Here is a brief history of the Talk Audio website over the years. The Car Audio market has certainly changed a lot since 1999 when TA started to come to life !
1999 - We started life as "The Live Wire Forums" a customer resource for retailer Car Audio Direct
2000 - Renamed Talk Audio and its own domain registered
- 12th July, Talk Audio as we know it, is born to the world
- 21st July, first genuine public posting (quoted as the official TA birthday)
2001 - Impressive migration of Newsgroup users to the forum, word travels quickly. The very first ICE-T forum meet takes place in Abingdon, Oxfordshire April 2001, followed quickly by ICE-T2 & 3 later that year.
2002- Site grows rapidly and moves onto vBulletin platform complete with more modern design. Heading towards half a million posts by 2003. ICE-T4,5 & 6 are held, now in Oxford.
2003 - Site continues to grow and community recognised as an important resource by car audio industry and press. ICE-T7 & 8 are held.
2004 - Talk Audio becomes a seperate website with its own dedicated server, staff and community. Hosted and supported by Car Audio Direct, Talk Audio becomes the UK's largest ICE forum with over 1 million posts and 13,000 members. ICE-T9,10 & 11 are held.
2005 - Another redesign and a period of rapid growth complete with the start of the "portal" front page. A new more powerful dedicated server is implementned optimised by HB specifically for heavy forum use. ICE-T12 held with largest attendance to date (approx 200 cars)
2006/7 - Talk Audio becomes totally independant as a self funding company and online publication and staffed by long standing and loyal members. The magazine is born and a new look and logo is unleashed to commemorate the change over. 2 milion posts are achieved. ICE-T14 (2006) last show held in Oxford. ICE-T15 (2007) held at new larger venue in Wallingford.
2007/8- Adam Rayner appointed online magazine editor and news content updated daily for full magazine status. New fresh design updated to streamline code and improve speed and facilitate increased content.
2008 - 3 Million posts achieved. ICE-T16 held.
2009- TA users help vote for Mobile Electroncis News industry ICE awards. ICE-T17 held.
2010 - Our 10th Anniversary! 3.7 million Posts, 38,000 Registered Users. ICE-T18 held.
- A huge milestone and upgrade took place in 2010 moving us from vBulletin to Invision powered forum. This coincided with a massive server hardware upgrade and database improvements. The final result being a more seamless website, faster search results and no slowdown during busy periods.
- In 2010 Chris Taylor aka HarryBo sadly passed away. For those TA users who do not know Chris, he was an administrator of Talk Audio for many years. His selfless dedication to TA was outstanding. Chris had put in thousands of hours of his free time to help TA, its servers, its community and infrastructure. He truly can be seen as one of Talk Audio's founding members.
2011 - The admin team implement a huge upgrade to the entire website template system. The website had more modern code, supported more browsers and large screen sizes and also had the page load times halved. ICE-T19 held, sadly the last at our classic Oxfordshire venue due to noise complaints :(
2012 - We launch the Talk Audio Privilege Club a monthly members upgrade feature that allows users to get enhanced forum account facilities, unlimited use of our new classifieds system, and superb discounts with online purchases from various websites.
2013 - We move past the epic 4 Million post mark. Adam Rayner really ramps up the feature he affectionately refers to as "SWAG", essentially scoring truck loads of competition prizes and free giveaway items for lucky TA users!
2014 - ICE-T20 arises from the ashes and is held at Vibe HQ and joins forces with a few other organisations to finally provide a long awaited TA meet!
2015 - 15 years online.....still the UK's leading car audio and automotive tech resource.... :D
2016 - A BIG change we rebrand to TalkStuff.net. After much deliberation and discussions behind the scenes we decided that the site is now a whole lot more than just "car audio" and has for many years been a resource for all manner of tech, motoring and life topics.
2017 - We expand our discussion topics even further to appeal to car audio, home audio , lifestyle and home tech.
2018 - Under mounting cost pressures and many users switching to alternative social media platforms with a shrinking car audio market, we decide to switch to a free platform Tapatalk.
2025 - After 25 years we decided it was probably time to close the old forum until we are ready for a revival!
Are you still here? Better try the dreaded Facebook....