"On that subject, have you done any voice coaching to hone your presentation chops, to get the pace of delivery right, the constant contact with the camera, the cadence of your talk, the enunciation, accent or other aspects of working as a speaker?"

"No, not directly. However, I do watch people whose vocal intonation I really enjoy. Take Tom Scott for example. He runs a 4.7M subscriber YouTube channel about all manner of weird and wacky tech items in the UK. A lot of his content is filmed on cellphones. Ultimate production values aren't his focus. It's the way he talks to the camera that I look up to and try to emulate. Of course relative to the written word, video can't go as deep. You've touched on that with Dawid and Jörg. I fully agree. There isn't the time and I don't want 30-minute videos. I'd prefer to get down to 15 minutes but always find myself having more to say. When I edit, I sometimes come across pauses which someone else would cut out but which I find say as much as the words which follow. So I leave them in. That simply doesn't pack the maximum amount of information into each minute that a far faster more clipped delivery would. But it avoids that mind-numbing sense of things being rattled off. Then there's camera presence. As you pointed out, a writer can hide behind his/her published word. Isn't there even a saying to never meet your heroes because they might just let you down badly? I think that was even said in the context of meeting you favorite author in person. With video, you can't hide your core personality. Otherwise you'll come off as phony; unless you're a highly paid very skilled actor. I've seen a few competitors in this space give up entirely because they didn't manage to develop just the right camera presence viewers could relate to. I was poor at it when I started. In fact I began with just lead-in videos embedded in written reviews; a bit like what Edgar Kramer in Australia currently does for Doug Schneider's SoundStage Network. I of course had Jana's help by doing my video edits from the very start. I never saw the raw footage I sent her in its entirety. I just know that she made me look a lot better than I was at that point. Now as I look at my work from week to week, I finally feel the lengthy process bearing fruit. I see slow but steady progress."

"Another important factor in video production is showing the room we work in. That's crucial. It's like your own photographs where you document your listening rooms as your places of work. It's also important to show comparator hardware side by side. It's all too easy to fake things with video by looping in some older B-roll footage to look in situ when it's not. Now reviewers can disguise that they're relying on sheer audio memory that might go back months if not years. What kind of valid comparator reference is that? To keep it real and honest, I insist on showing my viewers exactly what I had on hand for each video. None of it is imagined or remembered. Of course showing the room also embeds hifi hardware as an intrinsic part of playback's lifestyle. We show it in its actual context. That's a constant subliminal message. It also fills in visual information about the reviewer's personal style. Returning to my sideboard is important to me because I get to display again two or three album covers head-on. That's to remind viewers that I really am a music freak and avid if not rabid collector of physical media. It's cliché to say but that's really the genesis for what I do. I am super deep into music. That must come across. Of course having visible room treatments will lose some people. That's simple a gamble I took. I've been in this 84m² Neubau flat since I moved to Berlin 5 years ago. Though I've looked, I can't find anything bigger that's suitable and in my range. Berlin at the moment is overrun by newcomers who jam up the rental classifieds. Seeing that I'll likely be here for many years to come, I decided to optimize this space. Here it's very important that it still looks like a comfortable well-served place that you want to be in even when no music plays. Does it look hospitable just sitting in it doing nothing? That's my arbiter. And you're right, you can't fake personality or character when you do video."

"That's in fact what prompted my deep dive into the visual medium when I met Olaf. For years I was hugely frustrated that my personality as you experience it in our Zoom chat is very different from how I write. I come across more starchy, rigid or formal than anyone who actually meets me would ever expect. I never quite managed to find my true writing voice which accurately reflects how I see myself in company. I love to joke about and make off-color comments at my own expense. Hifi writing just doesn't lend itself to that. So the personality that my friends see is not what people meet who read me. That made going in front of the camera a really exciting prospect. I just had to overcome a certain inhibition about 'performing for the camera' to get comfortable with looking at a little black hole aka the lens. But what you see now is really who I am. This is where I live and work. You get to see all of it. That's been hugely satisfying and liberating. In your interview with Dawid and even your intro to ours, you wondered whether there'll be any room for writers left in the near future. I frankly think that the current YouTube flurry is already mellowing out or just about to. The current political sentiment on that platform is certainly justified and presages it. I still think that the established print magazines ought to get into the act but Stereophile got rid of Jana who was the only one who could do videos for them. As far as I see, they have nobody to replace her. Herb Reichert is an amazing character and writer but I don't know how he'd do as a regular video reviewer. I don't really see anyone on the roster of TAS either who stands out as the obvious candidate. In some ways then this has become a bit of a divide. But if you're really good at writing, you can still rule your very own niche and remain successful as you are. So I don't think that writing will go away. It simply must stand out to hold any special appeal. That's true for any endeavor. If you're exceptional at anything, there'll always be an audience."

"This gets me neatly to my next question. There are many aspects to our job. Which stand out for you? Precede each with a silent 'I am'. Here are the options." To make it easier on John, I read each out one by one. To make it easier on my readers, I've italicized them to distinguish from his answers.

"Communicator? Definitely. Networker? No. Critic? Not really. Creator? That's second to communicator. Influencer? I absolutely hate that word so definitely no. Writer? A little bit but I don't get to write as much as I'd have to to fully call myself that. Consumer advocate? Yes to a point. Not all consumers are reasonable. Hifi buyer by proxy? Definitely that. I put myself in the shoes of prospective buyers and report from there. Ambassador to the hifi hobby at large, so someone who promotes the lifestyle of listening to music playback? I didn't set out for that to be the case but YouTube has allowed me to explore it and realize that I can be quite good at it. Sales advisor? That's a very small component of what I do and many in my audience actually believe that's all I do. I can correct them in each and every video I shoot. Still I get emails as though I was their personal sales consultant to help them decide what to buy. Not so. I'm just here to tell you the differences about whatever things I cover in that video. I may even tell you why I'm perhaps a little bit more enthused about one product than the other. But then it's up to you to reflect on how any of it applies to your needs, desire and budget. I'm not Consumer Report. I'm not a sales Bible thumper telling anyone what to buy. If you go down that path, it makes it very difficult to create anything entertaining; and very hard for viewers to see it that way. So I guess there really are a lot of different aspects to my videos based on the things which I just said 'yes' to."