Jan Polet's Hit Test

Jan Polet, originally an audio engineer who worked at several Dutch local radio stations for more than ten years as an engineer, DJ and audio imager, in 1996 founded an ICT company called Help at Hand because of the lack of companies offering their ICT services to small businesses and private persons. Hence the name Help at Hand.

After ten years of concentrating on designing and maintaining networks and everything that that entails, and also doing lots of graphic work like basic layouts of brochures, flyers, signs, letterheads, cards, adds, PDF’s, etc, working with music and audio slowly found its way back into his work.

Creating the Hit Test, a segment featured on Adam Curry’s podcast named The Daily Source Code for about a year in 2005, resulted in several new things. In 2007 the Hit Test returned to The Daily Source Code as a weekly segment, and reached it's 100th epsisode in December of that year.

Although the graphics work remains, Help at Hand, now also known as Hit Test Productions, now focuses on audio imaging like voice overs, sweepers, beds, custom made music, complete packages, but also on producing formats, podcasts, audio newsletters and music. Others things like mixing, mastering and teaching basic audio and sound processing, everything you need to know to work with audio in a (radio) studio, are also part of the new media activities.

Also because of the fact that Jan is visually impaired, audio is a very importend part of his life. The lack of visual information forces him to rely much more on his memory. Because he can't read the covers, selecting music for radio shows was done by skipping through CD's and only listening to a few seconds of each song, which evolved into a game played with fellow DJ's and that's kind of the basis of The Hit Test.