Wojciech Pacuła: I spoke with Cai Brockmann, the chief editor of “Fidelity”, and he told me that German magazines are in bad shape. Do you agree?
Dirk Sommer: I prefer not to talk too much about fellow competitors. But one can state, that there are an awful lot of magazines around and the German Hi-fi-market is still decreasing. So it's hard to get your share of the market that you need to keep the quality of your publication up.

Wojciech Pacuła: How did you start “HiFiStatement.net” magazine? Where did the idea come from?
Dirk Sommer: When I left “image hifi”, in 2009 hifistatement.net already existed. A real hifi-enthusiast and attorney had founded the magazine a few months before. He had gathered some well known authors around him and started the magazine as a hobby project. There have been articles translated into English and French as well. But the magazine wasn't run really professionally: Doing some of the writing and all the administration besides his main job was too much work for the publisher. But I liked his idea of “hifistatement.net”, met him, discussed a few things with him and all of the sudden was the editor of an online magazine. When personal reasons made it impossible for the publisher to carry on with hifistatement in 2011, I decided to take over and continue the magazine. As soon as I started to work for the magazine in this – at least for me – new medium, I tried to find special things an online magazine can offer to his readers, but that are impossible to do in a printed one. So I developed the idea of our Klangbibliothek (i.e. library of sound): When doing a review of a cartridge, we always record the same three songs with this cartridge. So we get three wav.-files in 24/96 with the special sound of this cartridge, which we offer as a free download. If you listen to these files, you get a very good impression of the sound of the cartridge, especially in comparison to other cartridges. At the moment our Klangbibliothek offers 49 different files. And there are the Statements From Birdland, articles about jazz concerts with a review from a local newspapers, atmospheric pictures and one song that can be downloaded in CD-qualitity, high resolution and sometimes even as a DSD-file. You see, the idea of lauching “hifistatment.net” was not mine, but in the meantime you'll find some ideas in this magazine that could only be realized in an online publication.

Wojciech Pacuła: Do you think that printed magazines can learn something from web magazines? How about vice versa?
Dirk Sommer: The examples above show that there are things you can't do in a printed magazine. But because of my history with Image HiFi, for me a well made printed magazine is still the benchmark in some aspects: Writing in the internet should be done with the same knowledge and care as in print. For me the pictures are an important part of a magazine, where ever it is published. All pictures for our reviews are taken in hifistatement's own photo studio by Helmut Baumgartner, a professional photographer who is into High End equipment and especially turntables since his early youth. With one click you can enlarge the photos in our articles and even zoom into them without losing resolution. There is no reason – except keeping the production costs as low as possible – to use manufacturers’ pictures only, just because you are an online magazine. For me, it is ideal is to preserve the high standards of writing and taking pictures as in high quality printed magazines and add new features that are only possible online.