Announcing The New Carolina Audio Society’s First Meeting!

On January, 30, Audiophile Review Editor Steven Stone wrote to describe an event he was hosting for the Colorado Audio Society. He detailed what would be happening during the presentation and what he hoped to accomplish. I really wanted to attend myself but the logistics just didn’t make sense. What it did accomplish was to start me thinking about an audio society for my hometown of Charlotte. My March 9 article outlined my considerable interest to get something going locally. Because that article received enough favorable responses, it encouraged me to look more closely into the possibility of an audio society here. 

In looking at the history of audio societies in North and South Carolina, there have been a number of groups in various cities – Charlotte, Asheville, Raleigh and Wilmington to name a few. They all failed. They all disbanded. Why? That is a good question but my guess is too much effort for too little interest. A better way was needed. 

When considering how our local professional NFL football team, the Carolina Panthers is set up, it becomes quite obvious the goal is to attract fans from both Carolinas – hence the name not being the Charlotte Panthers. For home games played in Charlotte, fans routinely come from all over both Carolinas to enjoy a game. Naturally, I’m not comparing our audio society to an NFL team, but we did want to borrow the organizational concept in forming an audio society here. 

I’m happy to announce the formation of the Carolina Audio Society whose goal is to attract audiophiles from both Carolinas to meet on a regular basis to enjoy the audiophile hobby. 

While fans might travel for a couple of hours to see a football game, I seriously doubt most folks would be especially interested in driving across the state to listen to a stereo system. As such, our name is not based on any one city and instead, our plan is to have an overall umbrella, of sorts, for somewhat of a safety in numbers approach while holding local listening events. In this way, our hope is that we will not have to ask members to drive long distances as meetings will be held locally. 

Thus far, we have audiophiles who have joined that will enable us to host meetings in Charlotte, NC, Greensboro, NC, and Raleigh, NC. We hope to add sufficient membership so we can have events in the Asheville, NC area, the Wilmington, NC area, Greenville / Spartanburg, SC area as well as Columbia, SC and Charleston, SC. 

From what I have seen so far, there is quite a bit more interest that I would have really imagined. We have had more members sign up to date than I really ever expected. When my March 9 article was posted, I would have been happy to meet five or six local audiophiles interested enough to get together and “talk shop.” What I have discovered is there is considerably more interest in a NC / SC audio society than I thought. Needless to say, we are certainly not anything like the more popular and established audio societies. We don’t have hundreds or thousands of members. Our web site, for now anyway, looks pretty empty. However, we are just getting started and with any luck at all, we will create something that will enable audiophiles located in North and South Carolina to meet and explore the art of finely reproduced music. 

I would encourage anyone who is interested to visit our web site. There you can see what we are about and get more information. Hopefully, our membership will grow and we can do what all the other audio societies do on a routine basis – enjoy the audiophile hobby on a group basis. 

On behalf of the Carolina Audio Society, we look forward to anyone who might be interested in joining. 

Thanks and Happy Listening…