April 2002 Editorial

How to support TNT-Audio and why (Love, not Money)

You may already know TNT-Audio is a fully no-profit editorial enterprise, with NO financial support by readers (no subscriptions) or manufacturers (no ads).
Don't fret, I'm not announcing this has come to an end :-)
Au contrarie, TNT-Audio wants to remain exactly like it has ever been during these 6/7 years of existence.
Anyway, any no-profit activity needs support. There are various ways to help us and I'll try to summarize these in the following. Please have in mind the wonderful Love, not money album by Everything but the girl.

Links

The popularity of a website is measured, above all, by the number of sites that host a link to it.

If you're a "common" audiophile and you manage a personal site or know someone who does, you can consider the possibility to add a link to TNT-Audio into a "Links" section of the site. The small TNT logo on top of this page can be used instead of the huge one on our Home Page (which doesn't look good on clear background).
Also, it may happen you own a component that has been ravely reviewed (or trashed & bashed :-)) by us and want to let the World know about it :-) In this case you can link our review and use this small logo as a link.
Or, you may have built one of our DIY projects...in that case you can add a link to the corresponding DIY article and, perhaps, include our "DIY" logo below.

If you are a dealer, distributor or manufacturer of a product that has been reviewed by us, we strongly encourage you to link our review into your professional (Company) site, again by using the logos above. Our policy is to NOT exchange links (as we don't have a Links section)...we can only link to Manufacturers' websites that send us their products to test.
If the component under test has been supplied by a dealer or a distributor we can add a link to their respective websites as well.

Anyway, we are planning to REMOVE links to manufacturers' websites that do not link back to our reviews. I'll let you imagine what this means in terms of accesses to your website.
Recently a distributor confessed that after we published a link to his website, accesses increased by a jaw-dropping +630% (not a typo - six hundred and thirty %).
Now, since this means a huge increase of potential sales I'm sure you understand a link back to us is needed, to say the least.

Finally, you may have noticed not every Manufacturer links back to our reviews. This happens, mostly, for two reasons: either they don't directly manage their website so updates happen every now and never :-) or they simply didn't like our reviews and opinions on their products.
We strongly believe that even a negative review is better than NOTHING. Curiously, we have discovered that negative reviews raise audiophiles' interest for a product more than extremely positive ones (yeah I know audiophiles can be quite masochist ;-)).

Online polls

There are various HiFi websites that invite their readers to vote for the best online HiFi resource (mag, forum etc.). TNT-Audio is, by far, the most popular and voted site on AudioWorld, a general interest site on everything Audio. Of course, this is due to your continuous and faithful support and we are extremely thankful for this. But, support needs to be continuously supported :-) so, if you haven't already voted for us, do it now :-)

There's another poll which is very interesting, as it is related to the most informative and reliable HiFi magazine according to Ecoustics.com's visitors. Ecoustics.com is one of the best sites we know for everything related to HiFi professional reviews.
They periodically (and frequently!) update their website with links to new reviews of HiFi gear published on the web. This way you can search for a review of a product you're interested in using a very fast and effective internal search engine, without having to browse all the HiFi magazines available on the Web. Actually, this way you can browse all of 'em at once.
Now, while you are there, you can VOTE for us if you think we are a reliable source of HiFi reviews. Needless to say :-) we are leading the pack, as usual. The poll is exactly in the Home Page of the Ecoustics site.

HTML and translations

Not only our reviewers test the products and write the reviews, they also put the articles into proper HTML format, ready for the Web. Sometimes, because of lack of time (or skill) we receive articles in different text formats (TXT or WORD) so we may need, from time to time, your help for putting these into proper TNT-styled HTML format.
We don't use automatic HTML editors, we all do the code by hand (ya know, we're crazy DIY nuts :-)))) so, if you think to have the knowledge, will, spare time and wish :-) to do it, please drop us an e-mail.
This is something needed just once in a while as we already have a bunch of friends that kindly help us for this...but one never knows :-)
Of course, this is FOR FREE. All we can guarantee is your name at the bottom of each article you have helped to HTMLize or proofread. Proofread? Yes, we also need someone to proofread our translations, from time to time.
Let me explain briefly: you know TNT-Audio is double-sided: English and Italian. We have an excellent team of translators from English into Italian but we always need help for translations from Italian into English. This is a really tough job and we have found just few guys able to do it.
In order to make translators' job less heavy, Giorgio (Pozzoli) and me write our articles directly into English (and I translate mine into Italian...) but texts from other Italian reviewers need translation into English. This is the main reason why many articles (and DIY designs!) have never been published in English :-(
So, if you think to know (well) these two languages (including technical and audiophile terms) you'd be the perfect TNT-Audio translator.
A perfect choice would be an Italian who lives in an English-speaking Country or someone who wants to practice with Italian.
In the end, if you think you can, please drop us an e-mail. Even this job is unpaid and strictly no-profit, we can just give you all the credit you may need...but not money :-)))
Who knows? You can even add that to your C.V. !!! :-)

Conclusion

As you see, there are many ways to help us and only a little effort is required. After all, TNT-Audio is a pure labour of Love.