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Not An Audiophile – The Podcast featuring podcast episodes from The Australian HiFi Show Sydney 2025. Roundup of good, bad and new. Chats to exhibitors. Sound analysis and a look at the who’s who of HiFi. Episode 025 features Interviews with Brian Rodgers Richter Audio; Geoff Haynes, HeyNow HiFi; Jean Marie Liere, Microphase Audio Design + more. Backed up by two YouTube videos – Set up and first rooms AND Bowers & Wilkins, Vivid Audio, March Audio and many more.

Episode 028 features one on one interviews discussing the intricacies and new models for Bowers & Wilkins, Sonus Faber, Aurender, Focal, Marantz, Piega, Fezz and March Audio and much, much more.

Podcast transcripts below – Episode 025 & EP028

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S2 Ep025 HiFi Show roundup Sydney 2025 Not An Audiophile

Audio Marketing and Musical Fidelity lend us an A1 amplifier

Brian Rodgers: Having a relationship with, the guys at Audio Marketing and Musical Fidelity. They are kind enough to, lend us an A1 which we can set up with our bookshelves. Which sounds just fantastic.

Andrew Hutchison: I bet it does. I actually haven’t heard the new A1, but does it kind of sound beautiful and sweet and warm like the original?

Brian Rodgers: It’s definitely warm. Yes. It’s a hot. It’s a hot amplifier.

Andrew Hutchison: welcome back to not an Audiophile. This is episode 25, season two. I’m fresh back from the 2025 Australian HiFi show in Sydney. And today is the first of a series of episodes, of the various interviews that I managed to record with a whole bunch of interesting people.

This podcast is sponsored by Spectraflora. Meet Australia’s newest loudspeaker innovator

First up today, Brian Rodgers from Richter. This episode of not an Audiophile. The podcast is sponsored by Spectraflora. Looking for gorgeous speakers that sound as good as they look. Meet Spectraflora, Australia’s newest loudspeaker innovator. Their flagship Celata 88 is handcrafted in Victoria, Australia. With patent pending wave guide and subwoofer designs, this speaker delivers impactful, dynamic and emotionally gripping sound. Listeners rave about the beauty and breathtaking sound of the Celata 88 that makes ordinary speakers feel lifeless. Experience Spectraflora rediscover meaning in music. Learn more at spectraflora.com so we’re here with Brian Rodgers at Richter and it’s a pleasure.

Brian Richter uses A1 amplifiers at his shows

Thank you, Brian.

Brian Rodgers: Here we are.

Andrew Hutchison: Here we have another city. Another city.

Brian Rodgers: Another dusty hotel room. Another HiFi show.

Andrew Hutchison: I think it’s fairly clean, actually. I think the cleaners are really good here actually. But, you got a hell of an array. it’s. I guess it’s, What you seem to do at shows is you bring a simple range of equipment, but there’s always something new. At least in this case I see a little, modern day A1 musical fidelity, which is obviously not what you sell. But, No, why is, why is that? Here, look.

Brian Rodgers: Why? well, if you look at the M6si.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Brian Rodgers: that’s my own amp.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Brian Rodgers: Okay, so it’s not a loaner. It’s an amp I, I like to use. It’s got the power when required to develop the larger speakers.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

Brian Rodgers: it’s just a really nice performing product at a, at a sensible price.

Andrew Hutchison: It is.

Andrew Hutchison: I mean, it’s probably a good match for Richter, isn’t it?

Brian Rodgers: It’s a good match, yeah. And, and having a relationship with, the guys at Audio Marketing and Musical Fidelity, they are kind enough to lend us an A1 which we can set up with our bookshelves. Which sounds just fantastic.

Andrew Hutchison: I bet it does. I actually haven’t heard the new A1, but I’m, it is, does it kind of sound beautiful and sweet and warm like the original?

Brian Rodgers: Is it, it’s definitely warm.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Brian Rodgers: It’s, it’s a hot, it’s a hot amplifier. But yeah, look, it really sounds nice. I, Yeah, I used it in the Melbourne show as well and it really, really did, did well with the Merlins and the Harlequins.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Richter hasn’t had a dragon for nearly a decade

Okay, so you, you have, do you have something new in Richter at this show or are you newish?

Brian Rodgers: Newish. We have the larger speaker here which is the prototype dragon.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Brian Rodgers: Now we haven’t had a dragon for nearly a decade.

Andrew Hutchison: Wow. Okay.

Brian Rodgers: And the reason for that is we just didn’t know. We don’t churn speakers out for the sake of churning speakers out.

Andrew Hutchison: No. Every model has a place, I guess.

Brian Rodgers: Does it, it has to have a reason for being there. And we just weren’t quite sure what a dragon should be. but after doing the Excalibur in the previous Series 6 SE range, that gave us a, gave us a lot of ideas how do we bring a dragon in? And yeah, this is a prototype of the dual chamber unit.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. See there’s quite a displacement between the the two. Well, I guess they’re well, three bass mids. But I, I, what’s going on there? Because the complex design by the looks of it.

Brian Rodgers: Yeah, it is, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a big crossover. we’ve got the dedicated bass driver that we’ve used for the Excalibur.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Brian Rodgers: In, in its own base chamber at the bottom. So while the driver looks the same, it’s a larger voice coil. Oh, I guess greater excursion.

Andrew Hutchison: Same cone and surround, but same one.

Brian Rodgers: Cone and surround. It’s a totally different animal. Double magnet motor, heavy cast alloy basket. You know, it’s a good base driver. we use two of them in the Excalibur. and we use one of them in the dragon in its own chamber which is rear ported separately.

Andrew Hutchison: So the Excalibur is the top of.

Brian Rodgers: The, it’s the top of the range. So the dragon is designed to sit in between the new Excalibur.

Brian Rodgers: And the new wizard coming in what we call the Series 7 Special Edition range which is, it’s well developed at this stage.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Brian Rodgers: Yeah.

00:05:00

Andrew Hutchison: You seem to be constantly, you know, pushing the boundaries with, ah, the assistance.

Brian Rodgers: Of your guru designer, Dr. Martin Gosnell. He’s, he’s brilliant. you know, we really enjoy what we’re doing together. he’s, he’s been engineering the Richter sound for well over 25 years. He’s been the one constant.

Andrew Hutchison: Well, actually, yeah. And I, I remember I went to a product release for Richter, about that year. About that long ago.

Brian Rodgers: Yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: And that was his first series that he’d done. Yeah, I mean that is a long time ago. I mean that is, I guess it was the mid-90s or something.

Brian Rodgers: We don’t like to think that actually.

Andrew Hutchison: We shouldn’t say the mid-90s because that would be 30 years ago. So it wasn’t that long ago. Maybe it was the late 90s. But, Yeah. So he’s. So he is been responsible for largely everything in the last,

Brian Rodgers: Yeah, yeah, he’s been responsible for the engineering of every speaker since Ralph Waters.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. Okay.

Brian Rodgers: So now Ralph, you know, established the business, but Martin took over when Ralph stepped out. As far as an engineer goes, and that is well over 25 years. So I mean the, the brand is near 40 years old. Next year it’s 40 years old.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Brian Rodgers: not many Australian brands have lasted that long.

Scott Richter: Ralph Waters’ speakers were great value for money

Andrew Hutchison: Well, it almost brings me to my next thought, which is Richter is, I guess, I mean, Richter and Krix. Yeah, but I mean, Krix say they’ve been going for 50 years. Yeah, yeah. They’re listening, of course.

Brian Rodgers: Well, technically I’ve been going for over 60.

Andrew Hutchison: Well, I mean, yeah, yeah. I have a sneaking suspicion that Scott’s speaker was built as a child, as mine was, successfully or otherwise, on the kitchen table. And he’s including that. But, yeah, I mean, and Ralph may have built his first pair of speakers on the kitchen table. I’m not sure. But, he probably mentioned it in episode XYZ that we have, but I can’t remember what episode it was. But if you’ve. If for those listening, Ralph Waters, the founder, of Richter Acoustics, is, interviewed on not an audiophile podcast earlier in our series, season one, Back to current Day Richter. they’re such great value for money. I think that’s the. I mean they always were. Ralph’s speakers were great value for money. He was very conscious of that. And you’ve continued with Martin that tradition, I feel.

Brian Rodgers: Yeah, look, I like a lot of Ralph’s, philosophy, and really we aspire to the Same sort of claims, you know. You know, we’re not an audiophile. We’re not in the HiFi industry. We’re in the entertainment business. Absolutely.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Brian Rodgers: And we want to leave people, you know, excited, you know, engaged. we want to leave people, you know, when people are sitting down listening to our product, looking for the next track to play until they. Oh God, it’s two in the morning.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Brian Rodgers: And that’s actually where Martin and I end up quite often. Yeah, we’ll be sitting, listening, tweaking, designing. And you know, it’s two in the morning because we’re just having such a hoot of time. And if that’s not happening, then why are you doing it?

Andrew Hutchison: Oh yeah.

Brian Rodgers: So.

People seem to focus too much on the 10, 20, 30 thousand dollars speakers

But you look, one thing that irks me about our industry, I’ll say it.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Brian Rodgers: And I’m not sure at what point it became the domain of the uber rich and wealthy. You know, you can buy a damn good HiFi system for not a lot of money, which is very enjoyable. But we seem to focus too much on the 10, 20, 30 hundred thousand dollars speakers.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Brian Rodgers: Then you need an amplifier, then you need a source and suddenly, you know, you’re divorced and you’re living in an apartment on your own listening to.

Andrew Hutchison: A. I think if you hang around HiFi shows too much, certainly you would start to think that an average stereo is quarter of a million dollars. certainly not the case. There’s so much good.

Brian Rodgers: Maybe that’s why people aren’t going to HiFi stores anymore. Because of the perception.

Andrew Hutchison: Well, maybe that is it. That you have to spend a hell of a lot of money. And I, in my retailing career was always focused on value and tended to sell, middling, price range products that offered exceptional performance. M. And I did sell a little bit of Richter way back in the day. But but I mean people perhaps don’t realize how affordable your loudspeakers are. I don’t want to turn this into an ad, but I mean the little.

Brian Rodgers: That’s okay.

Andrew Hutchison: Is it? The little Merlin free ad is good. The little speakers, which I believe are the bookshelves, the bookshelf, the stand mounts, they’re actually more of a bookshelf. They’re not a big loudspeaker. They would go on a bookshelf.

Brian Rodgers: you look at any of our products, they are built stupidly well for the price. You compare them to any competitor at our price bracket or more, our build quality will be way better. You check the crossover build quality way Better.

Andrew Hutchison: I have seen pictures of crossovers on your, Instagram, what have you. And they look from my technical eye, they are made from very good quality components. Considering that that loudspeaker is $1500.

Brian Rodgers: well, in current climate, the Merlin S6 plus is now 1399.

Andrew Hutchison: 1399.

Brian Rodgers: And it’s just been awarded by a sound and image stand mount speaker of the year below 2500.

Andrew Hutchison: Well, there you go.

Brian Rodgers: So bang for buck.

Andrew Hutchison: Yep.

Brian Rodgers: It it ticks all the boxes. It is

00:10:00

Brian Rodgers: a, it is a, it’s a great speaker. It really is a great speaker.

Andrew Hutchison: I think it’s a decent point to make that an affordable streamer, you know, a good one.

Brian Rodgers: Yep.

Good HiFi doesn’t have to cost thousands of dollars

Andrew Hutchison: down to something here.

Brian Rodgers: I’m using the Node, icon.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay, so it is a Bluesound product.

Brian Rodgers: Yes. Oh, that’s the new, that’s the new icon.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Brian Rodgers: And again, I’ve purchased one myself.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Brian Rodgers: So you can put together. Let’s take that Musical Fidelity amp.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Brian Rodgers: It’s five grand.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Brian Rodgers: The Bluesound Streamer, round figures 1900.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Brian Rodgers: If you take the floor standing speakers, they’re the wizard S6 plus which last year took out floor standing speaker of the year below $10,000 and they retail for three.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Brian Rodgers: So for $10,000 you go and buy a very good floor standing speaker, the Musical Fidelity amp. Yeah, the Node icon streamer. and you will be very, very.

Andrew Hutchison: And stunned with the sound quality and. Sorry, what’s the, the price of that.

Brian Rodgers: Is about 10 grand.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, about 10. Yeah, yeah.

Brian Rodgers: Round figures. About $10,000. So that’s a damn good HiFi system.

Andrew Hutchison: That is. And I would take that a step further and say that you could buy a very good integrated amplifier with perhaps streaming kind of built into it and those speakers and be spending 6 and $7,000. Or you could take it a step further, further and buy the Merlins with a little nad or a rotel or something that for around a thousand and play some CDs or records through 500 bucks to a thousand and have a three or four thousand dollar system that sounded amazing. So.

Brian Rodgers: Absolutely.

Andrew Hutchison: So really good HiFi doesn’t indeed have to cost, you know. In fact good HiFi costs marginally more than rubbish.

Brian Rodgers: HiFi good HiFi shouldn’t be a scary thing to think about when it comes to investment. As you said the Merlin. A lot of Merlin bookshelf speakers have been sold with products like the Panote Edge.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes, yes.

Brian Rodgers: That’s a little 40 watt a side streamer.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. Yeah.

Brian Rodgers: And you are talking. Yeah. Two to $3,000 as a setup for a whole stereo. And it’s a, you know, for an apartment.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. It’s all you need. Well, it’s where you can start. It’s ultimately. Maybe you want more, but it delivers beautiful music.

Brian Rodgers: But it’s affordable entry.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes. Yeah. No, I agree wholeheartedly that, that there’s, there’s. I guess there’s. I mean, my, my point from a technical person standpoint is that, that’s a good quality combination. It sounds great, it’s quite well made. And, if you spend a bit less than that, you get utter rubbish, unfortunately. So you’ve got to spend a little bit of money to get something that’s going to last. That sounds great.

Brian Rodgers: Yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: Probably J.B. hi fi. without probably mentioning a retailer’s name, but I just did. Not a good place to go and buy hi Fi.

Jean Marie Liere: Yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: Because there actually is no HiFi in there.

Brian Rodgers: Get a good kettle, though. You get a good toaster.

Andrew Hutchison: These days they do a nice line in washing machines. I would step sideways to any, good, specialist retailer because not only will they sell Richter, but they actually will probably have a nice, you know, a value for money. Sensible choice to power them. Would you, Would you say?

Brian Rodgers: Absolutely.

Andrew Hutchison: I mean, you know your retailers well and you’ve actually got many of them.

Brian Rodgers: Absolutely. Look, these days a lot of people, we promote or try and suggest, to people that a nice modest, streaming amp or amplifier with hdmi, ARC and the Merlin bookshelf speakers is a great alternative to a soundbar. Nobody sits down and listens to a soundbar. No, nobody.

Andrew Hutchison: Not for long anyhow.

Brian Rodgers: Yeah. So, but here you’ve got a great HiFi system that you will sit down, listen and enjoy, you know. And my idea is that, you know, people come listen to music. They come to a dinner party, you’re listening to music, but then it turns into a dance party because they love what they’re listening to. why would anyone buy a sound bar if you want to listen to music?

Andrew Hutchison: So you’re in this business because of music, really?

Brian Rodgers: Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, look, always trying to make the product better because we’re in direct contact with our consumers.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Brian Rodgers: we take comments on board. when we develop a product, you know, those products are in the back of the car. I’m, out around retailers are in store. We’re listing, testing, trying it on different equipment. Every room is different. So we try to build a product that’s going to sound better. Than anything else in most situations.

A good balanced loudspeaker design will work better in most rooms

Andrew Hutchison: Yes. Yeah.

Brian Rodgers: Whereas you’ll find one speaker from another brand will sound great like this.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Brian Rodgers: But then in the wrong space it sounds terrible.

Andrew Hutchison: Well, what they say is the wrong space.

Brian Rodgers: Correct, Correct.

Andrew Hutchison: I’m not sure if it was you that said this, but a few people do, I guess is that it’s it’s something about. It’s not the. Now I’ve blown it because I can’t think of the same. But it’s about the excuses that people use for why the systems are not. It’s always the room.

Brian Rodgers: Of course, yes.

Andrew Hutchison: But in the reality, in reality rooms are rooms are rooms. You’ve, you’ve, you know, the better the equipment, no matter the room, it will sound better. So you know, the great balance of I mean a good balanced, a well balanced loudspeaker design will work better in most rooms.

Brian Rodgers: The good thing about a HiFi show is it’s a level playing field. We’re all got the same cardboard box to deal with. Right. But

00:15:00

Brian Rodgers: some people will bitch and moan till the sun comes on, you know, to the end of the day that oh, it’s the room. I can’t get it right. And they’ll have so much room treatment in the room and it still sounds crap.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, yeah.

Brian Rodgers: If you look around here, room treatment is absolutely minimal.

Andrew Hutchison: Well, I actually. Oh, I see you brought one foam quasi absorber diffuser thing sitting over in the. Oh, there’s four in there, they’re well disguised. Oh, there’s some behind a banner. Yeah, there is no room treatment at.

Brian Rodgers: All in here because you know, most people can’t put room treatments in their lounge room. Firstly, it’s gonna annoy somebody else. So you know, your speaker’s gotta sound good in environments that people live in and ah, that’s how we design our product.

Andrew Hutchison: I absolutely wholeheartedly agree. Yeah, yeah. There’s actually, there is a trend a little bit towards treating your room at the moment. But the reality is that in almost all cases, it will be in a specialised listening space because the other half of that family, if it’s only half, will will almost certainly not give the tick of approval for the array of quadratic diffusers that you’d like to put on each side wall. Correct. so you better buy something that works in what you’ve got.

Brian Rodgers: Well, maybe start with better product in the first place and minimise the requirement.

Andrew Hutchison: Room saying that that’s true. I mean you’ve got. And there’s an obvious step up through the range. So if you start off with Merlins, you may well be drawn into the one of the floor standing models, which produces quite a greater sense of scale and plays a little louder if you need that sort of thing, greater bass extension and slightly higher levels of overall smoothness and fidelity, I guess. Which is partly because it’s a bigger box and more drivers, but partly because your budget’s freed up a little bit, I guess.

Brian Rodgers: Well, I mean, look, I don’t have it here, but the next speaker up from the Merlin is the Harlequin.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Brian Rodgers: So if you were going to buy the Merlin and put them on stands, seriously consider the Harlequin because it’s a decent stand.

Andrew Hutchison: Costs money.

Brian Rodgers: Yeah, correct. So going from 1399 to 2299 for a floor standing Harlequin takes up no more space than a Merlin on a stand and you get a better speaker.

Andrew Hutchison: Would you be, would you indulge us as to what is perhaps the best selling model in the range?

Brian Rodgers: Merlin and Wizard. Merlin wizard, yeah, the two Hero products that are here. please. Thank you very much.

Andrew Hutchison: See, this is a real HiFi show. It is a HiFi show.

Brian Rodgers: They’re emptying the rubbish bin.

Andrew Hutchison: yeah, look, they are.

Brian Rodgers: They’re our Hero products.

Andrew Hutchison: There’s no question about that.

Brian Rodgers: The Merlin is. Look, when I, when I went and developed the Series 6 Merlin, I was rolling two bookshelf speakers into one.

Brian Rodgers: So I was rolling a small Mark V with a five inch driver.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Brian Rodgers: And a M Mark five with a six inch driver and a one speaker. So I wanted a speaker that was small but outperformed a six, you know, the bigger version of that Mark V. And you know, this speaker is the same height as what the 5 inch driver Merlin was in the MK5 range.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Brian Rodgers: and that’s, you know, generally if it’s going on a stand or on a bookshelf, height’s critical.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Brian Rodgers: It’s not so much width. Not so much.

Andrew Hutchison: No.

Brian Rodgers: Height is critical. So that will fit nicely inside an Ikea Kallax bookshelf, conveniently at only 32 centimeters high.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. Okay.

Brian Rodgers: and this, you know, if it needs to. Goes well.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes, yeah, yeah. No good sense of scale for, for a smaller loudspeaker. Absolutely. Yeah. Okay. thank you, Brian, for your time.

Give us a general wrap up on the range

Brian Rodgers: That’s all right.

Andrew Hutchison: And giving us a general wrap up on the range. And I, mean the brand continues, obviously.

Brian Rodgers: Brand continues and we’re constantly pushing the envelope and seeing what we can do.

Andrew Hutchison: Yep.

Brian Rodgers: How we can improve. I mean, I think Ralph might have actually said it, but, you know, a speaker designer can never be happy.

Andrew Hutchison: Well, no, because you’re always looking. Your latest baby’s always the best, Right?

Brian Rodgers: The latest baby’s always the best.

Geoff Haynes : But.

Brian Rodgers: But you also have to know when to bring something to Marketplace and then when to continue moving on to what will be in the next model. but this is series six. Plus is. They are stunning products for the value, no question.

Andrew Hutchison: No, certainly, they need to be listened to. And, this, episode goes out slightly after the show, so no one’s gonna hear this and come to the show, but good timing.

Brian Rodgers: The Sydney stereonet show is in August

You have retailers over the country and I guess you go to other shows, do you? Oh, look.

Brian Rodgers: Yeah. we normally do them. Well, there’s only two shows in, Australia, which is the Sydney stereonet show.

Andrew Hutchison: The Sydney stereonet show.

Brian Rodgers: The Sydney St. Have I had a drink yet?

Andrew Hutchison: Considering it’s.

Brian Rodgers: Let’s try that again.

Andrew Hutchison: Let’s try take two.

Brian Rodgers: Do you know something I don’t know?

Andrew Hutchison: Let’s start that again.

Brian Rodgers: The Melbourne stereonet show in August will be there. and, you know, fingers crossed, we may have the first run of

00:20:00

Brian Rodgers: the 3 Series 7 special edition models available for initial auditioning. so that’s actually.

Andrew Hutchison: Oh, that’s exciting.

Brian Rodgers: That’s what we’re working to at the moment. And again, these will be products Richter’s never, never built before.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Brian Rodgers: Really? Again? The Dragon, the Wizard, the Excalibur, all done in a natural oak walnut veneer. Real walnut veneer.

Andrew Hutchison: Oh, hang on. Really? Okay. Yeah. Wow.

Brian Rodgers: And it’s, well, actually the same as this here.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, right here.

Brian Rodgers: This is a prototype.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay.

Brian Rodgers: Returning to a slightly curved cabinet.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Brian Rodgers: And, you know, we’re moving away from black, so, you know, the baffles won’t.

Andrew Hutchison: Oh, well, that’s interesting.

Brian Rodgers: Okay, so we want to make the product a little more lounge room friendly rather than, you know, there’s a big black box on my lounge.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. I mean, they’re simply designed, but they’re very elegant and neatly, and designed and nicely proportioned, I think. Okay, so you’re elevating the, pushing the aesthetic a little bit. Yeah. Okay. Oh, well, that’s interesting. And of course, the Melbourne show, not that we’re here to promote necessarily their show either, but they. My understanding, is it’s on earlier this year.

Brian Rodgers: It’s earlier August, so, that way we won’t get hit with the Melbourne marathon streets down yes, there was people.

Andrew Hutchison: Running past the show last year.

Brian Rodgers: Correct. So. And of course it’s slightly cooler weather as well. So.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, good time to be inside and looking and listening to hi fi.

Brian Rodgers: Yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay. Hey, thanks, Brian Rodgers.

Brian Rodgers: That’s all right.

Andrew Hutchison: a pleasure. And, we’ll speak again.

Brian Rodgers: Sounds good. Thanks, Andrew.

Andrew Hutchison: No worries. Pleasure. Bye.

Are you looking for your tribe? Visit stereonet.com today to join one of the world’s largest online communities for HiFi home cinema, headphones and much more. Read the latest news and product reviews or check out the classified for the largest range of gear on sale. Membership is absolutely free. So visit stereonet.com and join up today.

Geoff Haynes from HeyNow HiFi How did that come to be

So we’re here with, with Geoff Haynes Haynes from HeyNow HiFi And perhaps the first question I could ask is why is it HeyNow HiFi

Geoff Haynes : So she,

Andrew Hutchison: Because I was just. I was just walking past and I met Geoff Haynes in the hall. How’s that going? He was telling me just the other day something. Anyhow. Yeah. Hey now. Hi fi. How did that. Are you a fan of the, Larry Sanders show?

Geoff Haynes : It’s actually just really, really simple. It’s a combination of my last name and my partner’s last name.

Andrew Hutchison: Oh, there you go. wow. Okay.

Geoff Haynes : Yeah, it just came to me in.

Andrew Hutchison: The middle of the night and it kind of works.

Geoff Haynes : Yeah, it does. And it’s like. That sounds pretty cool.

Andrew Hutchison: It’s memorable. Yes. Yeah.

You have some interesting equipment on display at the Sydney HiFi show

So you’re here, at Sydney HiFi show or Australian HiFi show or the. Whatever this show is called. What is it called?

Geoff Haynes : for me, it’s the Sydney HiFi show.

Andrew Hutchison: Sydney HiFi show.

Geoff Haynes : Because I had to drive a thousand kilometers to get here.

Andrew Hutchison: Absolutely. you’ve got some interesting equipment on display. obviously the dohmann turntable, which is. Which is, And that’s a helix one, helix two.

Geoff Haynes : Oh, it is a helix two helix two, mark three. It was, HiFi plus, choice of turntable of the year. price, no object.

Andrew Hutchison: Wow. Okay. HiFi plus.

Geoff Haynes : HiFi plus.

Andrew Hutchison: They’re quite a discerning journal really, aren’t they?

Geoff Haynes : They are, yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: They don’t just give prizes away. No, no. yeah, okay. I mean, it’s a magnificent piece of machinery. I just listened to it and it sounded. I mean, the horns. Sounded like horns.

Geoff Haynes : I just think it looks classic as well. Nice. 40, 60 split of it. It just looks great.

Andrew Hutchison: Well, it gets right away from the blingy euro chrome look of so many, European turntables. Continental Europe. The English are probably slightly more reserved. But, yeah, I Mean, it appeals to me. And of course the fact that it’s, made in Australia is. I mean, we go on and on about it and obviously we introduced Mark, introduced and interviewed him a couple of episodes ago and he regaled us with all sorts of tales. But perhaps most importantly for those that have not heard that episode, lots of useful information about how to set up all the important aspects of any turntable system.

Geoff Haynes : Absolutely. such a knowledgeable person.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, yeah. I mean, he’s clearly addicted to, to it and has been for 40 years.

Geoff Haynes : And I’ve been a part of this project for nine years, I think.

Andrew Hutchison: Is that right?

Geoff Haynes : Yeah, I’ve watched it develop from the original, Helix machines that, you know.

Andrew Hutchison: He built himself with pre production process.

Geoff Haynes : Yeah, yeah. All the way through. So I feel very honored that I can display and present this.

Andrew Hutchison: It’s quite a story, isn’t it, really? Yeah.

Geoff Haynes : So, yeah, this is the third one I’ve had since the last HiFi show.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, that’s a, that’s a pretty solid effort, you know. So you’re turning them over? Yeah, yeah, I mean, you know, it’s like you said, HiFi plus. HiFi plus.

Geoff Haynes : HiFi plus.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, yeah. Greatest turntable in the world.

Airtight, uh, tube amplifier which is actually surprisingly affordable

you’ve got some other amazing gear. Air tight, tube amplifier, which is actually surprisingly affordable.

Geoff Haynes : Yeah, it is, yeah. It’s Japanese made. It’s made by the people who. Their father was Luxman, like proper old Luxman.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay, when you say their father, you mean like by blood, by family.

Geoff Haynes : Yeah, yeah. And then when that went wherever it went.

Andrew Hutchison: Haywire.

Geoff Haynes : Yeah, These, this air tight brand

00:25:00

Geoff Haynes : started.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. Okay.

Geoff Haynes : And this here is an ATM1E 2024.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Geoff Haynes : It’s the first time that they’ve changed any element of it since 1986.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, well, I guess advances in tube design are limited in a way, but I mean, transformer technology, insulating properties, core materials or something. Yeah, that’s what’s changed. Okay. Yeah.

Geoff Haynes : And so, when you live through the, the idea of model number 1, 2, 3 1, mark 2, you know, all these things that just keep on bringing out new product.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Geoff Haynes : When it’s a classic, it’s always a classic.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, Yeah. I mean, yes, it looks classical. We know it’s well made. It’s a great brand. Surprisingly affordable. It’s less than $200,000. No, it’s actually. What is it, 20 grand or something? 18. It’s $18,000.

Geoff Haynes : Bizarre. yeah, yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: Just. I guess they haven’t, I don’t know, they always I guess they always charge what it costs to make and a small profit margin and they keep doing that when other brands have gone up exponentially around them.

Geoff Haynes : A lot of brands have decided that they’re now luxury brands.

Andrew Hutchison: Right.

Geoff Haynes : And so they put a luxury, Luxury tax.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Geoff Haynes : Yeah, I’ve seen products double in price.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Geoff Haynes : And I don’t see a value in it. I see them trying to appeal to a super wealthy customer.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Geoff Haynes : But I think there’s a music lover that always goes out there looking for value. M. Because you can get so much more enjoyment out of something which is a value product that will just.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, I mean that’s, I mean, you know, I mean, I guess there’s a segment of, you know, HiFi buyers who are after, a luxury product, of course. But really the majority of music lovers who can afford a superior system are of course looking for value for money and a quality item. Clearly. I mean there are such. So few products now actually crafted in Japan that. And we know that they are fanatical, about quality.

Geoff Haynes : So it’s one of the things as well. You know, these things unfortunately are finite because these are, handcrafted. Yes. I, feel at some point they.

Andrew Hutchison: Will not be able to make them anymore, will they?

Geoff Haynes : And they won’t have the next generation that wants to make them.

Andrew Hutchison: No, no, this is, this is a concern and there’s a lot of people saying that. I don’t want to go off that tangent, but there’s. Everyone I’ve spoken to so far at this show is concerned about, where we’re going with, with, with, with people with skills, with skill, hand skills as much as anything else. And and so anyone listening to the podcast who’s. Who loves audio should, you know, get some electronic training into you from the Internet. There’s tons of it out there. And buy soldering iron and start getting into it.

Geoff Haynes : So I think there’s a, there’s a whole nother podcast in that.

Andrew Hutchison: There possibly is.

Geoff Haynes : Yeah.

Fischer and Fischer loudspeakers are made out of slate from Germany

Andrew Hutchison: you’ve also got Fischer. and Fischer are loudspeakers. they’re quite a nicely proportioned floor stander from Germany, but they have a couple of unique features. Well, one in particular. what’s the cabinet made out of?

Geoff Haynes : It’s made out of slate.

Andrew Hutchison: Made out of slate. So you could, when you’re tired of them, you could turn them into flooring.

Geoff Haynes : So they, they were rescued from being flooring. Okay.

Andrew Hutchison: So that gag fell flat. so, really? Is that right?

Geoff Haynes : So what happens is brands, Fischer and Fischer, the Fischer Family own a slate mine in Germany under a mountain.

Andrew Hutchison: Under a mountain.

Geoff Haynes : A place called Schmellenberg Schmullenberg. And what happens is that they make roofing tiles and floor slabs. And the best pieces they cut out and keep to make speakers.

Andrew Hutchison: Wow.

Geoff Haynes : Speakers an inch thick, Is that right? There’s no, there’s no bracing or anything inside it. it’s just the slate. It’s beautifully bevelled. If anyone comes past and has a look at them, the seam on them is perfect.

Andrew Hutchison: Well, they probably have some fancy machinery on.

Geoff Haynes : They certainly do.

Andrew Hutchison: So do they make, like bench tops and stuff in house or something as well? Yeah. Okay, so they’ve got some great machining equipment.

Geoff Haynes : They do, yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: Some German made cnc.

Geoff Haynes : But I think the, I think the really interesting thing about slate is to explain what slate is because it’s not stone.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay, well, you better tell me about that because I’m foolishly thinking, it’s weirdly stiff and light, isn’t it? Kind of compared with rock. Is that part of it or is it not that light? Tell me about it.

Geoff Haynes : It’s 85 kilos each for this pair of speakers.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay. So these speakers are not light. 85 kilos apiece.

Geoff Haynes : And I’ve taken them everywhere. I’ve taken them Geelong. I’ve taken them to Bayswater in Victoria.

Andrew Hutchison: So this is everywhere. Bayswater and Geelong.

Geoff Haynes : I brought them here, I took them to the Melbourne HiFi show.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. Okay.

Geoff Haynes : People say, can I hear them when I put them in my car? And off we go.

Andrew Hutchison: that’s, What do you drive? A Dodge Ram? I mean that you put 170 kilos in the boot of the car.

Geoff Haynes : I’ve got the best car ever for this industry. I’ve got a long wheelbase Caddy.

Andrew Hutchison: Ah, the Caddy. Yeah. It is the best car. Yes.

Geoff Haynes : This drives like a car.

Andrew Hutchison: It does.

Geoff Haynes : I’ve actually managed to do everything that is said in the Dire Straits song.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Geoff Haynes : I’ve, done refrigerators,

00:30:00

Geoff Haynes : microwave ovens, TVs. TVs. And a custom kitchen. The kitchen. Kitchen that went in my Caddy.

Andrew Hutchison: That’s, very cool. Yeah. No, I had a Caddy, ah, for many years and it was super reliable, very capable. We used to call it the, the florist delivery van. We never delivered flowers in it, but it was kind of. A lot of people use it for that as well.

Geoff Haynes : And painters use them as well.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. And, and I also used to drive it around a racetrack and put my motorbike in the back as well. So it’s surprising what you can fit in there. I think you had to like take the mirrors off obviously, but you know, but it wasn’t that high. But ah, they’re a very versatile machine. But yeah, handle well enough to chuck it around lakeside, on two wheels. It was Yeah. The long wheelbase one maybe not so good.

Geoff Haynes : But putting a pair of Fischer and Fischers in one side would help.

Andrew Hutchison: You if you were speedway racing going only one way. But no, they’re back to speakers.

The speakers are made out of layers of silt. Unlike stone

so slate and they. Okay, so they had a ready access to slate. But what’s its acoustic properties?

Geoff Haynes : The acoustic properties are that it’s actually made out of layers of silt.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay. And sedimentary rock which is crushed over time, like.

Geoff Haynes : Yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: So if you left slate there long enough, it would turn into big sheets of diamond. So silk. That’s. So does that mean it comes. Is that why it comes out in quite neat layers or. Yes, yeah.

Geoff Haynes : And it is layers and that’s the magic of it.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. Right.

Geoff Haynes : Unlike stone.

Geoff Haynes : Unlike so many other materials that people use outside of mdf.

Geoff Haynes : This works like an acoustic. Acoustically trans. Sorry, A resonant free box.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Geoff Haynes : So each one of those layers is a different density and it keeps the sound.

Andrew Hutchison: Oh wow. So it’s like. It’s. Well, it’s not so much constrained layer but it’s. It’s it’s ah. Sound doesn’t pass very nicely through as you’re alluding to, through different media. If you lay a different media that has different densities, it obviously attenuates different. And I’m not a scientist but we know it works.

Geoff Haynes : It does.

Andrew Hutchison: It’s the basis of good acoustic room designers. You could use different materials, lay them up, particularly if you put a constrained layer between them. But is that what they’ve done though? Do they or do they do. They don’t put a glue in between two layers. They just.

Geoff Haynes : No, they don’t.

Andrew Hutchison: They don’t need to.

Geoff Haynes : It’s just a single. But the property is within the half a billion years.

Geoff Haynes : I checked that as well. It’s like. Sure, it’s half a million years. Billion years.

Andrew Hutchison: So these speakers have been a long time in the making.

Geoff Haynes : Yeah. And the other great thing is you look at some of the mdf. High gloss finished or vinyl finished or. They’re not going to last a lifetime.

Andrew Hutchison: Well, no, they’re not. No. And in fact this, this. Okay, so this is an interesting feature, isn’t it?

Geoff Haynes : That Half a billion years, half life.

Andrew Hutchison: Exactly. Yeah. So, they will. As far as the exterior finish, it will simply not change ever.

Geoff Haynes : No. I’ve got a pair of 270s. This is a pair of 470s. Okay. Customs, opened the box.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Geoff Haynes : Because they couldn’t believe that these things were slate speakers.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Geoff Haynes : And they used a knife and they’ve actually cut into this, into the slate.

Andrew Hutchison: That’s great of them to do that for you. Wow.

Mundorf AMT Air Motion speakers sound amazing. I’ve played some loud, complex tracks on them

Geoff Haynes : There’s a wax that you just put over it and they’re perfect. I can’t even see where they would cut.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Geoff Haynes : Okay, so they’ll last in terms of the finish. They’ll last forever.

Andrew Hutchison: Look, they sound great too. I mean, they seem to have a. I mean, at a glance, a, pretty serious, complement of drive units. On the front, there’s a. There’s a ribbon of some description.

Geoff Haynes : Mundorf AMT Air Motion.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay, so it’s not a ribbon. Okay.

Geoff Haynes : Yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: So it’s a serious, tweeter drive unit.

Geoff Haynes : And what it does is it actually moves like an accordion.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. Pleated sort of thing. Yeah, yeah.

Geoff Haynes : And as a result of that, you never get a harshness. You never get muddled sounds. I’ve played some loud, complex tracks on them.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Geoff Haynes : And I hear every note. It doesn’t homogenize.

Andrew Hutchison: There’s a real pace and a clarity to them. the horns that were playing before off the. Off the helix through, that beautiful tube amplifier, sounded incredibly realistic for. I, mean, for a loudspeaker. That’s not outrageously expensive, is it?

Geoff Haynes : It’s not outrageously expensive. Somebody compared them, in his room to a pair of speakers worth three times as much. Did a whole YouTube series on them.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Geoff Haynes : He was looking for things to be able to say, you know, speakers that I’ve bought are worth this much, but this thing here, a third of the value of it.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Brian Rodgers: To.

Geoff Haynes : Performed beautifully. I heard both speakers in his room.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. Okay.

Geoff Haynes : Just putting these in place. They sounded amazing.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. No, they’re, I mean, clearly built to typically sort of Germanic standards of excellence. So, I guess the build quality is, amazing. I guess. WBT terminals on the back. Or. I shouldn’t say that without checking first.

Geoff Haynes : They’re actually not. They’re actually okay. But the whole, simple crossover is all mundorf capacity through the whole thing.

Andrew Hutchison: No corners cut.

Geoff Haynes : No corners cut. And I kind of think it’s because they

00:35:00

Geoff Haynes : own the material. So you look at something like. I’m not going to mention any names. But some of these companies, they go to great efforts to buy the material, maybe then have to shape it and all the rest of it to try and create a speaker which most of them are made out of mdf, where so much of the sound pressure is lost out of the box. These guys here, they own the material. So all they need to do is build the drivers.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Geoff Haynes : And the plate, which is 3 millimeters of aluminium, which the drivers are screwed into perfectly through the slate.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Geoff Haynes : And it’s just, they just don’t move. Yeah, it’s just a pistonic movement of the drivers.

Andrew Hutchison: Well, I mean there’s a couple of different ways you can go with loudspeaker design. You can make it really light and sort of so it can’t absorb energy or you can just go the other way, get somewhere in the middle, of course, which is most MDF boxes and try to brace it or do something. But you know, and everyone’s got their own idea. And there’s birch ply, of course we know it has some advantages. but then this is the massive approach. But from a natural material. It has some very positive natural features if you like, in its characteristics and clearly it works. So yeah, so they’re worth a listen. Now this, this podcast is as I’ve mentioned in every segment, so people are sick of hearing that. It’s actually up after the show. But I mean, I guess you’ll be at the Melbourne show.

Geoff Haynes : Yeah. And people can make a time anytime.

Andrew Hutchison: You drop into your store. Ah. So make, preferably make an appointment.

Geoff Haynes : Always make an appointment.

Andrew Hutchison: But obligation free of course. Just come and have a listen to them, be amazed. And for that matter you’ve got offices full of other juicy goods.

You’ve also got actually just to round out the wrap up of the system. Ag lifter from New Zealand

You’ve also got actually just to round out the wrap up of the system. Very nice looking rack, but also

Geoff Haynes : Ag lifter from New Zealand.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay, so that’s a serious piece of equipment.

Geoff Haynes : Yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: Right. Yep. Beautifully, made. Beautiful looking in a slightly Swiss Germanic kind of way as well. Really. It’s, it’s got some, It’s a bit massive looking but it’s, it’s, it’s quite stunning.

Sutherland Trans impedance preamp is very fashionable at the moment

But this Sutherland, is it Sutherland?

Geoff Haynes : Yes, Sutherland.

Andrew Hutchison: Phono preamp

Geoff Haynes : Trans impedance.

Andrew Hutchison: Trans impedance. Tell us about that briefly. It’s very fashionable at the moment.

Geoff Haynes : Yeah. Basically it just means that you don’t need to worry about setting all of your impedances.

Andrew Hutchison: Oh. So if you’ve got a moving coil, cartridges, cartridge cartridges, perhaps if you’ve got dual Arm turns.

Geoff Haynes : Absolutely.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes. So. So you, you just plug it in, it just works it all out. Yeah, yeah. Okay.

Geoff Haynes : Very, very simple. Sounds beautiful, warm, rich, and cuts out all the noise.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Geoff Haynes : So we had a instance where we were using a traditional expensive preamp in a person’s home.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Geoff Haynes : Little did we know when we were going out to install this very, very expensive turntable that there was a radio tower very nearby.

Andrew Hutchison: Oh, okay.

Geoff Haynes : And so I went out with Mark dohman n and we had to wrap some alfoil around the cables and stuff, which did not look very nice.

Andrew Hutchison: No.

Geoff Haynes : And the next, about a couple of days later, we took out a, Sutherland little Loco. Perfect.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Geoff Haynes : All of the issues.

Andrew Hutchison: All right.

Geoff Haynes : Guy was so happy, he ended up buying a big loco, which was one of 16 that was later to be made. They’re going to be made for America only.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, yeah.

Geoff Haynes : And he contacted, Sutherland, Ron Sutherland, and said, can you make me one? And he goes, yep, I’ll have it to you in four weeks.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay. All right.

Geoff Haynes : It was 30 grand.

Andrew Hutchison: Serious piece of equipment.

Geoff Haynes : That’s what I took to the, last HiFi show in Melbourne.

Andrew Hutchison: That actual one.

Geoff Haynes : The client lent it to us for the weekend.

Andrew Hutchison: Wow. Okay. And that. So Sutherland is made. Excuse my ignorance, but, Kansas.

Geoff Haynes : America Handmade.

Andrew Hutchison: Kansas. Okay. Wow. Cool. It looks beautifully crafted as well and as it should be at an approximate price.

Geoff Haynes : And I’ve taken the lid off as well, so you can see the engineering.

Andrew Hutchison: How very nice it is inside.

Geoff Haynes : Just perfect, isn’t it?

Brian Rodgers: Yeah, it is.

Andrew Hutchison: And so the, and, and, and to round out the last piece that I can see, that’s, and we’ll, and we’ll. We’ll move on and let you get back to finishing your, setup of the room.

Ed Meitner is one of the architects of DSD DAC technology

Is the, Meitner, streamer.

Geoff Haynes : Yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. That’s a. Interesting looking piece as well.

Geoff Haynes : Yeah. Canadian. It’s a very, very good DAC. It’s called an MA3. The DAC on it as just a DAC. And I’ve had people buy it just as a DAC.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. Okay.

Geoff Haynes : Sounds really, really musical. Ed Meitner is one of the architects of DSD DAC technology. When it first came out.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. Okay.

Geoff Haynes : And so everything on that is proprietary. Meitner.

Andrew Hutchison: That Right, Yeah.

Geoff Haynes : Doesn’t. Doesn’t use other people’s little chipsets and stuff. It is his own dac.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay. That’s. That’s something.

Geoff Haynes : Yeah, yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: Right here.

Geoff Haynes : So. So his standalone DACs are like $60,000.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Geoff Haynes : This thing here is 24 with a streamer.

Andrew Hutchison: Is it really?

Geoff Haynes : Yeah. And he’s putting it on. He’s put meitner on it instead of EMM Labs.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, righty. Yeah. So EMM Labs. Yeah, that rings a bell.

Geoff Haynes : Okay.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. All right.

Geoff Haynes : And it’s often when I’m playing a different streamer in the shop. I know. straight off, it’s like

00:40:00

Geoff Haynes : there is something missing.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. Okay.

Geoff Haynes : This is pretty much the system I run every day.

Andrew Hutchison: It’s kind of surprisingly affordable, piece, considering how special it is. What? What? Yeah. So of course you’re kind of. Kind of used. You’ve developed a taste.

Geoff Haynes : I have, yes.

Andrew Hutchison: How the hell do you go back to something ordinary?

Geoff Haynes : That’s very difficult. Yeah, I just. I’d normally run an old 1980s Linn LP12 at home. nothing wrong with that. No. I took home a German turntable which is new. It should have been absolutely perfect. It’s got a really nice arm. It’s got a better cartridge on it than my linn

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Geoff Haynes : I turned to the negro and said, there is a problem with this. There’s something wrong. It was too clear, too clinical. Not what I was used to.

Andrew Hutchison: See, that’s interesting.

Geoff Haynes : Yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: So this is the problem, isn’t it? So, new turntables.

Geoff Haynes : Yeah. Oh. I think all of this.

Andrew Hutchison: Not all of them, of course, but.

Geoff Haynes : All of this sound is very subtle, objective.

Andrew Hutchison: Of course. But you, I mean, you enjoy the musicality of the Linn, right?

Geoff Haynes : Yeah, I do.

Andrew Hutchison: And. And the lack of. Well, to some degree. The lack of hi. Finesse perhaps. And then you brought home a HiFi turntable.

Geoff Haynes : I did, yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. And it wasn’t really. Didn’t work for you.

Geoff Haynes : No.

Geoff Haynes : Origin Live is very affordable equipment, depending on your attitude

so the next thing I’m going to take home is an Origin Live. Yeah, I bought some for the shop.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. Right here.

Geoff Haynes : I’m a dealer. I’ve been doing. I’ve been dealing with them for the last six months.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, right here.

Geoff Haynes : Really nice and successful for me. And so.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Geoff Haynes : I’ve got a couple of demo models that are coming in.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, right here. Who brings Origin Live in?

Geoff Haynes : I do.

Andrew Hutchison: Oh.

Geoff Haynes : You have to m. Buy them directly from Origin Live.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, righty.

Geoff Haynes : Yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: Oh, good on you. Okay, cool. Good stuff. Okay, so if people are interested in Origin Live, you’ve got that as well.

Geoff Haynes : Yeah, I’ve actually. Since the last HiFi show, I’ve actually really developed my. My place in Analog.

Geoff Haynes : this beautiful diamond has obviously helped it. And then people are contacting me for much more.

Andrew Hutchison: Record related.

Geoff Haynes : Exactly. And I’ve got Tony, who’s with me at the show.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Geoff Haynes : Who’s. He’s my person to set up turntables.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Geoff Haynes : If someone wants to hear a Dohmann in Melbourne or anywhere actually.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Geoff Haynes : Mark will accompany me.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Geoff Haynes : We’ll set it up and let them have a listen to it in their home.

Andrew Hutchison: it’s pretty amazing service really. You get the designer of the turntable to come out.

Geoff Haynes : I know, yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: Well that’s the joy of buying local, isn’t it, you know. Well, exactly, yeah, yeah. And then mind you, I have a successful suspicion that Mark happily travels the world to set his turns.

Geoff Haynes : He does, yes. Why wouldn’t you? You know, you walk into a house with a product with your name on it and all of his wealth of knowledge.

Andrew Hutchison: He’s literally living the dream, isn’t he?

Brian Rodgers: Is.

Geoff Haynes : Absolutely. And then here I’ve got Mark Busby who will work with me in my my Sydney setups. Because obviously the reason why I’m here is I’m not here to encroach on Melbourne. I’m sorry, Sydney, market. I’ve got exclusive products which.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, yeah, yeah. They’re not sold in Sydney.

Geoff Haynes : Yeah, exactly. And I figure I was worked with so many people in Sydney for all these years, the least I can do is to get in my car and come up if there’s a HiFi show.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Geoff Haynes : So more than happy to say hi to everyone, shake their hand and thank them for their custom.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. well that’s great. Thank you Geoff Haynes and thank you for your time. great system, very interesting components and you know, I mean within. Yeah. Depending on your attitude, I would say surprisingly affordable. But it’s still expensive equipment. But it does deliver the goods and it’s beautiful quality. And clearly these are pieces you keep for a lifetime if you choose to.

Geoff Haynes : Absolutely.

Andrew Hutchison: We work in or upgrade three months later. Well, I guess you do trade ins, right?

Geoff Haynes : I do trade ins, yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. Well, that’s the way to do it.

Geoff Haynes : And it’s all about evolving a system. So just because you bought something today doesn’t mean that that’s thing you want to live with forever. But having the ability to trade back in with the person who started you or was part of your journey.

Why would you want to try and sell it to someone else

Geoff Haynes : Is so important because why would you want to try and sell it to someone else? You know, you may get the perception of getting a better deal if you sell it yourself. But you know, the convenience, the ease and somebody guiding you through so much easier.

Andrew Hutchison: You don’t have to one stop shop and you don’t have to deal with, you know, people that answer random Ads.

Geoff Haynes : All right.

Andrew Hutchison: thank you again, Geoff Haynes . and we will, speak to you another time.

Geoff Haynes : Brilliant.

Andrew Hutchison: And of course, we’ll, keep running your ads.

Geoff Haynes : Thank you. We might try and change the next one.

Andrew Hutchison: Indeed, yes. Due for change. I keep running into you and discussing the same thing.

Geoff Haynes : People should be buying these Lindemanns.

Andrew Hutchison: Well, you’ve probably run out of Lindemanns now, so we’ll.

Geoff Haynes : Oh, I found another stack.

Andrew Hutchison: You found another stack?

Geoff Haynes Haynes: German.

Geoff Haynes : Well, very, very well built indeed.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, they won’t. They won’t go off. All right, thanks. and, we’re over and out. And we’ll be back.

Geoff Haynes : Brilliant.

Andrew Hutchison: See you.

Geoff Haynes : Thank you.

Andrew Hutchison: Bye.

Lindemann Lime Tree offers high end discrete components for HiFi systems

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What is it, the Australian HiFi show? Yes, the Sydney HiFi Show. Or is

00:45:00

it a sound and image?

Jean Marie Liere: It’s Australian Sydney HiFi show.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes. It’s somewhat confusing.

Jean Marie Liere started manufacturing loudspeakers in France in 1985

We’re here with Jean Marie Liere in the Microphase Audio design. Design room. Mad. Of course, Completely mad. we’ve come to see Jean Marie because, he has some rather unusual looking loudspeakers, some would say. But in reality, as I’m sitting before an original pair that he manufactured in 1985. That sound amazing. he’s really continuing on, really, from where you started in France.

Jean Marie Liere: Yeah, that’s right. And so that adventure lasted about, I don’t know, four or five years probably. we had good distribution all around Europe, primarily in Belgium, Germany, where we were selling only the Actives version of them.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay. Yeah.

Jean Marie Liere: And then in Scandinavia, we had an.

Andrew Hutchison: Active version in 1985.

Jean Marie Liere: Yes.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay. All right.

Jean Marie Liere: We do have a new version as well. Now we have the Amplifier.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Jean Marie Liere: But at the time it was a beautifully designed Class A amplifier. Class A made by one of my dealers in Strasbourg. and I’d never heard it was a m. Complete mess inside. But it sounded amazing. And then my German distributor said, I can’t sell that. so we redesigned it on a PC board. So we lost some of the magic. But obviously it Was more manufacturable.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes. So originally it was some kind of point to point wide sort of extravaganza or something.

Jean Marie Liere: Yeah, well, we. I don’t know why, because at the time there was, you know, I had a vinyl plant, not far studio. It was all the beginning of the free radios, you know.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Brian Rodgers: Yeah.

Jean Marie Liere: So there was a lot of activities, a lot of new studios that needed small monitors. And these ones, the professional one wanted to get an active version obviously. So that’s how we started. And then, the pinnacle of that. Is that the right word?

Andrew Hutchison: Yes, well, we say pinnacle, pinnacle.

Jean Marie Liere: Yeah. Of that was that we equipped the wall of the Norwegian radio with 100 pair of them.

Andrew Hutchison: Wow.

Jean Marie Liere: And some are still working well.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay. That’s amazing. So in fact your, your manufacturing, adventure in the mid-80s was of some scale. So, But at some point you moved to Australia.

Jean Marie Liere: Yes, 1997.

Andrew Hutchison: So you’ve been here a while.

Jean Marie Liere: Yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: So you’re almost a local. I mean you sort of really are. And and so as much as you go back to Europe quite regularly, of course, to get a taste of, you know.

Jean Marie Liere: Yeah. Oysters primarily.

Andrew Hutchison: What are you saying? Australian oysters are no good?

Jean Marie Liere: I didn’t see that.

Andrew Hutchison: You need to try Kiwi oysters. It’s one thing they do well. so, they do many things well. Sorry, sorry. Our New Zealand friends, the, mussels are also good.

There is a French connection in this podcast

so back to speakers. So you’ve got quite an array here. And what I also notice, and it’s disappointing that we’re speaking historically in a way because this podcast goes out after the show.

Jean Marie Liere: Yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: so it’s more of a show roundup than a, than a show. Preliminary sort of, teaser. But, you’ve got quite an array of, sort of. That’s not vintage gear as such, except perhaps the Stellavox little, open reel tape recorder.

Jean Marie Liere: Yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: Which is, I guess the. Is it the French version of a nagra?

Jean Marie Liere: No, no, no. It’s also a Swiss product.

Andrew Hutchison: Oh, it’s also Swiss, Yeah. I thought just being maybe because of your heritage that you had.

Jean Marie Liere: No, no, there is a big French connection.

Andrew Hutchison: Oh, there is a French connection, yes.

Jean Marie Liere: there’s two French connections, actually. One is, So first of all, the Stellavox SP7, I think was the real one. Production one in 1973, if I remember properly, was the first professional portable stereo recorder.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Jean Marie Liere: At the time, Naira was only doing mono because the film industry was still in mono M. And it took them like four years to compete properly with Telavox and with the Niagra 4s.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Jean Marie Liere: the stellaavox has the advantage of having a very much simpler circuitry.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Jean Marie Liere: There’s only four transistors between the mic input to the recording head where The Nagra has 20.

Andrew Hutchison: I also reckon at a glance that the stellavox is more, diminutive. It’s, lighter.

Jean Marie Liere: It’s slightly smaller and lighter. it’s only 4.5 kilos.

Andrew Hutchison: Ah. And we’re talking about, of course, portable tape recorder as it was in the early 70s, mid-70s. It was not a cassette recorder. It was a, you know, a, open reel, five and a half. is it what size reel? Five and a quarter. Five and a. What’s the size of the. Just five inch reels. What do you call it? But you can put bigger reels on it.

Jean Marie Liere: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I have an adapter, but

00:50:00

Jean Marie Liere: one of our belts decided to break before the show.

Andrew Hutchison: It’s got a little outrigger arm.

Jean Marie Liere: I’m just waiting for new belts to someone in Holland is making them for me. So, anyway, so the first big French connection is I was working for the distributor.

Andrew Hutchison: Oh, okay.

Jean Marie Liere: For a year or so, whatever. And there’s actually three connections. the second connection is that we sold about half of the production in France to the French radio and television because they were all going stereo at the time.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Jean Marie Liere: So my boss made a killing. I did buy a unit at that time, which I sold, you know, of course, later, because as people, you know, you’re young and you say, okay, well, I need the money, so I’m gonna sell it. but it gave me a taste for. I used to think there, that was my first fall into the audio professional industry. Okay. because we were selling Otari and. Oh, were you a very fancy, mixing, console from Italy that was, competing with Navy. I mean, you know, it was good stuff. And also the very first, electret microphones.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Jean Marie Liere: which the current NT range of rode are actually, not copied, but, you know, modern version of the same thing. Pencil. so I bought two of them as well and I started to make recordings because at the time you could just walk up to a venue and put your two microphones there and then say, oh, can I record? And it would say, yes. Okay. So that gave me a taste for that. but it’s not until another 10 years that I really started to design some speakers with the view of selling them, you know.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Jean Marie Liere: the third connection is that the motor, which is, made by Aton. it’s a company in the Jura part of France which is famous for watchmaking. So it’s the French equivalent of Saint Imier.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. Okay. So there is quite a lot of. Yeah.

Jean Marie Liere: So that motor was originally designed for Beaulieu, for a, film camera.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Jean Marie Liere: Okay. And then it was adapted by, George Kelly, the owner of Stellavox, together with Aton, to make it work into, a portable wheel to wheel recorder.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay. Well, I can see. I mean, so that’s why the machine’s here. I mean, there’s a very strong love and connection to. To the brand and to the idea of what, you know, open reel tape can. Can bring beautiful analog recordings, which I believe you’ve been doing some.

Brian Rodgers: But.

Swing rate is a term that used to be employed for amplifiers

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, but slipping sideways into the speakers, your. What would you call it.

Jean Marie Liere: Philosophy, I guess, around speakers design principles.

Andrew Hutchison: Is that you’re after pace and speed and lightness, and it’s sort of that slew rate you like to talk about.

Jean Marie Liere: Yeah, it’s a term that used to be employed for amplifiers.

Andrew Hutchison: I was going to say it is more of an amplifier term, but I.

Jean Marie Liere: Believe it applies to any piece of electronics, really.

Andrew Hutchison: I think it kind of does. And for those that are, listening who are not quite sure what a slew might be and at what rate it might happen.

Jean Marie Liere: Well, basically, if you input a square signal into a piece of gear, okay. Regardless of what it is, then the time it takes to go from zero to, let’s say, 10 volts or whatever it is, that’s the speed, and that speed is the slew rate.

Geoff Haynes : Okay.

Andrew Hutchison: And literally how square the square wave can be.

Jean Marie Liere: M. Yeah. Because, as you know, if. I mean, you can’t see, obviously, what I’m showing to Andrew, but that, means when the amplifier or the speaker get into the way, the front edge of the square wave just gets slanted a little bit. So it’s the slew. Yes, yes, exactly. And so nobody ever measured the slew rate of the loudspeakers. We do make impulse measurements, which is about the same. Okay. but we don’t transform that into a number, which would be the slow write. I think again, we need to anchor microphones to the history of French hi Fi. I started to be interested when I first listened to a pair of ellipso. There, were professional monitors basically, at a trade show, you know, HiFi show in Paris, way back in the 70s, when you were only about 50. Yeah, yeah. I was very. It’s A long time anyway. And at the time I was doing, my. I was a tune uni, learning electronics. So, you know, it was a kind of an interest. and then, you know, we had a Hue, portable recorder there to do some stuff. I mean, there was a lot of stuff happening at that

00:55:00

Jean Marie Liere: time, you know, in that period of life. And,

Andrew Hutchison: Well, it was the 70s and into the 80s was an incredible era of transformation and improvement in.

Jean Marie Liere: There was a real innovation at the time.

Andrew Hutchison: Innovation and improvements and genuine improvements. Big steps in performance from. From say, 1968 to 1978 was quite astounding. And then into the mid-80s, really. So you sort of rode that wave.

Jean Marie Liere: Yeah. Until the, mid-90s, where it started to become, you know, ordinary.

Andrew Hutchison: It was all done.

Jean Marie Liere: Yes.

Andrew Hutchison: Basically, the development had occurred. That’s right. We’d achieved nirvana and things. I don’t know. And of course, at some point in the mid-90s, there was this interest in how can we make things sound worse. Yeah. But cheaper.

Jean Marie Liere: Yeah. So. Well, a number of people like me or Jean Marie. Jean Marie Renaud that you probably don’t know about still is no longer alive, but his son has taken over. there was Cabasse and there was Triangle. All these people. If you look at the design we were all doing at the time, we were all trying to do a smaller or less difficult to manufacture than the Ellipson system with the Sphere and the big subwoofer. So if you. If you look at, the Quatron Tours here that I’m trying to sell.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, yeah.

Jean Marie Liere: Okay. That’s basically a baby version of a 4040 from ellipson.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. Okay.

Jean Marie Liere: and obviously much, much, easier to make and cheaper too, you know. And I mean, to a degree, if you look at some products from Cabaz and then BMW. Okay. You’ll see they all copy the Ellipse thing. Yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Jean Marie Liere: Yes. and so I was not very original in that. In that.

Andrew Hutchison: No, no. In the franchise.

Jean Marie Liere: I was just trying to. The idea of these speakers from 1984.

Andrew Hutchison: Is that when these speakers from 1984 are tiny, they’re literally half a shoebox.

Jean Marie Liere: Because the. The drive. The idea. I had another colleague in at hp, I was working for it at Packard at the time, so that helped as well with the measurement.

Andrew Hutchison: I was going to say, yes, you have. Because you were working for hp, you had access to at the time, test equipment that was simply unaffordable, except to the likes of Ellipse.

Jean Marie Liere: So I could borrow them for a weekend at no cost.

Andrew Hutchison: I mean, these were instruments about 5 and 10,000, dollars.

Jean Marie Liere: HP 3582, which was the very first FFT analyzer that anyone could afford, was still $25,000.

Andrew Hutchison: $25,000 when you could buy a very nice house.

Jean Marie Liere: And that’s in 1982.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Jean Marie Liere: Okay.

Modern manufacturing techniques for speaker enclosures are less than hand assembled

so, Kef was the first audio company buying the bigger one.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Jean Marie Liere: Which was like, you know, 250 thousand.

Andrew Hutchison: Is that right? So in the early 80s, KEF bought a quarter of a million dollar machine.

Jean Marie Liere: Yeah. And that’s Siegfried Link, which that you obviously know. most people would know was the guy at HP that sold the system to Kev.

Andrew Hutchison: Oh, was he? Yes. It’s a small world, the audio world, isn’t it?

Jean Marie Liere: And so, the, the design philosophy between the speakers is that, Pierre and I decided to find the smallest drivers that we could find that would still work to our satisfaction and put them in the smallest possible box. And because on the side we were building Onkyo enclosures, on enclosure for, you know, withdrawing raga and all that French, crown. A French Japanese crown. Anyway, so diverse. so that’s how we came with the idea of the, the slanted baffle. Because that was giving us.

Andrew Hutchison: It’s a little bit of time alignment.

Jean Marie Liere: Yeah, time alignment. it was not too difficult to make. You have to understand that these things were made manually. There was no CNC machine at the time. and so, if we continue in this street. So by the time I had, you know, really got married to some degree.

Andrew Hutchison: To cut you off for a second. I mean, you’re implying that modern manufacturing techniques for speaker enclosures are less than hand assembled. They’re all hand assembled. Really.

Jean Marie Liere: Yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: I mean the pieces are cut with a machine, but the rest is. Yeah, absolutely.

Jean Marie Liere: Yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: Whether it’s made China, Russia.

Jean Marie Liere: Yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: Estonia.

Jean Marie Liere: yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: UK or Australia. Australia or America. Can’t make anything there anymore. But I’m sure there’s someone who’s trying to change that. they, Yeah, they’re all ultimately beautifully precision cut.

Jean Marie Liere: Yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: Machine, but still have to be.

Jean Marie Liere: Yeah. But obviously the fact that you were cutting them on. On a bench saw.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, it’s a little bit of.

Jean Marie Liere: I did a little bit of, you know, variations.

Andrew Hutchison: A bit of fudging too. Yes. A bit like Jaguars of the 70s. Everyone was different. Yes.

Jean Marie Liere: So, so then, you know, moved to Australia, educated to kids that are now young adults and successful and happy. and then, I know why.

01:00:00

Jean Marie Liere: Because it’s true about 2015, I was working with a lighting company.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Jean Marie Liere: And they were doing extrusions, for LEDs and stuff.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Jean Marie Liere: And we had a project with the Scott Code College here in Sydney where they need 94 meters of that extrusion with lighting. But all the other services are perforated for the sprinklers. But they needed Also speakers for PA and speakers for EWIs, the emergency speakers. So because, the lighting company that I was working with knew that I was capable of designing speakers, they tasked me with the idea of making tiny little speakers with. I should have bought some actually. But anyway, so they’re cut out. Frequency on the bus is probably 200Hz, but as a PA system it’s more M than enough. And for EWI system it doesn’t really matter. so we did that. I made quite a good piece of money out of that. And I say, okay, well I’m, you know, that’s extra money that I really don’t need.

Andrew Hutchison: it’s good not to need money, isn’t it? Yeah. Yeah.

The Mark 2 is a small drive unit with two active drivers

Jean Marie Liere: Well, because I was doing also things that were working well. So, I decided, I said, well, let’s use, you know, 10 or 20% of that money. Not all of it.

Andrew Hutchison: No, no, no.

Jean Marie Liere: To design a modern version of those of the original. And that’s how the satisfaction Mark two came about. Which is the top of the towers here. I didn’t win one because I don’t want to sell them. I mean, I can’t make them anymore. but that’s also where the idea of the Mark 3 came about. Okay. Because that was the first, satellite into which we put a back drive, an active. Active as in not passive.

Andrew Hutchison: No, an extra driver in the rear.

Jean Marie Liere: Battle.

Andrew Hutchison: That’s a driven drive.

Jean Marie Liere: Yes.

Andrew Hutchison: I’m not quite sure how that works and unfortunately time will defeat us as far as explaining the technicalities of that. But the bottom line is you have like a four inch driver in the front. Or is it five and a quarter?

Jean Marie Liere: Yeah, well, this one is a, it’s a. At, the time it was the 10 centimeter. 11 centimeters.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. So 11 centimeter. Yeah. Which I guess we generically refer to.

Jean Marie Liere: We have now in the market.

Andrew Hutchison: It’s actually more of a three and a half inch driver, isn’t it? But anyhow, so. So it’s a small drive unit. Then you have a larger mid base drive unit in the rear and obviously some kind of crossover arrangement between them. It’s not as if they’re driven in parallel, are they.

Jean Marie Liere: Or are they. They are. Well, basically the front driver is not filtered at the bottom.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes. It’s only two and a half way.

Jean Marie Liere: Kind of. Yes. And then the back one is cut at the bottom, you know, 300 hertz.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Brian Rodgers: Really?

Jean Marie Liere: It’s two and a half way.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. Yeah. But it’s interesting.

Jean Marie Liere: And also because they are, like, you know, we use the term isobaric loosely, but basically because the two drivers share the same volume, each driver sees the whole volume of the box.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. Yeah.

Jean Marie Liere: Okay. So it looks like you have a small speaker that is twice the size.

Brian Rodgers: Yes.

Andrew Hutchison: It’s one of those things, I guess it’s very hard to predict in any kind of software. You really have to build it and find it.

Jean Marie Liere: Exactly. So we were lucky because, I think one reason why it works and what we could achieve the Mark three as well, is one thing that I found by trial and error and by chance as well, is that if the resonant frequencies of the two drivers are the same or very close, that way it works.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. Okay.

Jean Marie Liere: Okay. If you had a 40 hertz on one side and a 60th on the other side, it would go all over the place.

Andrew Hutchison: well, that’s. I’m gonna keep it because we’ve got a lot of.

We’ve got a lot of guests on this show. This episode is going to run for hours. But I mean, I. I really appreciate your time. You have so many interesting stories. and of course, I mean, decades of stories. There is decades of stories. Stories. There are many stories. We’ve touched on it. Yeah. M. The. But the bottom line is, Jean Marie’s loudspeakers are really easy to recognize, because they are built, from birch ply. They are, clear stain or clear lacquered. Really. It’s a terrible expression. Clear stain. Because they’re not stained, you know, in the normal sense. They are simply sealed and and present in their kind of in a finished raw state, I guess. And, they’re tall and skinny and they’re very fast and they’re very. There is something quite, there’s something about the way they sound that other. Many other loudspeakers don’t quite sound the same. And if you like, which is easy to like that kind of lively, exciting way about them, then you should have a listen. I guess you’re at other shows.

Jean Marie Liere: Yeah. We can announce today that we will be at the Melbourne show in August. We have now a listening room in Melbourne, called Groove Audio. Yes, it’s gonna be more active from July.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Jean Marie Liere: and, in Sydney, it’s at my place until we found someone else.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

01:05:00

Andrew Hutchison: And the thing is, for our European listeners.

Jean Marie Liere: Yes. So I have, a listening room in Kent in the uk called Val hi Fi.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Jean Marie Liere: And then someone in Paris, or near Paris, near Beauvais, who is a man of, gentilhomme, as we call him. I mean, he’s a musical encyclopedia in his head. And also physically because he has, I don’t know, 4,000 CDs and I don’t know how many vinyls. And just to give you the taste, he has 48 version of the Four Seasons and in.

Andrew Hutchison: Did you say 48?

Jean Marie Liere: 48, yes, on CD. So I’m sure he has more on vinyl.

Andrew Hutchison: I mean, it’s a wonderful piece of music. 48 versions may be a stretch. yes, and anywhere, any other ages.

Jean Marie Liere: So at the moment I can’t confirm. We are working with, Jean Jacques in Beauvais to appoint someone in Belgium.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Jean Marie Liere: and someone downtown Paris as well.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay. All right.

Jean Marie Liere: Well, but this is, you know, so an international brand. Yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: You manufacture locally, export everywhere. And, and you can hear them in all sorts of places. Thanks, Jean Marie, thanks for some insight. Thanks for being by and pleasure, maybe. Well, not a pleasure. Did I say not a pleasure? It was not a flat pleasure at all. It was an absolute pleasure, as always. And I’ll see you in Melbourne. Thank you. Thanks. Great. Bye.

Jean Marie Liere: Thank you.

Andrew Hutchison: Thanks.

Jean Marie Liere: Andrew.

Serhan Swift Bespoke loudspeakers designed and built in Australia

Andrew Hutchison: Serhan Swift Bespoke loudspeakers designed and built in Australia by perfectionists described by reviewers as exceptional. Serhan Swift has received numerous awards here and abroad, including Sound and Image Best stand amount loudspeaker 2024. For full information, head to serhandswift.com if you’ve enjoyed the show, and you must have, because you made it this far, can you please perhaps give us a five star review, if that’s what they call it, on the platform that, that you prefer. So thanks again for listening. See you in the next episode.

01:07:03

S2 EP028 WORLD’S BEST BRANDS – ONE ON ONE INTERVIEWS

This is part two of our Sydney or Australian hi fi show, Roundup

But first up, Alan March

Alan March: When I first decided to make some speakers and it was clear that purify  to me were going to be producing drivers that solved a lot of the problems which just have been sitting around with drivers for years.

Andrew Hutchison: Well, no one could really work out a way. And it did involve in to cure one of the issues. it did involve an odd looking surround. So if people are listening as they are watching.

Alan March: Yeah. I’m bracing myself for the show because we get asked this question about 100 times per day.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes, yes.

Alan March: What’s your. Your woofers are broken.

Andrew Hutchison: Look at the surroundings and welcome back to not an audiophile. Episode 28 Today is part two of our Sydney or Australian hi fi show, Roundup. And the show was held a couple of weeks ago and we spoke to some very interesting people during the show and I could list them all and all of their products, but there are so many. This is a long episode. There is chapters you can skip to, the part that you want to listen to now, which is kind of handy.

This podcast is sponsored by the subwoofer people, Harbottle Audio

. This episode of not an Audiophile. The podcast is sponsored by the subwoofer people, Harbottle Audio. If you’re serious about subwoofers or just tired of muddy bass and bloated hype, check out Harbottle audio. With over 800 subwoofer configurations, they solve problems from Trinov waveforming to vintage analog systems needing an actual musical subwoofer and not some hopeless air pump. No gimmicks, just pure unadulterated bass engineered to a performance standard focused way beyond the THD versus spl. And yeah, the CEO wrote this ad. That’s how inept they are at marketing and how much they care about sound.  Www.harbottleaudio.com

Alan March from March Audio has been busy with new products

we’re with Alan March from March Audio. I always wonder how you come up with a name, but it’s We haven’t spoken to you for a while, Alan, because, Well, you’ve been busy. Very busy. New models.

Alan March: We have been busy. I mean we’ve moved. We’ve moved house. We’ve moved office from Albany right in the bottom of Australia to just north of Perth. Yes, it’s about a five, six hour drive.

Andrew Hutchison: it’s a big move.

Alan March: Yeah. And yeah, that’s taken up a lot of time. But we’ve also been busy trying to get some new products finished.

Andrew Hutchison: We haven’t been trying. You’ve achieved that because they’re finished. It seems you’ve got just, just you’ve got, a wonderful looking little, Well, it’s little compared with your previous floor stand. And I’m not going to pronounce any of the, of the names that you’ve.

Alan March: explained the names to people.

Andrew Hutchison: Well, it’s Norwegian or it’s.

Alan March: It’s Finnish.

Andrew Hutchison: Finnish.

Alan March: So, the whole Finnish thing. Thing is due to us having two very fluffy Finnish spitz dots.

Andrew Hutchison: Is that the connection? Okay. all right.

Alan March: orange things that look like samoids, but a bit smaller.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay. Orange.

Alan March: they’re orange. Yes.

Andrew Hutchison: Not bright orange.

Alan March: Fairly bright. Same color as Rizzo.

Alan March: Really?

Alan March: Yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: Wow. Okay.

Alan March: And, they are the national dog of Finland.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay. Right.

Alan March: So. So, we’ve got rather boring names for our power amplifiers and amplifier range. Simple numbers. Numbers. Engineering numbers. So as there is a penchant for giving speakers crazy names, I thought we’d go with Finnish names.

Andrew Hutchison: And indeed you did.

Alan March: So we have Sointuva, which no one can pronounce.

Andrew Hutchison: Sointuva, which is your first one, your stand mount model.

Alan March: What does that mean? it means, I’ve forgotten. I’ve completely forgotten. We’ve got the big one, the Kuoro.

Andrew Hutchison: I meant to forget.

Alan March: I know. You’d have to edit this. This is terrible.

Andrew Hutchison: That was perfect. And we do no editing. I should have warned you at the time.

Alan March: Just to explain to everybody, we’ve just finished setting up for the show and it’s been a.

Andrew Hutchison: And that. And you should explain that because I’m sitting with you in a, in a very large space at this show. there is kind of three different areas or maybe four, maybe five areas of display. You’ve got three systems set up. Well, two and a half. And it’s a big space. And and of course we’re in Sydney. And for those listening overseas, Sydney is on the other side of the country from where you live, 4,000 kilometers away. And it’s a big trek. You packed up multiple pellets of gear and dragged it up. Well, a trucking company did. But unlike, last year when you had to drive u haul it across the country because of flooding and the freight companies weren’t working, so an easier way to some degree path to get here this year. But still 24 hours worth of setup.

Alan March: Yes. And that’s frazzled my mind somewhat. But we’re all ready to go now.

: We need some smaller speakers as well. Um, it is a consideration for people

So. Yeah, we’ve got our big  Ukkonen speakers, which is

00:05:00

finished for thunder.

Andrew Hutchison: Ah. so that was your first floor stander and it’s A hefty thing.

Alan March: Yes.

Andrew Hutchison: The big wave guide. and what looks like about an 8 inch base unit. our mid base unit, I guess. and, and quite a substantial box means, you know, and it’s. I mean, it’s a bit. It’s a, it’s, it’s a bit over a meter high. 1100.

Alan March: Yes, about that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: but the new floor stander is a bit cute.

Alan March: Dinky. Yes. it is a consideration for people. They’ve got to put these things in their homes. So.

Andrew Hutchison: And, everyone needs a bright red speaker.

Alan March: so not everybody can fit an ukkonen in into the living room. So we do need some smaller speakers as well. So we’ve got the new kuoro speaker.

Andrew Hutchison: Oh, yes.

Alan March: Kuoro, which is, which is Finnish for choir or harmony.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Alan March: Or chorus.

Andrew Hutchison: So not a comment on, it’s Style or cuteness.

Alan March: so it’s a fair bit smaller than the, Ukkonen, but it’s, got two six and a half inch purify woofers and the new purify, waveguide tweeter.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. So that’s brand new.

Alan March: That’s brand new. yes, those are the prototype we’ve got in front of us right now. And we’ll be playing them at the show to see what people’s reaction are going to be.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, well, we will report back on that. because as I mentioned in every one of these segments, in fact, this is being broadcast somewhat later than the show, but only by a few days. It is very much a show report.

All of your loudspeakers are built to water, right? Yeah. Well, they’re not even veneers

So, I made the comment about the red, but of course, all of your loudspeakers are really built to water. You can be any colour you want if you want. Pink ones with purple spots.

Alan March: And we’ve even done a speaker that’s in army green with. And the guy wanted, like mash, you know, the black stenciling.

Alan March: Yeah, yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That kind of stenciling, which was interesting. That’s actually kind of cool.

Alan March: Yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: All right. Because I think that the appearance kind of lends itself to that.

Alan March: You’ve done some degree to carp yellow.

Andrew Hutchison: Really? Okay. Yeah. All right.

Alan March: Yeah, yeah, we’ve done all sorts.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: All right. And there was a time when you were doing timber. Well, they’re not even veneers.

Alan March: No, they’re solid. They’re solid. Yeah, we’re still doing that. All the speakers are available in multiple hardwood, finishes.

Andrew Hutchison: Now, how do you deal with that acoustically?

Alan March: lots of people ask this Question. it’s absolutely true that the different woods, because obviously the painted ones are MDF like everybody else’s speaker is, because MDF’s are great material for making speakers. and it is absolutely true that different woods have different densities, different masses and therefore, a panel of wood, say on a speaker, side or front baffle or rear baffle, they’ll all have different resonant frequencies because of that different density and mass. And we just get round that with again, extensive bracing inside but a lot of damping.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. Okay, so there is some bracing but yeah, you do.

Alan March: It’s a double edged sword. You can go sort of one of two ways. If you, if you really extensively brace, you’ll make the cabinet stiffer. That will raise all the resonant frequencies. But there is an argument to say that you don’t want to do that because it may put those, those resonant frequencies into a more noticeable range.

Andrew Hutchison: Indeed.

Alan March: and that’s a sort of behind the sort of BBC lossy box. Lossy box where they’re, they’re, the walls are fairly thin and floppy and damped. So that kind of makes it.

Andrew Hutchison: Not sense but it, if you think about, ah, a piece of fabric.

Alan March: Yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: That’s wet.

Alan March: Yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: Try to make that ring, you know, I mean. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah.

Alan March: so yeah, there are different ways around it. So we just have. I, wouldn’t even say it was actually extensive bracing. It’s because part of my professional background is vibration analysis. So it’s just about putting enough bracing in to stop it doing the things you don’t want it to do and measuring it to make sure it’s moved that resonant frequency away from where you want it to be.

Andrew Hutchison: Like everything, I guess in loudspeaker design, it’s a compromise and it’s finding the right set of compromises which, judging by the. Now I’ve not heard the new smaller one because really no one has. But it looks as if maybe you’re not playing.

Alan March: We absolutely are. We’ll be swapping them over.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Alan March: Notice the tape marks on the floor.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, yeah, I saw. So the, the bigger ones. well, and it’s frustrating as a, as a kind of a competitor in one way that they’re, they’re incredibly good. Annoyingly so.

Alan March: Thank you.

Andrew Hutchison: Well, they really are. But then they, they have some very pre, you know, they’re premium ingredients. Right. So because that’s the beryllium, so.

Alan March: That’S an Aspie acoustics beryllium Tweeted their top of the range.

Andrew Hutchison: Just a very expensive device.

Alan March: Yeah, horribly so m. Yes.

Andrew Hutchison: And those purified drivers, I’ve no idea how much they cost, but they’re not cheap.

Alan March: They’re not cheap. No, no. but yeah we, we looked at lots and lots of drivers on the market when, when I first decided to. To make some speakers and it was clear that that purified to me were going to be

00:10:00

Alan March: producing drivers that solved a lot of the problems which just have been sitting around with drivers for years.

Andrew Hutchison: Well no one could really work out a way. And it did involve in to cure one of the issues. it did involve an odd looking surround.

Half roll surround solves two problems with a traditional surround

So if people are listening as they are watching.

Alan March: Yeah. I’m bracing myself for the show because we get asked this question about 100 times per day.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Alan March: What’s your. Your woofers are broken. Look at the surrounds. So if you ever go on the Internet and have a look at the surrounds on a purified driver, they do look weird. They don’t have a typical what they call half roll surround.

Andrew Hutchison: No. they literally have a random roll.

Alan March: Yeah. So literally half of the. The surround sticks out and half of it sticks in. And the reason for that. Yes, please tell us it solves two problems with a half roll surround. As the cone moves in and out, the surface area that’s radiating the sound changes.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Alan March: and that’s just. That creates distortion. Yes, one of the distortion because in.

Andrew Hutchison: Fact the diaphragm is changing size as it moves sort of dynamically or what have you is kind of weird, isn’t it? I mean a guitar as it vibrates.

Alan March: Or pianos doesn’t change.

Andrew Hutchison: It doesn’t change its size. No.

Alan March: and the second problem you have is with a half roll surround is as it moves the cone moves along its throw in and out. The resistive force of the surround, changes which creates another distortion factor. So purify that the most obvious. Now that I’ve seen it, it’s the most obvious thing in the world. Half of the surround sticks out. Sticks in. which means that resistive force, the comover stays relatively constant or much more constant than a traditional surround.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Alan March: And the surface air remains the same.

Andrew Hutchison: It makes a lot of sense. It is aesthetically weird. Challenging for some people. I have gotten used to it and I now have gotten over my initial concerns. It’s because they do work exceptionally well. I mean people, you know, people have to listen to your loudspeakers. you know, so I guess Some people listening to this podcast going, well, we were at Sydney show, we heard them and they were astounding sounding, maybe taking into account the limitations of this odd space. But I’ve heard them in odd spaces before and they work well. So I think you might be alright. You obviously listen to the system as you’ve been setting it up.

Alan March: How do you think it’s going? it’s always a problem going to a show and trying to tame the room acoustics. You’ve got a data set up and try your best to tame the room as acoustics. Now this room is quite large. I think it’s 7 and 1 2m by.

Andrew Hutchison: Which is kind of a good thing. Right?

Alan March: You know, it’s a good thing for low frequencies because it takes a lot of the room, the lowest room modes. But we’ve still got, we’ve measured it. We’ve still got a room mode floor to ceiling, which has boomed the base up a little bit.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. Okay.

Alan March: so yeah we’ve got some acoustic panels in here as well. But you can never do. You can never.

Andrew Hutchison: No, but I think this gives people a taste and and of course to some degree the, the show is on an even keel.

Alan March: Everybody’s got some kind of acoustic problem.

You’ve got a new amplifier and the one I want to skip to is the preamp

Andrew Hutchison: So but you’ve got a new amplifier and the one I want to skip to and ask you about is the is the preamp. Because as I made the smart ass comment before, it feels like this has been coming for a while.

Alan March: Oh, it has.

Alan March: This has been put on, on hold. We’ve changed, decided to take steps, different tacks on the design and you know, it’s just always some. Seems to be something in the way to stop us from finishing it. But we have pretty much finished it now. So we’ve got our new Pre one, preamplifier. Again, another boring name. So prayed.

Andrew Hutchison: I think so Pre 1 or Preamp 1?

Alan March: Pre 1.

Andrew Hutchison: Pre 1. I mean it kind of makes sense.

Alan March: Yeah, it’s the first. I think there’s probably quite a few of them called pre1.

Andrew Hutchison: I suspect there is, yes.

Alan March: so it’s a balanced preamplifier, throughout.

Andrew Hutchison: so balanced. Okay, so it’s now balanced is an interesting thing. I want to ask you why you felt that was necessary and maybe fashion is part of that. But. Ah, but I mean it’s, it’s twice as much circuitry effectively I guess and probably a hell of a lot more kind of design and development. Is that. Not really.

Alan March: Not really balanced circuitry has been around for a very long time. There’s nothing new about it. and it solves many, many problems. There’s a bit of myth out there that I think you just alluded to. One part of it is that people think it’s more complex circuitry, therefore it can’t sound as good.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, that may be one thought. I don’t have that thought, but I do.

Alan: RCA single ended circuitry is fundamentally flawed

Well, I’m going to come to my real question because your amp has a phono stage

00:15:00

in it, but let’s, yeah, wind back to the line part that’s clearly balanced.

Alan March: yeah. so there is a fundamental problem with RCA single ended circuitry.

Andrew Hutchison: Indeed. I mean is there?

Alan March: There absolutely is. there’s a very good reason why any professional application will use balanced circuitry. And if people think that balance doesn’t sound good, they need to consider that every single recording they’ve got in their collection has been recorded on balanced equipment.

Andrew Hutchison: Well that’s true, yes.

Alan March: there’s nothing out there that there’s no shame in the world.

Andrew Hutchison: Everything is balanced.

Alan March: And there’s a very good reason for it. It’s because RCA is fundamentally flawed. The problem. The problem with it.

Andrew Hutchison: How you going?

Alan March: Good. The problem with ico.

Andrew Hutchison: Are we at a HIFI show?

Alan March: Yeah, I think so. We haven’t started yet, have we? We missed the start. Anyway. The the fundamental problem with ICA is this, the zero volts or negative part of the circuit.

Andrew Hutchison: Hold that thought. Alan.

All music is recorded on balanced equipment or systems or studios

We’re back with Alan. March, the Ellen March Audio Studio at the Sydney hi fi show 2025. We’ve now eradicated our distraction. They seem like very nice people. Yes. But the show, we’re not open yet. you were explaining the benefits of balanced in relation to the fact that, I mean really all music is recorded on balanced equipment or systems or studios. And you’re.

Alan March: Yeah. And that’s because there’s a fundamental problem with ICA circuitry. So the zero volts in the circuit on a single ended ICA connection, is also used as the shield in Internet connecting your components together. What that problem that creates is that it also tends to be connected at some point in your system to mains safety ground. And what happens is that potential differences between different pieces of equipment makes currents flow in the shield wire in your interconnect.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Alan March: Which is, is carrying your very delicate.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Alan March: Naught volts reference.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes. Yeah.

Alan March: So these noise currents and it tends to be in, In Australia it’s 50 Hz mains noise In America, it’ll be 60 Hz, will sit there modulating your audio signal, which is crazy.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, it is.

Alan March: whilst a lot of the time you get away with it without any overt.

Andrew Hutchison: Well, if you’re stuck with single ended, you’re going to have to get rid of it somewhat by. I don’t know. I mean there are various methods, but some of m them illegal.

Alan March: Yeah, you can, well, you can try and break the, the ground up. So this creates what they call a ground loop.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Alan March: And in bad cases it will lead to an audible hum. You, you’ll definitely get it with record decks and pickup and stuff like that. less so with line level. but it’s also more, a more recent manifestation, of the problem is you will hear things like if you’ve got a DAC being driven by a computer, you’re literally. You can literally get mouse. When you mouse, you move the mouse. You can get sort of computer noises.

Andrew Hutchison: Is that right?

Alan March: Yeah, because the, these noise currents are getting into the ground.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Alan March: And carrying through your system.

Andrew Hutchison: You made a decision earlier that your preamp needs to be balanced. Or maybe with your original iteration, maybe it wasn’t going to be. But you.

Alan March: No, no, it was always going to be, all our equipment, right from the start, all our power amplifiers are balanced.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. Okay.

Alan March: it was really rca. We. Why it’s still being used makes no sense.

Andrew Hutchison: It’s cheap. It’s a standard. But it’s not a standard because every bloody connector and socket is very slightly different size.

Alan March: Yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: You’ve got to, got to find as someone like myself who uses plugs and sockets in my work, I have to you find your favorites that are, that plug together nicely and you stick with them because they are all over the place. the phono stage though, which you’ll new preamp has, it’s still differential. Okay.

Alan March: Yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: Right here. So how do you, how does that kind of work? well, when I say well, fundamental.

Alan March: A cartridge is fundamentally a differential.

Andrew Hutchison: Well, it kind of is, isn’t it?

Alan March: so my, my background is instrumentation.

Andrew Hutchison: So when I say cognitive is.

Alan March: It’s completely.

Andrew Hutchison: No, no, the, the cartridge, I mean it has four connections and then there’s a separate earth.

Alan March: So the fact that the turntables still have bloody RCA sockets on the back just drives me nuts. because one of the other things about

00:20:00

Alan March: balanced circuitry is because the ground wire is completely separate to the two signal wires, you don’t get that ground loop the noise currents flow in the shield. They don’t flow in the signal wires. so they’re harmless. So that’s one way you get rid of harm. But you can also get, hum pickup and noise pickup, through electromagnetic pickup. but balanced. Well, I prefer to call it. I don’t like calling it balanced because it’s differential or the electronic is really differential. Has a property where called, common mode rejection.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Alan March: So if a signal. So what, differential inputs do is amplify the difference between the two input wires. Any voltage difference between them, it amplifies it. But any voltage that is the same on both wires. Yeah, I like noise.

Andrew Hutchison: Will probably be equally picked up. Yeah.

Alan March: it cancels it out.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. Yep.

Alan March: Because you have an inverting and a non inverting. Yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: Because one channel is. Yeah, they’re. Yeah, one is inverted to the other. So when you meld them together, Yeah, they go away. Yeah.

Alan March: So,

So for turntables, a differential input is exactly what you want

So for turntables, a differential input is exactly what you want.

Andrew Hutchison: Is this some kind of terror attack or something? The neighbour to Alan’s room, we should tell the listener is a large, variously large home theater system. I will have filtered out the low bass in this recording. So you probably can’t hear what’s just happening next door, but. Oh my good God. You’ll be taking a rest every so often while they, power that up.

Alan March: Yes, I think we will. We will have to shut down because we can’t hear anything in here.

Andrew Hutchison: It’s quite distracting.

Alan March: Yeah. So my background in instrumentation is dealing with. Was always dealing with very small signals that you might have, which you would.

Andrew Hutchison: Have to measure hundreds of meters from.

Alan March: The source to the recording equipment. It might be a strain gauge in a jet engine, for example.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Alan March: so you need that noise rejection. So to me it’s just insane that we’re using the turntables still use RCA connectors.

Can you modify a turntable and turn it into a balanced system

Andrew Hutchison: Is it.

Alan March: Is it.

Andrew Hutchison: So you’ve. So your phono stage in your new preamp is. You’re calling it differential, which I guess the trade term is balanced. But there is a. There is a difference which you. Which you would are concerned about, or you know, want to make clear. But. But you still must basically take one of those signals to deck because turntables are wired that way off the shelf. But can you modify a turntable and turn it into a balanced system?

Alan March: You can, but what you’ll start doing when you, when you, you run, you can get problems where,

Alan March: When you start taking a shield down to One of the legs of the signal down to earth. You’re unbalancing the signal, so you’re probably injecting noise into one leg. Which won’t get cancelled out.

Andrew Hutchison: Which won’t be cancelled out. No. so could you, if you were building a turntable system from scratch, you could make it balanced.

Alan March: Yes.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Alan March: And that is our intention.

Andrew Hutchison: Oh, hang on. News flash. Yes, there’s a turntable coming.

Alan March: Yes. Next year.

Andrew Hutchison: Hell, this is like, this is hot. Next year.

Alan March: Yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: So we can expect it about 28, 29.

Alan March: Yeah. But, maybe, maybe I’m probably retired before that, but.

Andrew Hutchison: So you, you’ve, you, you feel it can be done differently.

Alan March: I’m better and better.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. Okay.

Alan March: Yeah. But it won’t upset people because there won’t be RCA sockets on the back.

Andrew Hutchison: No, no. A turntable with Canon, connectors. Xlrs, whatever we’re calling them this week. what do you call them?

Alan March: XLRs.

Andrew Hutchison: XLRs, yeah. Yeah. No one really calls them canons anymore. I think that must have been a brand or something. Oh, that’s very interesting. Okay, so that’s, that’s hot. So you really are, becoming a. With that step to a source component, you will be a system manufacturer?

Alan March: That’s the intention, yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay. Wow.

Alan March: m. It’s all very good just concentrating on an amplifier. but we need to have a full product range. and that’s exactly what we want to do.

Andrew Hutchison: So there’s a big factory in your future?

Alan March: Actually, I hope not.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. Okay.

Alan March: I, I, we want to stay relatively small.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Alan March: The last thing I want to do is in. To turn into one of these faceless, large manufacturers.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, no, I mean, that’s part of your appeal, is that you can. People I’m sure realize, maybe not. But if you ring up, you, you can speak to Alan eventually.

Alan March: When you, when he picks up the.

Andrew Hutchison: Phone, he eventually picks the phone. But when someone does.

Alan March: The problem is I’ve always got my head in such a. Maybe a piece of CAD design, the 3D, soldering iron in my hand, and the phone goes. And it’s just case I’m going to have to do that.

Andrew Hutchison: But if the phone is answered, it will be probably your phone.

Alan March: It will probably be me.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes. Which is nice.

00:25:00

Alan March: Emails, Emails are always easier for us because I can get to it at any time later in the day, I can get to it, which is a.

Andrew Hutchison: Much more efficient way to communicate. Yeah. Well, hey, have a great show. And of course, historically that’ll be. Have a great show, I guess. When we we put this episode up. But I will probably swing past again and get some live action footage of what you’re up to and add it to our video that we’re making. That’ll be on YouTube. And yeah, congratulations on the new model. Models, really.

Purifi have released an updated power amplifier module with significantly lower distortion

So, new loudspeaker, new preamp and I believe actually there’s new power amp as well.

Alan March: Yes. all around. Apart from the P501. All the rest of the range have actually been upgraded because Purify have released an updated power amplifier module.

Andrew Hutchison: Modules.

Alan March: and they are significantly better in performance. Much lower distortion. If I didn’t even think that was.

Andrew Hutchison: I don’t think there was any distortion.

Alan March: Well, yeah, lower noise in fact. And it caused us to a bit of a headache. So we had to redesign all the buffer amplifiers inside our amplifiers to actually keep up with it.

Andrew Hutchison: Is that right?

Alan March: Yeah, yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Alan March: And reduce all the noise and does the noise and distortion still further and.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay. And on that front, and I’m sorry, jumping backwards and I was saying our goodbyes, but I’m really interested in something. So the preamp of course is all in house. There’s no modules in that it’s. Is there? I mean, because there’s no such thing. So. So that I guess is part of the reason why it’s taken you a while to hone it because it’s. It is a 100 in house. design. yeah, congratulations on that. All right, we will speak to you again in a new episode, by the way, sooner rather than later. And and thanks again for your time, Alan.

Alan March: Thank you.

Andrew Hutchison: No worries at all. See ya. Looking for your tribe? Visit stereonet.com today. Join one of the world’s largest online communities for hi Fi home cinema, headphones and much more. Read the latest news and product reviews or check out the classifiers for the largest range of gear on sale. Membership is absolutely free. So visit stereonet.com and join up today. Thanks for listening to the ad. We have many interviews in this, episode. but, coming up, John Martin from Bowers and Wilkins followed by Gareth Weller from Focal and Name. And then Phil Sawyer, McIntosh Audio Research, Riga, etc.

Massimo are in the process of selling the Sound United business

And yeah, we’re back with another guest on The Sydney, 2025 hi Fi show roundup. This time John Martin from, I guess Massimo. But I mean it has a. The distribution company or it’s not even a distribution company. It’s the company that owns bw Bowers and Wilkins. We have to Say, these days. Of course. and, what do you refer to it as, John? Where do you work?

John Martin: Yeah, that’s right. Thanks, Andrew. so, I mean, I really refer to us as Sound United because that’s the.

Andrew Hutchison: Because that is the core. The audio business.

John Martin: That’s the audio business. And it’s no secret that Massimo, the medical company who purchased us a few years ago, have announced that they’ll be. They plan or they are in the process of, selling the Sound United business. So we won’t be Massimo for much longer.

Andrew Hutchison: No. So you’ve kind of. Yeah, I guess we’re talking Sound United.

John Martin: Yeah, I think that’s the. That’s the. That’s the catch. All, owner and you know, we comprise the. The brands. You know, Polk, who were based in Baltimore over on the east coast of the. Of the US and still have a team there. The D and M, team, in Japan, which is Marantz and Denon. And we’ve got the team on the west coast of the usa, which is where Massimo is and where our, our head office is. And so that’s where the American operations and a lot of the global, executives are based. And we’ve got the UK team of the Bowers and Wilkins team.

Andrew Hutchison: so because there’s still, you know, the. The 800 series, which you’ve got some on display here at the show. Sounding magnificent.

John Martin: thank you.

Andrew Hutchison: By the way, they still make, those products in Worthing.

John Martin: Well, they make the products in Worthing. There’s a, workforce of, I think it’s about 250 there. Down in Worthing, where John Bow is originally.

Andrew Hutchison: Is there that many?

John Martin: Yeah, it’s a big, big operation. And up the. Just up the road from there in South Water, we’ve got another facility called, sre. The South Water Research Institute, where all the products are designed. So, we do have a few products that we don’t actually manufacture, but we have manufacturing partners for in Southeast Asia. But all the products are designed by us. And then we. We contract some of them out to build them. But we’ve obviously got our own factory down there in Zhuhai. Yes, in China, just across from Hong Kong, where we build 600 series, 700, 700 series Zeppelins and. And other things. So.

Andrew Hutchison: So that’s your own facility?

John Martin: Yeah, as much as it can be in China.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. Well, yeah, I guess there’s an ownership issue or something. But yeah. Okay.

John Martin: There’s But it’s run by, former Worthing engineers who’ve been down there for a long, long time. But, everything still sort of emanates from the mothership in the UK and And then, you know, even the things we make down in

00:30:00

John Martin: Suhai, a lot of the components that go into them are still made in the. In the UK and shipped down. So those Continuum M Cones, for example, that’s, only made in England and then transported down there. So. Yeah, so there’s still kind of a center for all of the brands, you know, where that’s sort of the, you know, the, the brains trust, if you like, for each of the brands and even within Denon. And there are different teams doing their own thing, and it’s simply manufactured on the same production line or the same production facility. So it’s just one big, you know, sort of aggregation of brands. And there’s only so much. It’s not like a, you know, it’s not like finding a, Morris Minor door handle on a Jaguar, you know, back in the British Leyland days.

John Martin: There’s.

John Martin: There’s very distinct technologies and designs for all.

Andrew Hutchison: For all for each level, so to speak. Yeah.

John Martin: Yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: So, Yeah, I’m genuinely surprised that there’s. I mean, I don’t know how many. I suppose I thought there’d be 100 and something at Worthing, but, that’s, a.

All the finishing is done in house, even when we buy components in

So it’s a big area. Yeah, it’s quite a large.

John Martin: Yes.

Andrew Hutchison: Area. It is, you know, like. I don’t know. I couldn’t even guess. 3,000 square meters or something.

John Martin: I couldn’t tell you. But I know, they do everything there from, you know, the bending, the wooden cabinets and gluing them and baking them in the special ovens. And I mean, I’ve had the pleasure of being there a few times. And it goes through every stage of manufacturing. And we don’t make every part of an 800 series in the factory. There are a few things, like the diamond tweeters come from Germany, the turbine alloy head, that’s actually made in a foundry just outside. So we do buy some things in, but all the finishing is done in house and the painting and we’ve got a robotic production line. And of course the Nautilus is still there. We’ve got a separate part of the factory where Nautilus is made. so. And yeah, there’s all sorts of cool things there. They do, accelerated aging tests and finite and element analysis in this different labs there where they test materials for suitability. Because we do Everything ourselves, even when we buy components in, it comes from us. And we say, well, this is exactly what we want for this product. and it has to meet a certain specification.

Andrew Hutchison: the bullet, if you like that. The tweeter. Not bullet, the torpedo, whatever it is. I mean, m. What do you call it?

John Martin: We call it the turbine. Sorry. That’s the tweeter on top. Yeah, yeah, the pod top. Yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: And so, that’s It looks like it’s a cast aluminum part.

John Martin: No, it’s actually a billet of aluminum. It’s machined from a machine from billet.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

John Martin: And it weighs about a kilo.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, it’s quite. I mean some people sometimes say, oh, 800 series, you know, it’s not exactly cheap. I think it’s almost a bargain. I mean that sounds so ridiculous to say in a way, but having heard the 805 signatures that you have on display, it’s so beautifully made. And there is no off the shelf parts of any kind, is there? And the, the bending of the birch, I assume. Birch clothes, right?

John Martin: Yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: Enclosure, clearly a great material to make speaker enclosures from. And and yeah, the bending of that, which obviously has its advantages as well, but it makes it super stiff and you know. That’s right. And it’s you know, the drive units, the cross. I mean I’ve seen inside the things. The crossover components are extremely high quality. There’s absolutely no compromise really, is there? That’s how you get it. Just to give you to deliver that incredible amount of detail and precision that those loudspeakers deliver. I guess that’s the trouble you’ve got to go to.

John Martin: Yeah, that’s right. And I think since John Bowers, first founded the company because he was an engineer, but he was a music lover as well. And he had this fascination with applying engineering solutions to speakers to remove coloration and remove distortion and all those things. And I think that ethos has traveled through the design team over many years. Even since his passing. That’s been sort of carried on. And we are focused on, on you know, making the quietest cabinets that we can, making drivers that reflect, you know, certain goals, certain performance goals. And we try and measure those things to understand why things are happening. I mean we started using Kevlar back in the 70s when it was a bulletproof vest material. And that came about because John Bowers and his team started experimenting with cone materials and listening to cones that or drivers that they’d made from certain things. And they found the Kevlar worked really well. And they didn’t understand quite why, but they started using it.

Andrew Hutchison: We’ll give it a go.

John Martin: And as time progressed in their measuring, apparatus improved. They discovered why Kevlar was so good. And that’s because of the woven mat that works for bulletproof vests. It makes it very strong, but very relatively light. And, and in audio terms it self damps extremely well. So it doesn’t resonate at a certain frequency

00:35:00

John Martin: like a lot of of, of other materials do. So we’ve carried that through into the continuum cone which is actually purpose designed.

Andrew Hutchison: Some kind of hybrid material.

John Martin: It’s still a woven synthetic machine material that they don’t talk about the, the you know, the construction of. And I’ve seen them making it from the, from the base material through to all the treatments that they do. And that’s a, that’s a proprietary material. And so it does everything that Kevlar, well, we call it Aramid fiber these days. We don’t call it Kevlar anymore but.

Aramid fiber and Continuum does all the things that it did very well

Andrew Hutchison: Well, in Atlanta or something.

John Martin: No, that’s right. Well we’re not paying due point a fee to fill license the technology and so we call it Aramid fiber and Continuum does all the things that it did very well. But even better, it damps and controls resonance that much better than it did.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, that’s completely impressive. I think what people don’t realize, that people listening to podcast casually don’t realize is that there’s almost no part of any of those loudspeakers that isn’t absolutely B&W one off designed specifically for the task. You’re not like you like some poor little loudspeaker builder such as myself, who has to buy in drive units from very good drive unit makers. But nonetheless you have to kind of work with what is available to you. Whereas you can set a bar much higher. Admittedly it’s a more expensive product, but you can do whatever you feel you need to do to to, to make it happen there. But the thing that impresses, I was going to say the pants off, but we don’t want to do that. Doesn’t impress the pants off me. But the clearly the amount of specialized tooling, specialized materials, the trouble that has been gone to is Well, I mean it’s substantial, you know, and yet the price compared with some you know, the plethora of things, you see wandering around Munich as an example, I mean it’s almost Bargain basement compared with some of the stuff at Munich. So, genuinely well priced, I feel.

John Martin: Well, considering. I think it comes down to economies, of scale in large.

Andrew Hutchison: You must make a lot of them.

John Martin: We build so many of them, that, that helps amortise the cost. Although I have to say we have a price, a global pricing parity, model where we sell it at pretty much the same price throughout the world. And our, margins are actually Quite skinny on 800 series because we’re selling at the same price as the bigger market.

Andrew Hutchison: You’ve got to ship them here.

John Martin: Yeah, that’s right.

Andrew Hutchison: And you’re not selling as many of them.

John Martin: No, exactly. 2% of the world down here. So volumes.

Andrew Hutchison: So we’re still 2%.

John Martin: Yeah, roughly. Yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: I think it would be more.

John Martin: Yeah, I know. Well, I guess we’re growing. But the rest of the one to.

Andrew Hutchison: One people used to say one to two. Now it’s a solid two. Is it? Yeah.

We’re building about 15,000 units a year across all models

so when you say you’ve got a fair bit of, fair bit of volume, can you lend a number to that at all? I mean maybe on one model or an indication like 805.

John Martin: I think 800 series, overall we’re building about 15,000 units a year.

Andrew Hutchison: That’s, that’s quite a quantity. Yeah.

John Martin: For speakers that started.

Andrew Hutchison: 15,000 units. 15,000 pieces.

John Martin: Pieces a year across all, all the models. so that’s you know, in, you know, a range of, a range of colors. But that’s for, for a speaker lineup that starts here in Australia at about $15,000 a pair. So, you know, it’s not entry level. It’s not entry level things that you bulk stack.

Andrew Hutchison: No, no, no. God, no.

John Martin: No.

Andrew Hutchison: You’re not stacking them high and selling them low.

There’s about 80 markets that Bowers operate in globally

I was going to say, what country who buys a lot of 800-00?

John Martin: so there’s about 80 markets that we operate in globally. the big markets. It’s actually interesting when you divide it up, it’s roughly a third eu, a third Americas and a third apac and some of the big markets. Japan is a very big market for us. They dominate in Japan, but of course always been strong in North America, Europe and the uk of course we’ve got good coverage in the large markets there. Germany, France, Italy, etc. And you know, we hold our own down here in Australia as well. We’re hovering around, you know, top 10, position in the globe overall.

Andrew Hutchison: Not bad for 2%.

John Martin: It’s a big, it’s a big Portfolio of products and we actually bring everything to that they make.

Andrew Hutchison: Is that right?

John Martin: We’ve got nearly 200 SKUs in the Bowers lineup. When you count all the color variations, which is,

Andrew Hutchison: That’s.

John Martin: It’s a lot of products. Headphones, custom installation, speakers. We’ve got about 30 models there and that makes up nearly 25% of our business. So it’s a big part of. Part of the turnover. So I think because we’ve been established here since we were the first, outside Europe. I think there was the. The Netherlands distributor was the first international, distributor. But we were amongst the first to come on board. 70, 71, 72.

Andrew Hutchison: That early.

John Martin: Yeah. So there’s been. I think I estimated at one stage there was approaching half a million B W products had been sold in

00:40:00

John Martin: Australia since. Since Convoy took it on back in those days. So there’s a lot of people.

Andrew Hutchison: And so Convoy was that original importer, for Australia.

John Martin: There was a distributor, in Perth at one stage who was just bringing it in. But then Convoy took it over.

Andrew Hutchison: So In fact there’s really only been really. I mean, because somehow. I mean, I don’t quite remember how Convoy got rolled into Sound United or how whatever happened there. But it really has been in very steady hands, hasn’t it?

John Martin: Yeah. Well.

Andrew Hutchison: And you’ve been involved with it?

John Martin: I first bought a pair of BMWs back in the early 1980s. So I’ve been involved with the brand for more, More years than I like to remember. But I had been. Well, I’ve worked for Convoy twice and I came back to Convoy in the late 90s and sort of had a continuous, you know, relationship, since then. But we took it over when we decided to go direct in Australia. That was 2017.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

John Martin: And basically we. We just came to an agreement with. With Convoy to to go to part ways. They actually continued to do our distribution. So it was an amicable split and we just set up our own local sales office. And since then, of course we’ve been through the, you know, the acquisitions of Sound United and then Massimo more recently.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes. Yeah. But in reality, I guess at some point Massimo sells Sound United. It really won’t change anything in a way.

John Martin: I don’t think so It’ll change what the aspirations of the new owners would be and that, you know, that I can’t really speculate on, on who it might be or what they might do with the company. But I think the intrinsic value of the four brands and don’t forget we also do definitive technology which is very much in the custom space these days. And we own Boston Acoustics, as well, which is more of a licensed audio ah, product these days. We don’t see that much here. But I think, yeah, there’s a lot of brand equity there and there’s also a lot of infrastructure and because we do a lot of our own manufacturing, all of that is kind of tangible stuff that will continue into the future for whoever becomes the owner. And yeah, we’ll see where it all, where it all lands.

Andrew Hutchison: But Sand United, I think my point is more that Sand United, reportedly everyone I speak to is kind of happy with the kind of job that’s being done with the brands, you know. Yeah, it’s not like it’s, you know, there’s some situations where corporations, accountants get involved with M brands and then things aren’t as good. No. whereas there seems to be a lot of reinvestment. There’s. Yeah, everyone seems to be happy. Service is great.

John Martin: Yeah, we take service very seriously. M and here in Australia even we keep virtually everything in house. You know, we still have customer service, we still have finance with marketing. After sales service we’ve got a dedicated group in Melbourne who you know, does all the day to day stuff. So we’re not farming much out.

Andrew Hutchison: and it’s a big, and it’s a big business.

John Martin: It’s a sizeable business. We’ve got people in every state and good representation. So yeah, we try and be as I say, a full service company. and that means supporting end consumers as well as AV specialists and other retailers, that we take product to. but yeah, look, the market’s pretty mature in most categories now. So it’s, it’s not a, not a market that’s growing exponentially anymore.

Andrew Hutchison: No, but I guess it had its little spurt during the Covid era. But that’s. And it maybe it’s rolled off a little bit since then, but it still seems like there’s an enormous amount of interest in good quality audio equipment.

John Martin: Definitely there is. Definitely there is. And there are areas such as headphones, for example. The headphone business is very competitive, very cutthroat, but it’s a big growth market. So we’ve made a foray into that reasonably successfully and that continues to develop. It’s very different to selling traditional components, pros and cons there. But yeah, look, we’re looking for areas where there is growth and we’re continually trying to educate consumers to the benefits of, good audio.

Cheyne says BMW is constantly trying to take good audio to consumers

Hence all. All of the partnerships. And we’ve just announced one with, McLaren, the McLaren Formula One team, because we’ve had a relationship with the McLaren Automotive and been in their cars for 10 years. That’s now extended to the F1 team, which is the most popular formula, one team.

Andrew Hutchison: I guess you’re not putting stereos in.

John Martin: Not yet, no.

Andrew Hutchison: No.

John Martin: I don’t think you need the noise cancelling indeed to be pretty good. But, That helps us take the brand to, To new customers and And even, you know, people like David Beckham, who we brought on as a band ambassador. That’s been controversial, but I don’t know that that’s a bad thing. No, people are. People have a, you know, a view, about different individuals. But, It’s. It’s introducing us to new customers and taking us to places where we, you know, we. We haven’t been in the past. So we are constantly trying to, Trying to,

00:45:00

John Martin: take good audio to consumers and, I think that’s important. Renewal.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. It would be great if everyone who’s interested in music could hear, at least once, hear their favorite artist or album through a great stereo system and then realise. Because I think the, you know, know, the trap is. Well, not the trap, but, The, you know, the reality is that not everyone gets a chance. I guess they may hear it on a friend’s system or something, or hear it, you know, but the reality is that you’ve got to make an effort to walk into an audio store, I guess. And so how do you know that you need to go to that audio store? And that’s the constant challenge. And I guess that’s what this show partly is helping to address, I think.

John Martin: And that’s why it’s important to support it, to, you know, you know, grow the community. See the Sydney Audio Club here and, you know, and, Those guys are very enthusiastic and about, you know, they’re very passionate about, you know, interested in this space. So, that’s really important. And today music is, for a lot of people, a commodity. They get a pair of earbuds with their new phone and that’s as far as it goes. But we’ve got an obligation to try and educate, Educate people that, you know, there is more out there and, That they shouldn’t just treat it as, you know, Something that comes with their musical noise.

Andrew Hutchison: It needs to be better than that.

John Martin: Yeah, definitely. Definitely. And not everyone’s on board with that and that’s fine. But yeah, as you say, everyone should have the opportunity to hear music the way it’s meant to be heard. Yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: Hey, thank you so much. Thank you for your time and your thoughts and information. I think some have put some numbers and some scale to the. Even just the 800 series. I mean BMW is clearly. I’ve got to stay Bowers and Wilkins. I know. I think BMW’s banned, isn’t it? You’re not allowed. I mean are you allowed to say BMW?

John Martin: No, we’re encouraged to look, they’re pretty relaxed.

Andrew Hutchison: We’re encouraged not to.

John Martin: Yeah, we’re encouraged. Bowers and Wilkins is what the companies.

Andrew Hutchison: That’S what it was always called, but they were the ones who shortened it originally. Right?

John Martin: Yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: But not a long time ago we.

John Martin: Brought back Bowers and Wilkins into 2002. I remember that happening. And we were BMW, Bowers and Wilkins, up to a point and then they dropped the BMW. But everyone has who’s been in the business a long time knows this is BMW.

Andrew Hutchison: So Yeah, it’s a trap. It’s a bit of muscle memory or something. Yeah, exactly, that’s exactly right.

John Martin: Okay, well thanks for your interest.

Andrew Hutchison: Absolutely. A pleasure. Thank you so much. Thanks for coming on the podcast.

John Martin: Yeah, thank you very much.

Andrew Hutchison: Cheers. Bye.

Hey. Not an audiophile. I’ll be reporting from the Munich High end show which is on very shortly of course, putting videos up almost immediately, recording interviews, etc. And the videos, will be available at. Not an audiophile podcast, the YouTube channel. And we’re sort of, I guess as we try to do try to cover some of the other things that some of the mainstream media that are attending, don’t necessarily cover. We’re looking for, you know, with our educated eye, some interesting products that, that other people may miss. So yeah, please check in during the show here with Gareth Weller, a legend in the Australian audio industry.

Focal is one of the most successful hi fi brands in Australia

He tells me, allegedly these days, having been seemingly in the business of importing, selling, distributing hi fi for quite a while.

Andrew Hutchison: You are ah now working with folks locale and name again. Yes. So it is. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Gareth Weller: This is my second stint. So previously with Chris Murphy, one of the, I guess one of the, like one of the builders of the. Of the brands in this market. One of them, I guess one of the key elements to the success of the brands along with many others. But a couple of years with him in the. I think 2017, 2018, before it went to. Went, you know, to the dark side, if we can say that.

Andrew Hutchison: Well, no one listens to this. This podcast.

Gareth Weller: Perfect.

Andrew Hutchison: You can actually say whatever you want. I mean, and that, and that’s. I mean I’m not really here today to talk about the. What happened with the brand, although we want to touch on that because obviously you’re responsible for rebuilding it, if that’s the right word. But, I mean you’ve got an interesting new product which is sitting beside us, which we’ll have photos of on the website. and you can tell us about that because I think that’s interesting because it’s actually making best use of the two brands working together in some ways.

Gareth Weller: I believe so. Yes.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, but, but yeah, the. I mean as a longtime fan, of name and the way they do things, I, never had really that much to do with Focal. But it’s obviously it’s a great product, beautifully made and they’ve built quite a reputation quite quickly really. Although on the bones of JM Lab, as it was back in the day, I think you might know. Yeah, yeah, it was than me. But, But

Gareth Weller: You know, from sort of a drive unit maker and boxes and now they’re a far more serious, you know, finished loudspeaker system maker. But there was. And at some point they took over name which, was, I like feel like was 2013 or something.

Andrew Hutchison: It was, yeah. Roughly around that time.

Gareth Weller: Yeah. Yeah. So that’s kind of okay. But things, started changing at name at that point. Not, not necessarily. Always in a positive way it seemed. I mean there’s certainly people that left that I spoke to who were quite grumpy.

00:50:00

Andrew Hutchison: I mean, a change. No one likes it, right?

Gareth Weller: Correct. Yeah. yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: But there was obviously some positives to come out of that. There must have been.

Gareth Weller: Well, I think so back in those days. There’s, You know, there was the way things were done and then there’s new people came in and with vision and with ways that. That they wanted to see the company go. And when you get two different ideas, ideals, you tend to get friction. I can’t speak for anybody necessarily at those times, but just the stories that I’ve heard and again through experience in going through those similar moments that it is difficult for people. People do get cast aside and business must go on. Right. And I think genuinely that the the influence of the parent company and where they’re taking the Brands is in a much more of a. It’s less audiophile and very much more a consumer based, consumer based brand. So they’re building a broader base headphones integrating the two brands together in the product we have nearby here and really sort of focusing on a brighter future.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, I mean which I mean what I was always amazed with name is they did these amazingly high tech, big investment type things like really doing streaming properly and things like that and a broad range of products. You know really they did it on a kind of on a shoestring. I mean it was as much as the factory was the most impressive factory tour I’ve probably ever had in my life. It just for the care and the detail, the hospital like atmosphere of just white coats and incredible you know enthusiasm for doing things brilliantly.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: Which I mean guess built the reputation of that brand and giving excellent backup service and great sound. Right.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: but yeah that can’t last forever. It’s. You need a new audience I guess of customers and I guess Focal saw an incredible opportunity and grabbed it but at some point it kind of went off the rails in this country at least in Australia. Yeah.

Gareth Weller: So obviously there’s, there’s a number of distribution changes. Whenever that happens it does unsettle the market. you know sometimes it’s for the good and sometimes it’s not so you know it’s not so positive. So again not being a part of the brand necessarily through a lot of that, I mean I was responsible for parts of it but. But yeah, I mean it’s very disruptive. It’s very disruptive for end users. It’s very disruptive for the retailers in particular because the retailers are thrust into new relationships with people for the brands that they have huge affection for, that they’ve spent enormous amounts of their hard earned money investing in the brands for their stores as well as marketing it and supporting their customers. So thrusting them into relationships with new people, it can be quite jarring. and that’s what we’ve really seen in the market. So we’ve seen I guess a reduction in availability of the product in the market in terms of restriction of distribution. and now as West Ham we’re looking to rebuild that back out again. So bring the brand back to the levels where we saw it before and again touching back on Chris Murphy and the guys, even Len Wallace and Harry, the guys that have been, been I guess the custodians of these brands in the past where they’ve done tremendous work where they’ve really built a really strong base for the brands and they’ve you know through all their hard work and investment have brought it to the country and you know the enjoyment of people’s living rooms over the years and we want to, we want to build back onto that and make sure that we recognize what they’ve done and get that brand back into the place of deserves.

Under previous distributor the customers were extremely loyal to the brand

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, well that’s great to hear because I mean it was there was a time for many, many years where there was. Yeah the dealers and the customers were extremely loyal. M Loved the brand, loved the way they did business, love the sound that you could produce and the just. And the reliability. I mean incredibly reliable, you know, sturdy product, very thorough engineering and all about quality and you know all made you know in Salisbury etc. Yeah. In the UK and it’s quite a special brand and it’s it hasn’t actually changed that much at at HQ I feel because they still make a lot of product there. I know they, they have got some other manufacturing elsewhere but that’s the model. Yeah, it’s kind of unavoidable I guess. But And obviously the, the the, the mu. So speakers you know can’t you know the level of fit and finish and yeah. And complexity in a very affordable, relatively affordable product can’t be done in the UK I guess easily not at that price. so yeah there was a great deal of very supportive dealers that then under the previous distributor to yourself dissolved into the die Hards only.

Gareth Weller: Correct.

Gareth Weller: although the two dealers you mentioned I think were still supporting it.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, yeah, still holding on.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah but they may have only been, they may have been the only two other than the current of the previous distributors own retail store.

Gareth Weller: Correct.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, we’re not. Which were not really proper hi fi shops in a way. So it was a strange thing. I don’t. I

00:55:00

Andrew Hutchison: never went in as a client but I guess the service standard was at a lower level than previous.

Gareth Weller: As far as based on market feedback. Yeah, I mean look again like you, I hadn’t been to the store so I can’t really judge and I know, I think this industry you can consistently say that there is inconsistency in the people you deal with. Right. So if you go into a store on any given day and depending on who you actually as a customer approach, as a, as a salesperson you’re going to get a vastly different experience. and I think therein lies some of the, some of the challenges and potentially some of the consumer’s perspective on dealing with those stores. But you know, to be fair to them, obviously they’ve got a job to do and they’ve got a tremendous responsibility for the brands that they have. But yeah look, the difference between the long running name retailers with all of their history and all their understanding of the brand, which is tremendous and also incredibly necessary to do the product justice. Very valuable, very difficult to transfer that when you do a distribution change, the knowledge doesn’t go with it.

When distribution changes, there’s a complete lack of continuity of brand

Andrew Hutchison: No. And it’s. And that’s I think the listeners, many of the listeners of the podcast who you know are hi fi enthusiasts and customers and what maybe customers of name probably don’t realize in the background just the breadth of knowledge and support and love that is helping their experience be as good as it is. And that is dissolved when distribution changes. And it does create I think an enormous amount of disruption. It’s certainly a complete lack of continuity of the qualities that that brand probably had at a local level. So you’re bringing that back?

Gareth Weller: Well, trying to.

Andrew Hutchison: Piece by piece.

Gareth Weller: Piece by piece. Look, it’s, it’s what it is. It’s the one thing we don’t value in our industry as well is knowledge necessarily. Like we can’t. It doesn’t have a value in regards to Doesn’t have like a. There’s no loyalty to knowledge.

Andrew Hutchison: Right.

Gareth Weller: Unfortunately. And that’s the thing that does get dropped on the wayside. So yeah. Like the people that I’ve worked with in the past. Again touch on Chris Murphy and Harry from Audio Genesis and Len and his team. There’s not nowhere near the level of knowledge that those guys have that doesn’t exist outside of those stores.

Andrew Hutchison: No. No. Well, certainly Harry is when it comes to name, he is the guy in Australia.

Gareth Weller: He is, yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: Other than Chris who was obviously in New Zealand, and no longer a distributor either. Which is no in New Zealand. I mean he was Australia and New Zealand as people listening who are Australians will realise and gave impeccable service. The guy has encyclopedic knowledge of of everything name in his head.

Gareth Weller: None. I don’t think anything’s written none better than him. Yeah, absolutely.

Andrew Hutchison: So if you had a problem, you ring Chris? Yeah, probably still do but he might take off M. So yeah, they sort of. After 30 odd years he did name in New Zealand. Correct. he’s, he was Unceremoniously, let’s not talk about it.

Gareth Weller: Yeah, yeah, that’s right.

Moving, moving forward. So you’re, you’ve got a few new stores obviously, uh, which is great

Moving, moving forward. Yes.

Andrew Hutchison: To the positives now we’ve got. So you’re, you’ve got a few new stores obviously, which is great. So more and more as new, products Focal and a product, new product they will be in.

Gareth Weller: Yeah. So fresh products coming through which provides I guess a level of let’s say a level of enthusiasm from the market to embrace those new products because they’re fresh, they’re exciting. yes, new stores coming on board, which is great. So that having faith in West Ham and again the brand Spokane name in moving, moving forward, investing in these brands and creating spaces for consumers to come and really see and hear and sample the products in tremendous environments.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, so it is exciting spaces which is important.

Focal Devi Utopia dv has naim amplification built into loudspeaker

Hey, onto, ah, the juicy stuff. The reason why people listen to this podcast is not to perhaps hear so much about politics, but this amazing new loudspeaker that sits before us. And I don’t know what it’s called, so you better tell me.

Andrew Hutchison: It’s the Focal Devi Utopia dv. Diva.

Andrew Hutchison: Diva. Diva. Diva Utopia.

Gareth Weller: Diva Utopia.

Andrew Hutchison: So Utopia immediately implies it’s kind of. Well it’s not grand Utopia, but it’s obviously a high end, high range model.

Gareth Weller: It sits in that family. So grand obviously is the top of the range. this is, this is quite a unique product because it’s active and as you said in the very early on for the listeners, it’s a marriage between both Pocal and Naim in terms of the design of the speaker, in particular implementation of the electronics, the streaming platform. the two, the two brands really have married very, very well into this product.

Andrew Hutchison: It sounds. When you briefly described it to me the other day, I got a little bit excited to be honest because. And the reason why is because two things. One, it has name amplification built into the loudspeaker. It’s an active loudspeaker obviously, therefore it has the amplifiers built in. But it takes it a step further and it’s got Name Engineer streaming Correct. Into it. The same as you would get in like a Unity product or a name.

Gareth Weller: Yeah, or even, even higher. It’s the same module that they implement right the way through to the Indy Triple five.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. Okay, so this is a one stop product. This is a hi Fi system.

Gareth Weller: Correct.

Andrew Hutchison: It’s almost a radiogram if you put a turntable in the top of it.

Gareth Weller: Yeah, that’s right.

Andrew Hutchison: I mean in the sense that it does everything.

Gareth Weller: It does, yes. And it does have provision for a turntable if you’d like. Yeah, it does have legacy

01:00:00

Andrew Hutchison: inputs.

Gareth Weller: Doesn’t fit into the top.

Gareth Weller: It does not fit into the top, no. You could possibly get a bespoke shelf mounted to the side of it maybe. I don’t know. But, But yeah, they are. It is. You effectively just need power for both. Both speakers and you, you need a network connection. So whether it be wireless or ethernet, that’s all you need.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, it’s. I mean, I, I’m a little bit of a fan of all in one solutions. This takes it to the next level. they also look like nothing else.

Andrew Hutchison: Correct.

Gareth Weller: we’ll come to that in a second.

400 watts of speaker, uh, three way. So they’ve got the Beryllium M M profile tweeter system

I just want to just talk a little bit more about. Because the other thing I think I forgot to say just then that I liked about the naim is that you could assume the naim electronics is. You could assume incorrectly in this case that Naim M would use their newfound class D interest in the, as amplification. But no, you’re telling me it’s class? Absolutely. Yeah.

Gareth Weller: It’s class AB. Yeah. 400 watts of speaker, three way.

Andrew Hutchison: Yep.

Gareth Weller: So they’ve got the Beryllium M M profile tweeter system, which is, I guess, you know, again, synonymous with the Utopia series. Right. From their car audio headphones right through to Home home audio running the W sandwich mid range. And then four six and a half inch woofers.

Andrew Hutchison: Four six and a half. So the, the grill cloth area on the side. There’s.

Andrew Hutchison: There’s a couple of two woofers on either side.

Andrew Hutchison: On either side. Sort of like doing this here to balance out sort of.

Gareth Weller: Yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: Natural forces, so to speak, of a driver vibrating around. that’s very clever. Okay, that’s all great.

The idea is that speakers will be a chameleon to suit environment

Now what the hell is going on with the, the look Veneer.

Gareth Weller The veneer.

Andrew Hutchison: It does look a little bit. Oh, no, I was gonna say something that I won’t.

Andrew Hutchison: So, like a pair of.

Andrew Hutchison: It’s got carpet tiles on it.

Gareth Weller: Slippers.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, way better than that.

Gareth Weller: It looks amazing. Look, the speakers. The idea is that, they’ll be a bit like a chameleon. You’ll be able to change them with the environment, to suit. So initially, they’ve come out with a grey felt finish, which is very unusual, as you pointed out.

Andrew Hutchison: I think it’s very French or European at least. I mean, why wouldn’t it be?

Gareth Weller: It’s high fashion.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Gareth Weller: Yeah. So they’ve been, I guess, encouraged and they’ve, you know, and motivated to try and bring in, materials that are. That are. That have a nice sort of, I guess, you know, texture so they feel warm, they have a familiarity to them. you know, like a nice flowing jacket type thing, like a grey jacket. Something that’s got warmth and it’s great. But not only does it look good, but it also has acoustic properties because it’s a very dense felt.

Andrew Hutchison: It makes complete sense. It’s such a. An obvious thing to do, in a way, is that you’d Rather than worry about whether a piece of timber on the side of the box is vibrating and doing something negative with the sound, which it almost certainly is. This, kills that problem.

Gareth Weller: It does, yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: Basically got an absorbent material, a dense, absorbent, acoustically absorbent material on the side of the enclosure, but done in a very artful, typically, focal, stylish kind of way.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: there’s a lot to like with the look of them, and I. And I would imagine, that you could put different clothes on it, a different jacket.

Gareth Weller: True. Yeah. So. So the. The grey felt is a standard, and it will remain the standard. there will be. Coming in the next, say, three months or so, there’ll be painted finishes. So again, they will be able to be clipped off and clipped on. So there’ll be. I believe there’ll be a black, a. An off white, and a June finish, which is kind of like a champagne without calling it champagne.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Gareth Weller: and then moving forward into 2026, there’ll be timber finishes as well. So there’ll be. There’ll be like, you know, really beautiful, like ebony woods and dark walnuts and things like that. So some really, really rich colors. we don’t know, but we’re. I guess we’re, We’re coming up with the assumption that there’ll also be some collaborations with potentially, you know, some of the big fashion houses in the world and potentially have leather finishes and various other things. So tie in the real luxury of these. Of this product. But,

Andrew Hutchison: Well, it’s.

Gareth Weller: It’s great, I think, always to see a fresh, take, avoiding. I mean, it’s got beautiful radiuses and it’s got the typical sort of slanted top. But, it’s actually not got the utopia style. Different sort of, angled baffles, but. But it kind of looks like it does because the way they’ve done the side design. But look, it’s. It’s stunning. Yeah, I love it. And I’m gonna have a listen to it shortly. But, I did hear it playing yesterday and what I heard was very impressive. but I was passing by rather than sitting down having a listen. But, it’s, I believe quite well priced, correct? Well, we think so, yeah. Yeah. You know, well, it’s not an entry level product for a beginner, but it’s not.

Andrew Hutchison: But when you think about what you don’t have to buy with it.

Andrew Hutchison: So that’s right, exactly what you need to do.

Gareth Weller: Yeah. So, you know, if you’re comparing it, say, you know, it’s $60,000 Australian. So there is a, there is a focus from, from Focal and Name to have, pricing parity around the world for key models like this. So. So In Australia at 60,000, it’s exactly parity with the US and with Europe.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Gareth Weller: you know, obviously with the currency conversion taken into consideration. So there’s no funny business going on there.

Andrew Hutchison: which is

01:05:00

Andrew Hutchison: refreshing.

Gareth Weller: Which is. Yeah. And like that’s part of the values of West Ham as well. Like, we don’t want to be, we don’t want to be some of those historic, distributors that do, I don’t know if I can say, take the piss on a podcast, but they take the piss with pricing.

Andrew Hutchison: So you can say whatever you want.

Gareth Weller: Say whatever I want. So, yeah, so we, we really embrace, that concept of parity, pricing, fairness, and doing the right thing in the market. So, these speakers, they’re truly good value. when you consider, as I said before, you don’t have to worry about furniture, you don’t have to worry about source equipment, you don’t have to worry about amplifiers, preamplifiers, cabling, remote controls, confusion barriers for the family to be able to use these. Literally, they’ll operate off Bluetooth, off, off airplay cast. Their own application comes with a remote control, which is, which is not ir. It’s a, it’s a,

The app lets you adjust the volume of both speakers based on room measurements

Andrew Hutchison: Oh, so like a name which is Zigbee.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Gareth Weller: Ah. So you don’t have to be pair it like a Bluetooth, but it’s not Bluetooth.

Gareth Weller: Correct. Yeah, you don’t have to point it directly at it. But again you can control the basic stuff like input selection, volume control.

Andrew Hutchison: Those remotes work extremely well.

Gareth Weller: They really do.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. I mean it’s not laggy or any weirdness. They. And they don’t lose connection.

Gareth Weller: But the beauty of it is you get feedback on the remote. So you get to see the volume setting on the remote control as well.

Andrew Hutchison: Oh, you do.

Gareth Weller: It recognizes what’s going on. So again, the speakers themselves, because they don’t have a display so much, when you are adjusting things like that.

Andrew Hutchison: You kind of want to know where it is. If you can’t hear any sound, of course, turning the volume up and nothing’s happening, you’ve got some feedback, correct? Yeah, you’ve got it on the wrong input.

Gareth Weller: And then. And also through the. Through the. The procal name app. Ah. you then sort of dig layers into the adjustments you can make for these speakers. So there is room, eq, and by setting up that, there’s auto and manual settings. It’s all about measurements and it’s bespoke for this brand, so they’ve done it themselves. And when you’re listening to it with the room correction engage, you can switch it on and off immediately. And it does. It switches in, in moments. But you’ve also got a scale of 1 to 100% of how you want to actually engage.

Andrew Hutchison: Oh.

Gareth Weller: So, right, the, the room, you know, the eqing that you’ve done. So that’s very cool. You can really adjust it to fit the room.

Andrew Hutchison: So it comes with a measurement mic. Is that the thing?

Gareth Weller: Not a measurement mic. It uses your phone.

Andrew Hutchison: Uses your phone.

Andrew Hutchison: Right here. All right. well, that’s also kind of smart, right? Yeah, so, yeah, very. So you basically do run a. Run a sort of, the test program or however does it just with your phone, set your phone where you’re going to listen to.

Gareth Weller: Well, you effectively set measurements. So, you effectively will pinpoint, aspects of the speaker. So you’ll locate the tweeter. So you put a dot on the tweeter through the app. You’ll then put a dot on the rear wall. You put a dot on the sidewall.

Andrew Hutchison: Is that right?

Gareth Weller: For both speakers. So it measures. So it knows how far it is away from those surfaces. Then you go back to your seating position and then you measure it from there. So it’ll know, how, I guess, how that triangle will work.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, yeah.

Gareth Weller: And then it will go through a series of audio tests where it will play one speaker than the other speaker again pretty quickly.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Gareth Weller: And you’re listening for a balance, not only a balance of the image, but also a balance of the actual, volume of each of the speakers based on that. So you can adjust that while you’re listening to it on your phone.

Focal Power By Naim speakers rolled into Australia in October last year

Andrew Hutchison: Wow.

Gareth Weller: And then it goes through, I think there’s about 16 steps, different, different frequencies. And then once it’s done, it’s done. And Then you can adjust while you’re actually.

Gareth Weller: Then you literally adjust the mix between the revised settings or EQ settings that it’s measured and flat.

Gareth Weller: Correct. How much intervention you want? Yeah, based on that. So, yeah, the scale of 10 to 100, it’s pretty cool.

Andrew Hutchison: That is very cool.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: wow. Okay. I mean, so this is an amazing product, really. I mean, and look, I. I feel like it’s been out for a few months, but I can’t quite remember where I saw it. Or is it brand spanking?

Gareth Weller: No, it rolled into the country in October last year.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. Okay.

Gareth Weller: Literally the day that the stereonet show started.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Gareth Weller: And we had a. I guess we had a bit of a panicked trip to the airport to grab them off the cargo ship and then straight, into the Premium Sound shop around the corner from the show. Had a bit of a launch there. And, and they’ve been housed at the Focal Power by Name store in St. Kilda, since then. And this is our, I guess our incursion into the Sydney market, the Sydney show.

Andrew Hutchison: Incursion to show to invasion or incursion.

Gareth Weller: Well, I don’t know either.

Andrew Hutchison: Right.

Gareth Weller: The thing about it is that we don’t have a Focal Power By Name store in Sydney, so there’s no one here authorized to sell them. So the team at Premium Sound decided to come up with us and show the Sydney audio folk these speakers a real treat as far as I’m concerned. You know, this thing, these things don’t happen very often. So, so they’re here, and we’re here and we’re excited to show everybody and you know, and. And it’s a. It’s a great product and a great experience, I think.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, no, I think people should, look it up. So website wise, for further information, I guess Focal name website has.

Gareth Weller: Yeah. Focal.com.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: So focal. Just.com.com. yeah. Okay. Well, thank you, Gareth. That’s been incredibly informative. I found out more than I expected to. It’s, you know, it’s a stunningly complex product and obviously, performs. Looks amazing and, thank you for your time.

01:10:00

Andrew Hutchison: Thank you for your insights on the,

Andrew Hutchison: Politics.

Andrew Hutchison: Politics. It’s a bit of a wrap up of how things were, but how they are now and how it’s improving. So thanks again. Have a great show.

Andrew Hutchison: Thank you, Andrew. And thank you, listeners.

Andrew Hutchison: My pleasure.

01:10:11

Another dohmann and turntable from Geoff at Heynow HiFi

Andrew Hutchison: I

Andrew Hutchison: I was just talking to Geoff at Haynow HiFi about, his latest installation. Another dome and turntable. This time one with a super track Blackbird arm, and a Mutech Hayabusa cartridge. Motorcyclists everywhere are wondering how that could be. Blackbird arm, Hayabusa cartridge. Yeah. anyhow, then he said he was going back to the store to listen to some records on the Helix 2 in store unit. I thought, do you ever get sick of listening to records? But then maybe not plain playing them back through, the Fisher and Fisher speakers that are crafted from slate. Anyhow, enough discussion of Geoff’s, antics.

Phil Sawyer from Synergy Audio Visual founded the business 30 years ago

Back to the show. Today, this segment of the show Roundup, we’re talking to Phil Sawyer from Synergy Audio Visual. Is that the correct title, Phil? Is that what you call your company?

Phil Sawyer: That is correct, yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: And I found out yesterday while speaking to you briefly that, I feel like I’ve known you for a long time, but maybe not 30 years.

Phil Sawyer: It’s got to be at least 20.

Andrew Hutchison: Well, maybe it’s 20 and probably is 20. Unfortunately, not unfortunately, but I mean, only from the. From the point of view that we’re both 20 years older. you’ve been running the business or started. Founded the business 30 years ago.

Phil Sawyer: That is correct. which is amazing in our 30th anniversary. I feel like we’re out of L plates now.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, you’re definitely out of L plates. for those that, are listening who, have, you know, the brands that you import, they will know Rega Reger. Rega, sure. And let’s cover off straight away on that. Now, you must have spoken to Roy Gandy at some point.

Phil Sawyer: Yes, we’re one of the older distributors now, in the Rega network. We’ve, been doing the brand for over 27 years.

Andrew Hutchison: 27 years, wow.

Phil Sawyer: So it was actually one of our. Right now, it’s our oldest brand that we’ve been representing in Australia. and I first met Roy, back in the late 90s when M. They were, looking for a new distributor in the Australian market. and we were very, very fortunate to be able to meet him in Malaysia of all places.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay. Yeah.

Phil Sawyer: He wanted me to come to United Kingdom. I said I wanted him to come to Australia. So we met in the middle.

Andrew Hutchison: Met in the middle. And he pronounces it Rega.

Phil Sawyer: Yes, I believe so.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes. Yes, yes. Well, I mean, that’s what I’ve been told. I’ve not spoken to him. but, yeah, I think maybe you told me that I don’t know, but it’s. There’s a lot of people who say Rega, which is fine.

Phil Sawyer: Whatever makes sense.

Andrew Hutchison: Exactly.

Phil Sawyer: Yeah.

You’ve been doing high end products for long enough that I’d forgotten

Andrew Hutchison: So, you’re displaying at the 2025 Sydney HiFi show. You’ve got a hell of a room. It’s full of equipment.

Phil Sawyer: We’re enjoying it.

Andrew Hutchison: There’s some Rega in there. But you also represent and have done for a long time, on and off. Sonus Faber.

Phil Sawyer: Yes.

Andrew Hutchison: Macintosh.

Phil Sawyer: Yes.

Andrew Hutchison: Rel. And a ton of other great brands. But they’re probably. Is that your core range or. They do have audio research as well.

Phil Sawyer: Yeah, yeah. I think we’ we’re probably fortunate these days to be a little bit more high end than we were when we started. the first brands that we actually imported into the country, back in the 90s, are now defunct. Which is a company called Alchemist.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. Okay. So is that where you started?

Phil Sawyer: That was the first brand actually. And I saw these beautiful products. The Nemesis and the Kraken and the Faucetti.

Andrew Hutchison: I remember those.

Phil Sawyer: Yeah, they were beautiful pieces. And they were set up by three young English guys, and were exhibiting in the New York show. And I thought wow, these things are great. And the prices were magnificent.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Phil Sawyer: So that’s actually how we started. Very sadly, that company was closed ah, probably about three or four years later just for financial reasons. and by that stage we’d taken on Rega and a number of other products and Yeah. So it’s been an interesting journey. So I suppose in some respects the start of the company was at a more humble, price, ah points. by the 2000 and tens. we were very fortunate to come into contact, with.

Andrew Hutchison: We were just receiving drinks.

Phil Sawyer: That’s what I was saying. We’ve got some beautiful coffees here thanks to Balaji. we were very fortunate to have the opportunity to represent Sonus Faber, which had been handled up until that point by International Dynamics, which is Ensel Stereo.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Phil Sawyer: And they We were able to represent their full range at that point which topped out at the Ahmadi homage level. but very. But very soon after that went quite into the stratosphere, so to speak.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. In fact I kind of remember that now because you’ve been doing high end products for long enough that I’d kind of forgotten that at some point I actually was somewhat surprised that you were suddenly selling very expensive equipment. Not there’s anything wrong with that. But I mean, it’s And I guess there’s a, there’s a commentary there that, that maybe even the, the high end, which people kind of say, oh, it’s, the high end is sinking, you know, and we need new customers, all that. But actually high end, it’s a terrible word in a way, but, but good quality. the, Is that your eggs ready or. But, the, It’s. It’s. It’s. Well, I mean, everyone’s

00:05:00

Andrew Hutchison: saying really high end sales are pretty good.

Phil Sawyer: I actually, think they’re pretty strong as well. And I think, people’s desire to have something of great performance, great beauty, great, great value, dare I say it, is pretty strong these days. People want products that they can cherish, that they can love.

Andrew Hutchison: Well, you can certainly do that with Sonus Fabre. I mean, some of the models are just exquisitely made, aren’t they?

Phil Sawyer: The designs from, Livio Cucuzza and his team in Vicenza are just magnificent. I’ve just been incredibly impressed by their ability to be up.

Andrew Hutchison: I don’t know how they make it. I have no idea. I mean, I mean, it’s, it’s. I mean, it’s.

Phil Sawyer: Andrew, you have to come for it.

Adam Prangelll: It’s such fun.

Phil Sawyer: You have to come for an IM tour of Italy.

Andrew Hutchison: Well, you know, I will be there soon, but I will be holidaying and doing absolutely nothing.

Adam Prangelll: Ah.

Andrew Hutchison: But, yeah, I actually haven’t done any, factory tours in, Europe at all. So it’d be interesting to see that.

Phil Sawyer: Well, you know, shortly after we started with Sotosva, that begat, audio research, because at the time that was part of the Fine Sounds group, as it then was.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Phil Sawyer: and we were able to do that for a period of time. And then, by 2014, 20, 2015, the group, purchased Macintosh.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Phil Sawyer: And so it was a natural progression in some respects that we moved into the high end. Of course, so much has happened since then.

Andrew Hutchison: So it sort of came to you in a sense because of some changes of ownership, in the world. you sort of seem to get comfortable with it pretty quickly.

Phil Sawyer: Yeah. And I think, it was at a time when, you know, the prosperity for Australia and the world was certainly on the rise. Interesting times that we’re in now, Andrew, with the last, 24, 48 hours in, World Geopolitics.

Andrew Hutchison: yeah, you’d have to tell me about that because I’ve been At a HiFi show and I haven’t been watching tv.

Andrew McIntosh: Tariffs put on American goods by China last night

Has something bad happened?

Phil Sawyer: Well, I think we just had, another raft of reciprocal tariffs put in by China on America last night.

Andrew Hutchison: God, is that right?

Phil Sawyer: Which affects the American suppliers that we do who sell into China.

Andrew Hutchison: this is a mess.

Phil Sawyer: It’s a bit of a.

Andrew Hutchison: We don’t actually do politics on this show, but I think at some point you have to mention it. And, yeah, it is a weird time. I mean, we’ve had a weird time with the whole Covid scenario.

Phil Sawyer: Yeah. But I think, you know, it sounds trite to say that a, you know, a $60,000amplifier is good value. Of course it’s fair.

Andrew Hutchison: It does sometimes sound a bit silly, but I mean, sometimes $60,000amplifiers do appear to be great.

Phil Sawyer: Well, this is the whole thing, you know. You know, if you think about how much. How important music is in people’s lives and, you know, the relative investment that we make to have beautiful music, versus, say, for example, a home or luxury car. We still got connection there.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. Just checking the battery level. that’s good. You’re coming in loud and clear.

Phil Sawyer: Wonderful, wonderful. It’s a beautiful piece of pro kit here.

Andrew Hutchison: That, Andrew, is affordable pro kit. but we do do things properly. Not an audiophile. So, Yeah, so.

Phil Sawyer: So you.

Andrew Hutchison: They do they want. I mean, I mean there’s.

Phil Sawyer: People drop millions on homes.

Andrew Hutchison: Absolutely. Well, now they’re forced to, aren’t they?

Phil Sawyer: Yeah, particularly in this town in Sydney. But, you know, I think that that makes in some respects, investments in audio, certainly more justifiable in one sense, because it’s a, you know, a wonderful way to have a piece of luxury in your life that you might not otherwise have if you. If you’re not in the property market, for example. But, you know, and I think that these products also stand the test of time. They last decades upon decades.

Andrew Hutchison: Oh, they do.

Phil Sawyer: you know, compared to say, something like an automobile which might be transitioned every four to five years or, certainly every decade or so.

Andrew Hutchison: I would imagine with Macintosh as an example, that you could literally keep it for a lifetime. You know, I mean, I suppose there’s some. From a technical perspective, there’s probably some pieces that would need servicing. Servicing. But at the same time, yeah, there may be that. But there might also be streaming stuff. Stuff or what have you. Because it’ll change. But, I tell you what, the amplifiers, they’re literally going to go on forever.

Phil Sawyer: We always take, a Little bit of interest in what comes through the service department. We run a fully equipped service department.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, you’re actually different in that regard. To skip sideways away from the excitement and the gloss of the high end product to nuts and bolts in reality. Yeah. You have your own service department?

Phil Sawyer: We do. full listed water by three technicians. which is super unusual. A little bit different perhaps from some other contract based outfits.

Andrew Hutchison: But the gives you some control.

Phil Sawyer: The benefit is that we get to see what comes through. And personally it’s of interest to me when you see something that’s particularly old come through the doors. And I’m reminded of some 1960s Macintosh pieces that have come through.

Andrew Hutchison: Is that right?

Phil Sawyer: One was from Canberra University of all places. They were actually still using it in a pro capacity.

Andrew Hutchison: Is that all right?

Phil Sawyer: Yeah, so we were able to service those products. and you know some of these brands obviously a little bit younger than that regular, started in the early 70s.

00:10:00

Phil Sawyer: and of course audio, research was late 60s as well. But MacIntosh was 49. So.

Andrew Hutchison: Is that when it started? Wow.

Phil Sawyer: Okay, so it’s been, it’s been quite, quite extraordinary. But we just had the 75th anniversary of Frank MacIntosh’s founding of the company.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. Okay.

Phil Sawyer: They had a few mementos for that, a few special editions for that. so yeah, it’s an absolute joy. But to be completely fair, I get as much interest as you know from an affordable piece of HiFi.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, yeah, yeah. where Rega fits in.

Phil Sawyer: Yeah. Which is like you know, a good example. This is the new Brio 7 that’s just been released. It’s just a. I don’t know why.

Andrew Hutchison: I get so excited about such simple amplifiers, but I think maybe that’s the thing, isn’t it?

Some of our brands are all driven by engineering prowess

Phil Sawyer: Well you know, in one sense we’ve got this beautiful new piece from audio research, the ref 330M M monoblocks, which as a pair about $165,000 for a set.

Andrew Hutchison: Well you get two for that. Right.

Phil Sawyer: Not each for a pair but you know, absolutely glorious pieces of engineering and you know, moving the industry forward. But at the other end of the spectrum you’ve got products like the Brio 7 which are a technical triumph and I think it’s one of the things I wanted to mention today was just the commonality between some of our brands are all driven by engineering prowess.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, absolutely.

Phil Sawyer: You take a company like Rega, which is started by an engineer, is very much driven from an engineering perspective in Fact, the company’s full name is Rega Research.

Andrew Hutchison: Indeed.

Phil Sawyer: So the whole DNA of the company is around innovation.

Andrew Hutchison: I mean Rega is something. the things that I admire about Rega other than the, the value for money and the great sound quality of the product and the the simplicity and durability is that they do so many things in house. I mean they I mean I’ve not been to the factory. I was going. Well, I was. I think I was going. And then Covid happened or something. I’m sure that. Yeah, but anyhow, I know that I was going.

Phil Sawyer: You will be in Southend soon, I’m sure. Well, thank you.

Andrew Hutchison: If I or you have got anything to do. But I’d love to see because I. Because I. The first turntable I ever sold as a HiFi salesman as I think about a 16 year old working part time on hifi store Thursday night, Saturday mornings was. It was a P3 really or Planar 3.

Phil Sawyer: Pretty high end at the time, if I’m not mistaken.

Andrew Hutchison: Well, they were. I think it was about 699 or 799 or 600. It might have been 599 possibly.

Phil Sawyer: What year would have this been, Andrew? Dare I ask?

Andrew Hutchison: It was a while ago, you know, it was six or seven years ago. No, I think it was It was kind of like probably 83.

Phil Sawyer: Yeah, that, that would be right. Yeah. Because we did have a patch of inflation in the mid-80s, didn’t we?

Andrew Hutchison: Well, we think there was quite a bit of inflation.

Phil Sawyer: Quite a bit of inflation, yeah, that would make sense. I think by the time we started in,

Andrew Hutchison: Well, it was hardly any dearer, was it?

Phil Sawyer: Well, 97. There had been a fair bit of inflation. I think the Rega 3s at that time, around about 1100, $1200 by that stage.

Andrew Hutchison: I reckon I was selling them at 999 at one point.

Phil Sawyer: I know you would have. Absolutely.

Andrew Hutchison: But I mean. But anyhow, the point is that they make. Okay, so they make all these products, but the tone arms, the cartridges. All in house.

Phil Sawyer: All in England.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, which is, which is just amazing.

Phil Sawyer: it gives them incredible control over their destiny. And I think coming back to this point, some of our brands might appear at first glance to be unrelated. Arenda, Rega Audio Research. But the one commonality that they share is they’re all driven by engineers. And I think yesterday I might have mentioned to you that Aurender, which is our Korean streamer, server business, one of the leaders in the space, absolutely gloriously built and engineered. They’ve got Full control over their hardware, their software and their firmware. So the entire product they’ve got control over. and the company, which is small, consists of 30 staff. 28 are engineers, including their salespeople are engineers. Did I mention this to you?

Andrew Hutchison: No, no, you may have, you may have mentioned it previously, but I just tuned out. No, no, I mean, I mean I think we, because we. When I have exhibited HiFi with the assistance of a customer of yours and a customer of mine effectively as I sold him the business. But yeah, we, we used Alex’s Aurender for some years and what a, what a delightful analog kind of sounding piece of digital equipment. I mean, is that how it strikes you, the sound? I mean it’s, it’s quite a. Well, it’s not, it’s not sharp and bitey.

Phil Sawyer: No, it’s certainly a premium piece in the sense that you know, they’re not entry level products per se.

Andrew Hutchison: Well, no they’re not.

Phil Sawyer: But the, the wonderful thing about them is that the. Whether you’ve got, you know, a need for an analog output from a DAC based version or ah, a digital only product because you have a high end DAC elsewhere, the company can produce a product that will give you a server streamer, digital front end if you like. and it’s borne

00:15:00

Phil Sawyer: out by the large number of other manufacturers that use Aurender as their digital source for their systems.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, you do actually see that quite a lot.

Phil Sawyer: Axboner, I think which is coming up in a couple of weeks. You should just shoot over to Chicago.

Andrew Hutchison: I think fitting three shows into a month and a half will be more than my body concerns close to Munich. You could go. Look, if I lived a life of leisure such as yourself, I would I would go to all three. But that is not going to happen. I will be I need a holiday before I even go to Munich, which is, which is what I’m going to do.

Phil Sawyer: Well, certainly, you know, and then you go across to North America and look at audio research and Macintosh’s background and both those companies very much led m from an engineering perspective. So whether it be Rega in the United Kingdom, Aurender in Korea, and these North American companies and all of our companies, they have this wonderful commitment to innovation and performance and value.

The quality of Australian music has gotten better, says M. M.

Andrew Hutchison: I think, I would guess part of the fun of your job is that you get to speak to all these interesting, intelligent people, but also get to see some of how the magic happens. I would imagine there’s a great joy.

Phil Sawyer: And I think one of the things that I find fascinating is you know the company’s 30 years old and you know, it’s almost more enjoyable now than ever before. The equipment is spectacular. The music that we can reproduce is just formidable.

Andrew Hutchison: M. I, think it kind of is. I mean I had the pleasure of listening briefly in a competitor’s room, by accident, yesterday afternoon. and a well known brand, with some, you know, a very old brand, with a very old brand driving them, but new music, Australian music actually. How cool. And the engineering the sound was. I mean it would sound equally as impressive on your system. It’s just that you weren’t playing that. No, no, of course, at the time, maybe you do. And I can’t remember the name of the artist, but we’ll mention it somewhere in the podcast because I will speak to that gentleman later. Fascinated to hear.

Phil Sawyer: We love new music.

Andrew Hutchison: Oh, I’ve got a picture of it. I’ll show you before we leave. But the, but it is the sound quality, it’s like yellow as far as the incredible high quality of the engineering, but getting it somewhat away from yellows, you know, I mean enjoyable. But you know you can only listen to so much yellow. So this is a different take. But yeah, the quality of the sound really has gotten better. Yeah, you know like, and the reproduction, the sound recording has gotten better. people who love analog tape and analog mixing consoles would disagree. But really this was very clean and warm and analog, but incredibly detailed, fast and dynamic. but the playback gear has got better, I always think probably more so loudspeakers perhaps than than electronics. But the streaming has also gotten way better. The digital side of things is, yeah, sounding more and more analog I feel. You know, so. But record players have a place. You’ve got the P10 on display now you’ve got the.

Phil Sawyer: We’ve got two Regas actually in the room. We’ve got the Naia, which is the new flagship. it just sits above the P10. And was a, ah, derivative of a concept product called the Naia that they.

Andrew Hutchison: Which is like a cost no object.

Phil Sawyer: Cost no object machine. They produced I think somewhere around 30 to 50 units I think. Ah, we had one that came into Australia.

Andrew Hutchison: You did get one. You didn’t keep it. You sold it though, did you?

Phil Sawyer: Well, somewhat reluctantly it did get sold. you know, to be fair, if I got to keep all the pieces that I would like, I would need another. Another office.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes. Sorry, I almost. I was having a Sneaky, espresso shot there and I almost looked at. Yes. no, I, I, I feel for your. no, there’s some one, I would have this, I mean I’m actually searching.

Phil Sawyer: For an alchemist Kraken, if anyone can find one, because that’s a piece that obviously has a special.

Andrew Hutchison: Once someone did ask me to fix a piece of alchemist equipment not that long ago it came in. But I would remember it if it did though.

Phil Sawyer: Yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: Very striking. Heat sinks and stuff. Yeah.

Phil Sawyer: We’ve still got one or two pieces. We’ve got an old nemesis and I think we might have a Faucetti somewhere. But the Kraken was was almost the iconic piece that they produced. It was a two box, a class AB amplifier. although it was very heavily biased towards class A because the, it did generate up to 55, 60 degrees on the heat.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes, yes.

Phil Sawyer: So a little bit hot.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes. Don’t lean against it.

Phil Sawyer: No, no. so I think, but I think, you know, it is, it is an enjoyable time to be.

I’m expanding my music collection now. More so than I’ve ever done

I’m expanding my music collection now. More so than I’ve ever done.

Andrew Hutchison: I was going to ask you that. Do you, what do you say? You, you’ve got, I’ve got.

Phil Sawyer: You do all three.

Andrew Hutchison: You’ve got record CDs and streaming.

Phil Sawyer: Absolutely. And use them all in different cap. one of the fascinating things for me right now is if you want to find new music, obviously streaming is a wonderful one start to do that. But in some ways the experience with streaming can somewhat be a little sterile,

00:20:00

Phil Sawyer: perhaps in the sense that you’re not momentarily engaging with the music, but it’s not there once you’ve turned it off. It’s. Where is it? It’s nowhere. Physical media, I think, has a different, a different sensation. Of course I’m of that era that grew up around LPs and CDs.

Andrew Hutchison: But you’re only in your late 30s.

Phil Sawyer: Exactly. I started the company when I was in diapers, as Americans would say. But no, it is, it’s very enjoyable and I think, you know, I was lucky enough to acquire a number of CD collections during during the COVID period. And you know, the enjoyment that you get from listening to new pieces that you might not have, come across. And some of this of course is not available on streaming services.

Andrew Hutchison: That’s the thing. There’s lots of, lots of CDs I have, which I don’t play much, but I have got Them, you know, ripped to a hard drive and So the CDs kind of sit in a box. But the point is, yeah, there’s whole bunches of things I’ve got that don’t appear on streaming services. Well.

Phil Sawyer: And in fact, one of the ones. Speaking of Australian artists, I wanted to be able to play one of the Christine Sullivan discs live at Mietta’s. Beautiful piece. I think it was released late, 90s, early 2000s.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Phil Sawyer: Doug Devries on bass guitar, I believe. Oh, no, he might be lead guitar actually. But you know, some of the fantastic, you know, iconic jazz musicians and One Night Only in, in Melbourne, and got the disc. Yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: And it’ll never be on stream.

Phil Sawyer: It’s not on any of the services. Certainly, not the high resolution services. so I think Christine might have eight or nine titles. You might be lucky to get three or four on streaming services.

Andrew Hutchison: This is the thing quite often, and I’m a Tidal fan, but, they annoy me a bit from time to time. Where, quite often the best album that an artist has is the one title doesn’t seem to have. Which is kind of annoying. It is, I think, the Jordan album back in the day and equally as much today. Because they’re still expensive. Right. It’s an expensive way to obtain music.

Phil Sawyer: It’s a costly sport.

Andrew Hutchison: But you are invested not just so you’re forced to listen to it in a way because you like, Well, I paid 60 bucks for this thing, right. So I’m going to bloody well get my money’s worth out of it. So on first blush, you may not particularly enjoy the album, or you might only like one or two tracks, but you are kind of. You force feed it to yourself. And I think you will never do that with streaming. You’ll just go, nah, I like it. Move to the next thing. And so you’re really not expanding your horizons in a way. Not investors, your brain isn’t tuning in or something. There’s, there’s. There’s something going on there.

Phil Sawyer: There’s another element as well, which is the collections element. You know, if you want to collect m. You know, your own curated copy, of whatever you’re listening to, then yes, you can have a playlist, of course, but then you stop paying that subscription. What happens to your playlist?

Andrew Hutchison: Well, it clearly disappears.

Phil Sawyer: Yes. So I think, you know, if you want to have a collection that you can give to a cherished other.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Phil Sawyer: You know, and pass down perhaps Then you know, physical media obviously still has a place and the rise of vinyl, ah, is testament to that, I think.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, it’s funny, it’s, it’s It I mean to some degree vinyl is responsible for me buying equipment from you because I had to start selling Regas again and because people were coming to the bloody shop and asking for them and asking for not necessarily specifically Regas. In some cases they would have, but they just wanted a turntable and this is quite a while ago now.

Phil Sawyer: Yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: and but I was. So we’ve covered that. Yes.

Audio Research went through a bad phase recently but it seems to have bounced back

And we could talk about that for a long time, but I just wondered whether there’s some new models or. I mean you mentioned the mono blocks. Kind of irrelevant to most of the audience, but they’re the ones that I’ve seen in your room. They are a delight to behold.

Phil Sawyer: They’re actually only just released and they’re almost like a rebirthing of Audio Research that’s gone through a number of changes.

Andrew Hutchison: Well, actually, yeah, I mean that is. Okay, we could talk about that for a second because obviously audio research went through a bad phase recently, but it seems to have bounced back.

Phil Sawyer: Yeah, it was under capitalized and there was a change of ownership, just over a year. A couple of years ago now.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, yeah.

Phil Sawyer: And the new team has invested considerable amounts, it looks that way. Not just in new product, but in the backbone of the company. the carriage forward. The production processes and software behind that has been quite astounding. So it’s one thing to buy a company, another thing to keep it running with the capital required. so the ref 330s are an outcropping of that and they’ve just announced a new range of I won’t say more affordable when I’m talking about audio research, but certainly lower priced products.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Audio Research sells integrated amplifiers for around $12,000

Okay, so what is the entry level of audio if you want an integrated amplifier?

Phil Sawyer: Well, the i50 is the current entry point. Around about $12,000.

00:25:00

Andrew Hutchison: That’s too bad.

Phil Sawyer: No, it completes us.

Andrew Hutchison: Is that transistor or Tube? Tube for 12 grand from audio Research. That’s not crazy.

Phil Sawyer: That’s right.

Andrew Hutchison: Considering that’s Australian dollars. yes, international. So in the US it’s like eight grand or something.

Phil Sawyer: Oh, less.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. Yeah.

Phil Sawyer: I think the American dollar is quite strong at the moment.

Andrew Hutchison: Or our dollar’s weak, one or the other. But I mean, yeah, the exchange rates are awful.

Phil Sawyer: We almost double. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s around about €6,000.

Andrew Hutchison: Is that right?

Phil Sawyer: Yeah, because we’ve got a bit of.

Andrew Hutchison: Freight to get it here and so forth.

Phil Sawyer: Well, they quote ex tax and we quote inc. Tax.

Andrew Hutchison: Oh, that is true. Yeah. You have to be a little bit aware of that.

Phil Sawyer: It tends to be about double in Australia to get Parity. Yes, parity, roughly speaking. But you know, so they’ve got some new products coming down the line which they’ve just announced. The LS2 and LS3 preamps.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Phil Sawyer: some a new valve power amp and two new solid state power amps. So audio research, although it’s historically most famous for its tube design, has right through from the 70s produced solid state products which have.

Andrew Hutchison: I own one. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Well people get excited.

Phil Sawyer: Which one have you got?

Andrew Hutchison: I’ve got a. It’s got. It’s full of fets. It’s a preamp and I’ve forgotten the model. But it’s a pretty pre. it’s.

Phil Sawyer: I wonder how old it would be.

Andrew Hutchison: I think it’s sort of mid-90s. And I just use it on the test bench just. Oh, when I need a preamp.

Phil Sawyer: You have to send a photo across because.

Andrew Hutchison: And it’s immaculate. I mean. But unfortunately it’s. I ended up with it because it was full of corrosion from living near the coast.

Phil Sawyer: Yes, that was.

Andrew Hutchison: So I have slowly. Yes, I’ve slowly repaired it to the point where at least it mostly works and and certainly good enough for what I’m doing with it. But it’s such a nice. I mean I look at piece of audio research every day sitting on my.

Phil Sawyer: Workbench, you know, 30 plus year old VT200.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. Okay.

Phil Sawyer: In my office which we brought back from, from its deathbed, it had been sort of. Had it run into an accident with a cat.

Andrew Hutchison: Well, it’s a heavy product so I can only imagine the way the cat would have damaged. It was a bit smelly I would admit, and corrosive.

Phil Sawyer: Yeah, I suspect you’re right. So we had to do a fair bit of board replacement.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, I bet you did. It’s super corrosive stuff, but it’s a.

Phil Sawyer: Glorious piece and I think you know, the, the company’s ascendant in one sense because the commitment of the current team is unequivocal and the ref 330s are emblematic of where the company is going up. Well in terms of ah, new innovative new designs that are trying to move that bar forward and it’s the same for Rega. It’s the same for Aurender. It’s the same for Macintosh. and, you know, we’ve got some beautiful new.

Andrew Hutchison: You’ve actually got a hell of a suite of brands, really, haven’t you? You know, you just. I mean, I. It obviously didn’t happen by accident. Maybe Macintosh. But the, But I mean, you have to be able to pull it off. And you have, in fact, Macintosh has been a Warner. Is it 10 years or something?

Phil Sawyer: Yeah, yeah. So it’s 10 years this year for us. So that’s 2014.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. So, we just.

Philip Sawyer: Australian company has taken over New Zealand market

Phil Sawyer: Just taken over the, the New Zealand market for them. So we’ve just launched our New Zealand operation only, five months ago.

Andrew Hutchison: Oh, okay.

Phil Sawyer: Actually, yeah, so in just the first of November.

Andrew Hutchison: So, an international player. We Audio distribution these days.

Phil Sawyer: We are an Australian New Zealand company now.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Phil Sawyer: Okay, so companies. Because we actually have to run separately.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes. Yeah, but. Well, yeah, that’s pretty special rules over there. How do you find New Zealand?

Phil Sawyer: I should love it.

Andrew Hutchison: It’s an amazingly beautiful place. And the seafood. Oh, but that accent.

Phil Sawyer: Well, the other thing, of course, is if you’re into motorcycling, it’s a. It’s a. It’s a wonderful.

Andrew Hutchison: Well, you’ve got, of course, the legend of Southern hemisphere motorcycle manufacturing in the form of, the now deceased, unfortunately. Oh, my God. I’ve got his name. John. yeah, John, What’s his bloody name? Is it John? You know what I mean. The purple motorbike, right? The pink and purple bloody handcrafted motorcycle. I’m gonna have to edit this particular podcast, actually, because I had a fairly big night last night and some of my memory has been, vaporized.

Phil Sawyer: That’s okay.

Andrew Hutchison: But, yeah, I guess that’s what you’re referring to. Great roads and great riders in history as well. yeah. So the roads are. Yeah, the roads are stunning. So you were alluding more to personal motorcycling than watching racing. Yes.

Phil Sawyer: Well, you can do both.

Andrew Hutchison: Did you take your bike, as a luggage?

Phil Sawyer: I actually feel like we should have a bike over there, which would be wonderful. well, you could do that.

Andrew Hutchison: I know where you could buy one similar to yours. And you could keep it. New Zealand. But anyhow, it’s not really for sale. But, Hey, Phil, thank you so much. No, no, this is, Andrew. Yeah. It’s a great joy, actually. We got the batteries. Didn’t just give up, did they? No, they’re still Going. Still working. I will install a new set after this recording. look, thank you for your time. You’ve got a big day and I’ll let you go. But thank you for the coffee. we could go on for hours. We didn’t even touch on motorcycling really, and. And some of your other brands as well, because I think you’ve got about 19 or 20 brands.

Phil Sawyer: Well,

00:30:00

Phil Sawyer: it’s. It’s probably our company’s divided into two divisions. We have our sort of hi custom.

Andrew Hutchison: Install and HiFi.

Phil Sawyer: And we have a custom install division. So there are some brands that are very specific to that second division. So in the Hifi space, we’ve probably got, about 12 to 14 millimeters still. Plenty right enough. But keep in mind that some of these are in very, very different categories, like cabling, servers, loudspeakers. So they’re in different categories. But, it is a great joy to work with all of these wonderful manufacturers. And, come and have a listen if you’re in Sydney at the Australian HiFi show. At this.

Andrew Hutchison: Well, this bloody episode, as I keep having to disappoint my, interviewees, is that it’s going up like a day after the show, which is kind of a. Kind of annoying. but what isn’t is a little video, which I’ll be in to shoot some footage later on. And, that will be going up this afternoon. So thank you, Andrew.

Phil Sawyer: Thank you so much spreading the word.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. Philip Sawyer, thank you so much for your time. Happy to spread the word and, I’ll speak to you again.

Phil Sawyer: Thanks, Andrew.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay, bye. Bye.

Phil Sawyer: Bye.

More Sound United welcomes Adam Prangelll from Marantz and Denon

Andrew Hutchison: coming up now we have Adam Prangelll from Marantz and Denon. And, followed by Cameron Keating. Piega being his. His key product that I enjoy. it’s a delightful sounding loudspeaker made in Switzerland. Hey. Yeah, we’re here with, Adam Prangell from, I suppose Denon Marantz. I mean, More Sound United.

Adam Prangell: Indeed.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, that’d be great. but your area of expertise, not so much Bowers and Wilkins. We’ve spoken. Talking to John Martin about that. But, more Morantz then on, Definitive Technology and Polk Audio. Audio, yeah. You’ve got some great displays here. good sound. And, it’s the. Actually, the Denon gear actually surprised me before. That’s a very affordable system in the.

Adam Prangell: Denon Pok Room there. Yeah, yeah, the PMA 3000NE.

Adam Prangell: Yeah, it’s a big lump.

Adam Prangell: It is a big lump. It’s the flagship.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes. Yeah, yeah.

Adam Prangell: Six grand retail.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Adam Prangell: Very affordable.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, absolutely. Considering, you know, what it does and how it sounds.

Massimo Consumer Sound United is developing a streaming music player called HEOS

but the thing that caught my ear yesterday and when we both briefly spoke off air, so to speak, is in the other room with the 805 signatures and that new, Marantz, is it series 10 or what are we calling it?

Adam Prangell: So the complete system would be the series 10, which comprises of the model 10 integrated amplifier.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Adam Prangell: The link 10N, which is the network player, streamer, preamplifier.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Adam Prangell: And then preamp as well.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Adam Prangell: And then the SACD10, which is the super audio CD player.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. It’s great that you’re still making a, CD player that not only is a CD player, but is a super audio CD player. It does have a bit of a following in certain circles.

Adam Prangell: Audio file circles, but we’re not that. Yeah, no, no, no.

Andrew Hutchison: There’s no, no audio files here. We’re definitely not an audio file. so, we also spoke about that. That equipment has HEOS capability. Now. I’m. I’m not a digital kind of guy. I, I mean, I love streaming and that’s what. It’s how I mostly listen to music. But I concern myself less with how it works and more with just, listening to music, I guess. heos. I guess everyone knows more about it than I do. But there’s one key thing that I didn’t know about it is that it’s, invented in Australia.

Adam Prangell: Indeed.

Andrew Hutchison: What can you tell us about that?

Adam Prangell: So it would be going back to probably 2010. 2011.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Adam Prangell: I think 2010 was when, it was a gentleman called Peter Solinsky and his brother, they were Adelaide University guys, did a white paper around WI Fi, being that Australia invented WI fi.

Andrew Hutchison: Invented WI Fi. That we know.

Adam Prangell: Yes. So they then started doing this wireless speaker technology and, working on creating this. They took it through to ces.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Adam Prangell: Originally, a couple of floor standing speakers won. Won some awards at ces, came back to Australia and they went hunting for it for an owner. And that’s when, DNM Holdings. Yes, Denon and Marantz Holdings. Back in the day.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, yeah.

Adam Prangell: They brought into the technology.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Adam Prangell: around about 2014, I believe, is when we started to launch the product into the market. So it’s just cracked on 10 years in the market now.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Adam Prangell: But back then it was a brand and we had active speakers. Yeah, we had the HEOS one, the HEOS two.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, that’s kind of how I remember it. And then, and then I see it appearing as a sort of a logo on streamers, I guess. and that’s where, I mean, it’s, it’s kind of a streaming software hardware. Yeah.

CAdam Prangell: So, we call it an ingredient. So it’s, it’s, a. An ecosystem.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Adam Prangell: And being that we are Massimo Consumer Sound United and, and we have a plethora of brands, we like to spread that ingredient across our brands. So the ecosystem can work, whether it’s a Denon active speaker or the Link 10N flagship streaming preamplifierants. Yeah, it. They all

00:35:00

Adam Prangell: use the HEOS module.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Adam Prangell: And that module, it allows for, obviously control via the HEOS app. it allows for Connect, Connect. Connecting. So, yeah, as in Spotify Connect or Tidal connect, Apple AirPlay too. So you can do all those sort of Connect sort of services. but our, engineers, there’s. They call themselves engineers. I refer to them as the nerds. The nerds.

Andrew Hutchison: Apparently you’ve got a room full of, or even a factory full of nerds in Sydney.

Adam Prangell: Correct. So we’ve got about somewhere between 40 and 50 nerds in our Chatsworth office.

Andrew Hutchison: And engineers, you advertise the positions.

Adam Prangell: I’m sure they don’t advertise it as nerds.

Andrew Hutchison: Highly experienced nerd requirement.

Adam Prangell: They are geniuses, to be honest. To be fair. whether it’s fixing bugs and growing the platform or adding new features, you know, there’s little teams. So they’ll break up into, you know, a team of five or six nerds or engineers, and they have a role to do each. So there’s a little group that just works on bug fixes because every time they change something, something trickles down, right?

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Adam Prangell: Or there’s another team that works on just the streams coming in. So they just work on bringing those streams into the HEOS module.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Adam Prangell: And then there’s another team that works on taking the streams and sending it through the system, whether that is just playing on that one device or, sharing it across the multiple devices. The beauty is because we’re not branded. Well, because we’ve got all these brands, we can have, an active speaker from Denon, we can have a CD player from Marantz, or, you know, the new Marantz active speakers over there with the Horizon, Grand Horizon, which I’m going.

Andrew Hutchison: To ask you about in a second because they’re very interesting. Yeah. So, yeah, so it’s basically the same, I guess it’s the same circuit board. The software works on all of them. yeah.

Marantz latest chipset is based on HEOS silicon

And of course it encompasses an app to control the device. Correct. As in the piece of hardware, the amplifier streaming device, what have you.

Adam Prangell: I believe we’re on to our seventh generation of that module.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. Okay.

Adam Prangell: So over time, you know, I can’t remember what the first one was called. The second one was known as the LEGO chipset. And then third, fourth, fifth, and we’re now just released in their latest products, the AOS Aios 7.0 chipset.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. Okay.

Adam Prangell: And on that one, a lot of the codecs and stuff that’s usually, on separate silicon chips on boards is all being brought onto the HEOS silicon.

Andrew Hutchison: Oh, okay. When it comes to kind of simplified it and wow. It’s a bigger chip, but makes it.

Adam Prangell: Harder for these guys. Our engineers, nerds, they. They now having to do a lot more work, but it gives us a lot more control over how things are decoded and how things then get shared.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, right.

CAdam Prangell: It’s. It’s amazing what they do there.

Andrew Hutchison: Well, it’s all a step forward, I guess. and the hardware, though, is. Is clearly made in one of your factories elsewhere, I presume, because that would make sense. But it’s interesting that you take. You’ve kept an Australian idea, invention or what have you, local and, you know, which I guess makes sense because there was a bit of a history of it. Or is it. I mean, what is the. Is there a good. Of course there’s a good reason. But what is part of the reason why it’s, done locally still?

Adam Prangell: Well, I guess Anders, who’s now or who’s headed it up. Up ever since I’ve known.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Adam Prangell: So for over 10 years, Anders has been the. The lead engineer of the team.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. Yeah.

CAdam Prangell: he’s. He’s been living and working here all the time.

Andrew Hutchison: Sydney doesn’t want to commute to.

Adam Prangell: Exactly.

Andrew Hutchison: Wherever. Yeah.

Adam Prangell: And the way the world matter where.

Andrew Hutchison: It doesn’t matter where you are.

Adam Prangell: You’ve got teams, you’ve got email, you’ve got. You know, we. These guys deal with the Japanese engineers. They also deal with the engineers over in, Carlsbad. So there’s teams around the world that all collaborate and come together to create this ecosystem that we’re running with now.

Andrew Hutchison: Completely impressive. the spherical speakers, the horizon. Horizon. Horizon and Grand Horizon.

Adam Prangell: Correct.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay. Excuse my ignorance on that front. admittedly, it’s probably a little out of my, area of interest personally. but I tell you what, the industrial design is terrific. It looks quite. They’re Very striking. seem to sound pretty good. What’s, what can you tell us about that? That’s exciting.

Adam Prangell: So, design was a huge part. Obviously being Marantz, it has to sound good. Yes, there’s no doubt about that. You know, the Marantz soundmaster, he works with his engineering team to make sure that everything that has the Marantz badge on it sounds like a Marantz product. Sound signature has to be Marantz. However, the, the actual design of it was very important because it is a higher end product. so our European team worked on the design of that one. It’s actually won the if design award just recently. So, it is being recognized as a beautiful piece. The

00:40:00

Adam Prangell: base that they sit on is real marble. And depending on which of the three colors you purchase, the marble base matches the color of the product.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Adam Prangell: they’ve kept things like the Porthole design, so that’s why it’s a sphere shaped.

Phil Sawyer: Yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Adam Prangell: So that ticks the box of the Marantz porthole.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

CAdam Prangell: And when you see.

Andrew Hutchison: Oh yeah. As in connecting it to the, the styling of the amplifiers. That had been the case for what, my last 20 years or easily. Yeah.

Adam Prangell: well, 70 years of Marantz. And I believe the Porthole’s been a part of Marantz’s look for pretty much most of that time.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Adam Prangell: Not all of it.

Andrew Hutchison: Not most. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

made out of 100% recycled ocean plastic

Adam Prangell: also the, when you touch the, the touch controls and you see the lights going up and up and up as you’re adjusting the volume, they are little pointers of the, the North Star, which again is a tip of the cap back to the Marantz North Star that is on all of our products. Products. the, the cloth itself, the acoustic cloth to cover the speakers. A lot of what thought went into that and being that they’re trying to be more eco friendly, it’s actually made out of 100% ocean recycled. Recycled ocean plastics.

Andrew Hutchison: Wow.

Adam Prangell: Okay, so that’s a, it’s a plastic cloth, but it’s. It’s not, it’s.

Andrew Hutchison: Now, are you not concerned that you might run out of raw materials?

Adam Prangell: Pretty sure there’s enough plastics left in the ocean to keep us going for a while, but that’s one seamless piece as well. So they had to create a sort of like, tube at either end of the cloth to put the ring on to help make it nice and taut.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes. Okay.

Adam Prangell: To help with that acoustic transparency. so it’s a beautiful piece and you’ll Find there’s a little speckle going through that which is one strand that’s been sewn in so that when it catches the light it gives it a little glitter, glitter effect.

Andrew Hutchison: I’m going to go and have a closer look then because this is obviously like all of these things. There’s a hell of a lot more under the surface I guess that that one doesn’t realize with a quick glance.

Series 10 Amplifier uses Class D amplification which sounds amazing

And then the series 10, we touched on the it’s, it’s a, I mean it is your top of the range product. Class D amplification.

Adam Prangell: Yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: So you got any thoughts on why with a super history of history. Well if you go back tubes obviously and then it’s a class A in effect, then some very, you know, warm sounding Class AB amplifiers over the years and, and I mean Class D is matured of course. It’s sounds amazing now. it has done for a few years but it’s such a hefty serious product. It seems counterintuitive that you would use a class D module of some description. Although I believe it’s, it’s not just.

Adam Prangell: An off the shelf module.

Andrew Hutchison: No, no. The power supply is, I mean it’s a linear, it’s got giant transformer, big.

Adam Prangell: Toroidal power supply inside. Absolutely. But the Class D module itself is actually completely built in our Shirakawa factory. The whole unit is.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Adam Prangell: Yeah, they’ve, they’ve gone to Purify and got, let’s call it a blueprint from Purify, one of the leading Class D manufacturers in the world. So we’ve taken that and then our engineers, including our marine sound master have I guess you could say like expression Sound master. He is a sound m master.

Andrew Hutchison: Does he wear special clothing?

Adam Prangell: He has a special jacket. It’s his sound master. But imagine that like a chef, you know when a chef goes and grabs Gordon Ramsay’s cookbook, he won’t follow the recipe to the, to the nth degree. He will then add his own salt, his own pepper, his own little bit of chili, his own little bit of spice, whatever. Correct. He makes it his own. It’s no different to what they’ve done with the purifier amp module. So they’ve taken the blueprints, they’ve gone and got all the parts or created the parts. If they weren’t happy with the parts, they could get locally.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Adam Prangell: And then they’ve put it together, they’ve gone back to purify, they’ve ticked it Off. Gone. Yep, perfect. No problem. We’re happy with that.

Andrew Hutchison: So I. So if it sort of has to be given the tick by Purify for what, stability or something or component quality or. You don’t really.

Adam Prangell: That’s probably. We don’t know.

Andrew Hutchison: I mean it’s a bit bloody complicated.

Adam Prangell: It is, it is well above my pay grade.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. Yeah.

Adam Prangell: But it’s been approved by them. They’ve then utilized that and created I think what’s pretty much the showstopper, here this weekend.

says combination of 800 series speakers with Marantz 10 sounds amazing

Andrew Hutchison: Okay, well I’ll tell you what it is in the sound. I mean, you know, I was impressed yesterday afternoon when I heard And that particular track that you were playing that I’ve forgotten the name of.

Adam Prangell: Smilk. Yes, that’s right. Last Rainforest.

Andrew Hutchison: Last Rainforest. Australian artists. Look it up, people. Ah. It is a stunning piece of music that is stunningly engineered and then when played on the 805 signatures, and I don’t want to go on and on about it, but they are not a particularly large loudspeaker. they’re in a normal sized domestic space in this hotel room and driven by this beautiful stack of gear. It just, it is, it’s got a degree of precision, clarity, openness, cleanness, dynamics, full bandwidth.

00:45:00

Andrew Hutchison: I mean it just sounds, I mean, you know, it sounds amazing. Right.

Adam Prangell: Does. Makes the hairs on your arms stand on the end.

Andrew Hutchison: It’s, it’s you know, look, and people who know me know that I don’t go around saying you must buy a pair of 800 series speakers. They’re the only one to buy. I mean there’s lots of great speakers, but the, it’s a, it’s a very. I’ll tell you what it is for those who are listening who aren’t lovers of the 800 series necessarily because maybe they expose a little bit too much detail of the recording or something like that. this combination of the 800, 805s with the Marantz 10 is is a, is a sweet, It’s one of those classic, synergistic sort of combinations where they just work. They seem to work together brilliantly. I mean it kind of makes sense that you would do that. Right?

Adam Prangell: But.

Adam Prangell: Yes, but there’s a lot of history behind that too.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Adam Prangell: Okay, so even though, Marantz or DNM holdings and it has been working in our Shirakawa workshop for many, many, many years.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Adam Prangell: Creating our Marantz product there.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Adam Prangell: Denon in Japan have also been the Bowers and Wilkins distributor For a very, very, very long time. Okay, so even before Sound United picked up Bowers and Wilkins to bring it in house, they have always sounded the new Marantz gear on Bowers and Wilkins speakers.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Adam Prangell: For a very long time.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, yeah, right, yeah, yeah.

Adam Prangell: So the synergies are just, they’re matched perfectly. Called a perfect pairing.

Andrew Hutchison: Well, it’s one of the most impressive sounds, I’ve ever heard on what I would rate as a more or less affordable system. I mean, it’s not an inexpensive system, but compared with some of the things that you see, it shows that, are impressive, are quite often so expensive that it’s kind of irrelevant. whereas this is, you know, somewhat attainable and it’s quite stunning. so, yeah, I. Congratulations on having magnificent sound at a HiFi show. Some people say it can’t be done. Clearly it can. So, yeah, no, very impressed. hey, thanks so much for your time. Thanks for your inside information. It’s, much appreciated, Adam and, enjoy the rest of the show.

CAdam Prangell: Thanks, Andrew. Been a pleasure, man.

Andrew Hutchison: Thank you so much.

Adam Prangell: Cheers.

Australian loudspeaker legend born with stunning new VAF Research i93 Mark V

Andrew Hutchison: An Australian loudspeaker legend has been born with a stunning new VAF Research i93 Mark V, winner of Stereonet’s floor standing loudspeaker Product of the year and Sound and Image magazine’s Floor Standing speaker of the year. 20,000 to $50,000. VAF’s i93 has redefined what I thought was possible from a loudspeaker in a domestic setting, says Stereonet VAF Research Building Award winning loudspeakers in Australia since 1978.

So yet another, live cross from. That’s not that live because we’re recording it from, the, Sydney HiFi Show 2025, this time with Cameron Keating, who reliably informs me he is related to the intimate distant. Yes. How does that happen? I mean, we know how it happens.

Cameron Keating: Well, from Ireland, of course, tall fellows from Ireland that decided to come to Australia.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, okay.

Cameron Keating: I’m not so tall, but, you know, interesting guy.

You’re flogging HiFi equipment. Have you been doing that a while

Andrew Hutchison: So, and so are you because you’ve got an incredible range of equipment that you import. But you’ve just implied. Not implied, you’ve told me that you used to be involved with tascam.

Cameron Keating: My origins go back, well, let’s just say before I was in the industry, I was kind of related to the industry.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Cameron Keating: Uncles, were importers, brother was a tech. so I was kind of the guy who used to listen to a lot of the audio systems at home and cousin’s house, uncle’s house, whatever the case may be. And, I was generally the sounding board.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Cameron Keating: As to what sounded good.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. Right.

Cameron Keating: So at a young age, they were all coming to me for recommendations. And. Yeah. What do you think? Even my dad. And I said, okay. This is a rare for my dad. And I did differ with my brother, who was a guitarist. So. Yeah, okay. But that’s okay.

Andrew Hutchison: And you’re a failed guitarist.

Cameron Keating: No, no, unfortunately, I wanted to be a saxophone player.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Cameron Keating: And I, was put into clarinet.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Cameron Keating: And then I thought kind of uncool. M. Most of the. Yeah. Clarinet players were uncool. and I. I did like the big, beefy dude that was playing for Tina Turner on the saxophone. I thought he was doing a great job.

Andrew Hutchison: And. Yeah.

Cameron Keating: Yeah. And then the guys from UB40. So. Yeah. So I couldn’t switch. He wouldn’t let me switch. So I said, I’m out of it.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay. So you turn to the dark side or the. The alternate side, which is, of course, flogging HiFi equipment. Have you been doing that a while?

Cameron Keating: Yeah. So I moved in. I was, doing a bachelor of Business, accounting. And I went to work for TEAC.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Cameron Keating: TIAC in the days were about 19 people. we were in Whiteman Street, South Melbourne. And we were.

Andrew Hutchison: I remember that address well, for some reason.

Cameron Keating: Yeah, yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: At the bottom of every ad or something.

Cameron Keating: Yeah, yeah. Right near the casino now. And, it’s a really. It’s a great spot. So we were the next to Rose Music, which was Yamaha at the time. We were the people that were closest to the city as far as distributors of HiFi gear. And. And we had, Tascam. We had blowpunk TVs.

00:50:00

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Cameron Keating: Tek, of course. we had all the cassettes and so forth. And then we had, Denon, Nippon Music. so we had the record label.

Andrew Hutchison: At the record label.

Cameron Keating: Yeah. So we had a really cool, eclectic.

Andrew Hutchison: Quite a little band of Brads then, really.

Cameron Keating: Yeah, yeah. So it was a lot of fun. I really enjoyed it. And, because of the. The business background that I’d studied. So they put me into statistics and getting a lot of things done.

Andrew Hutchison: Early 80s or something.

Cameron Keating: Yeah, yeah. Mid 80s. Mid 80s. Yeah, late 80s. So, Yeah, so I was put into that area and, then started to work my way through the industry a bit.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Cameron Keating: Yeah.

Max Media is celebrating 20 years this year

Andrew Hutchison: At some point you struck out on your own. And I should mention that Max Media is your business.

Cameron Keating: 20 years this year.

Andrew Hutchison: I was gonna say I was just about to say it feels like 20 years.

Cameron Keating: Yeah, yeah. Towards the end of this year it’s 20 years. So we’ll be celebrating that.

Andrew Hutchison: It’s quite a, that’s quite an achievement.

The Swiss make some interesting loudspeakers

Congratulations. I mean it’s a tough industry to be in, but you have got a. I mean I’m not quite sure what you were distributing back in the day. I mean you’ll tell us where you started. But the current lineup is. Well, I mean the one that, that I know about, as I mentioned to you yesterday, Piega, which I believe is approximately how it’s pronounced, is such a lovely loudspeaker. the Swiss make some interesting loudspeakers. Speakers, they all sound a little bit different. They’re all beautifully made of course, you know, understandably have the ability to really finely machine pieces of metal which is in fact Piaga has got a lot of aluminium in it I believe.

Adam Prangelll: Yeah. These days it’s all aluminium bodies. So it’s extruded aluminium. And they find it is the most rigid. Well, possibly. Well the thing is, see Piga go up to $600,000.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, they do, but they also start at what, five.

Adam Prangelll: well they do have some products and they do produce in China and they produce in Switzerland. So what they call their A series out of China is a little bit more on the affordable and you get the bookshelf speakers, you know, in the world of about $3,000. The Swiss made product as a bookshelf speaker would really start in that sort of five grand sort of category.

Andrew Hutchison: I mean that’s, I mean you know, 5,000 odd dollars for Swiss made in Switzerland. And that’s kind of great value, isn’t it?

Adam Prangelll: Yeah, it is great. And it, I mean it, we say it’s a discerning customer. that sort of goes to the Piaga. I mean not everybody wants a Swiss swatch or can afford a switch Swiss watch. So you know it’s basically. They’ve narrowed down the field of what they want in I guess a step size and sound. And then it comes down to that.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, well it’s certainly the sound is very cohesive, very balanced, very neutral, very easy to listen to. Yeah, I’ve been impressed in past occasions where I’ve had a listen to them.

That tube amplifier is very striking. It’s a quality looking item

but you’ve got we’re sitting in your room and there’s a number of interesting products in front of us. That tube amplifier is is very striking.

Cameron Keating: That was launched two weeks ago.

Andrew Hutchison: Oh, okay.

Cameron Keating: So that is the new Fezz Olympia. I’ll explain a little bit more about Fezz in a moment but sure. That is 100 watts into four ohm. So 100 watt per channel.

Andrew Hutchison: That’s a four ohm.

Cameron Keating: dual mono configuration.

Andrew Hutchison: Oh, it has got a Yeah, it’s got four tubes.

Cameron Keating: A channel in the airport obviously KD88s. And so they come standard with the KD88 server from JJ but then they, you can up spec it as well. For a couple hundred or a couple of grand. It goes up to the next level of tube.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

ACameron Keating: And then within us tubes some people have a preference on what style they like or origin or whatever the case may be. So yeah, okay. Auto biasing so that all the complexity of managing the tubes is taken away.

Andrew Hutchison: So no manual adjustment required?

Cameron Keating: No manual adjustment needed.

Andrew Hutchison: No.

Cameron Keating: it’s pretty switched on.

Andrew Hutchison: It’s a quality looking item. I have to admit. Unlike Piaga, I know nothing of Fezz. I don’t know where it’s from.

Cameron Keating: I’ll explain it then.

Fezz is from Poland. And like a lot of the Polish companies

All right. So Fezz is from Poland. And like a lot of the Polish companies that are coming out now and being known and we did, we deal with four of those.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Cameron Keating: so they’re a coming four.

Andrew Hutchison: They’ve always been doing.

Cameron Keating: They’ve been there.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Cameron Keating: And the industry, the HiFi industry in Poland is quite robust. And these guys have been making for a lot of the industry. And the parent company of Fairs is Tyroidi. So they’ve been running in excess of 30 years and they’re in excess of 50 people in the manufacturing side of things. So it’s quite serious. It’s a decent company.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Cameron Keating: as with the other guys that we deal with. so you know, part of that is the substance behind what they’re doing and they can spec it to the way they want. And one thing we do say about Fezz is that okay, so they’re building these awesome transformers and power supplies. And they’re delivering what a lot of people say. Ah, you know, tube amps are a bit noisy, bit this and bit that. We go okay, so we just turn the volume to zero and we go no noise tube amp. And it’s a tubed act. You’d expect some noise. But there’s no noise.

Andrew Hutchison: Neither mechanical from the mainstream nor they’re isolated.

Cameron Keating: Yeah. And they’ve reserved a lot of the best gear internally for themselves.

Andrew Hutchison: So they, they make kind of well they don’t. I don’t know, maybe they do. Do they make tubes in Poland?

00:55:00

Cameron Keating: They don’t make tubes nearby, I guess. No, they’re very close to them. Ah, so tubes, the, the origins of tubes are from a few countries. one of them is in, in hot water at the moment. But anyway, they started it.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, Battle Fawlty once said. so, the transformers though are clearly made in Poland.

Cameron Keating: Well, that is 80% made in Poland. So the only thing that’s not made in Poland is the tubes.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Cameron Keating: Okay. So the casework is made in Poland, by them. I’ll explain a little bit about this design tool.

Andrew Hutchison: I mean, that’s a beautifully machined piece of aluminium, I assume that is.

Cameron Keating: no, it’s actually sheet metal. but what. It looks like aluminium, I guess.

Andrew Hutchison: Hang on. So the front panel, which from this distance 2 meters away looks like it’s a, ah, you know, a nice section of an extrusion. But it’s, but it’s folded.

Cameron Keating: Folded.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay. All right.

Cameron Keating: So these guys own not only the, the finishing side of it, which is the painting, but they own the sheet metal place.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Cameron Keating: so all the gear and componentry that’s going into it, they produce all that. and when it came to the design though, they did say, okay, well they had a series before that that was pretty local in what they did, and a little bit of it went to America and the UK and so forth. But they said, okay, we want to go global. We’re a big company, let’s go global. We’re producing a good product. So they employed a design team. It was a female male combination and they designed something that they thought would aesthetically appeal to a mass. Yeah, as opposed to just that. HiFi. do it yourself kind of looking amplifier.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes, the slightly steampunky DIY look.

Cameron Keating: Yeah, so they’ve achieved that in a nutshell. But what they also achieved in doing that, so they’ve won over an audience on aesthetics. But in, the manufacturing process, they’ve streamlined things by actually getting it right and getting everything looking very similar. So the whole process is from, you know, order to production is a lot quicker than it used to be.

Is the, is the component underneath related to the DAC itself

Andrew Hutchison: Is the, is the component underneath related?

Cameron Keating: It is, yes. Well, the DAC itself is. Okay, so fares make for a lot of the big heavyweights in the industry as far as the high end componentries, the transformers and so forth. the dac, Lucas, from Lamposader. These guys make his power supplies and transformers.

Andrew Hutchison: Is that right?

Cameron Keating: So they said, well hang on, why don’t you make us something? And Lucas pulled something out of his drawer and he’s a small company. He said well I’ve got this board that I never put into production but it’s really nice.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Cameron Keating: So the boys got it and they played with it and three months later they go yeah, this sounds good. So they produce their first dac. So that’s the Equinox dac which is a single ended and the one we’ve got today is the balance unit. So it’s a proper balance. So when we were talking last year I said, you know, my, my rig at home and a lot of the big rigs we do are balanced. Can you produce that for us? They said we’re working on it now.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay, okay.

Cameron Keating: I said okay, so when will I have that? And he said I think you have it in six to eight months. We’re there. I said okay, cool, cool. So we now then explain to people that if you want a balanced unit you can go that way. But if you’ve got a small let’s say a watt, a side single ended set amp.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Cameron Keating: And you wanted to get a little bit more sparkle. You’d go for the single ended dac A because of the inputs anyway.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Cameron Keating: But it’s just got that little bit more gain on it.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Cameron Keating: And it’s just magic. So people are just blown away. So we do blind tests with much more expensive DACs.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, yeah.

Cameron Keating: And people are always coming back to the first dac. It is brilliant.

Andrew Hutchison: And you’re saying it’s heritage lies with Lampers.

Cameron Keating: You know, Pacific DAC is one of, regardless one of the best DACs in the world. And I think they’re in the world of 65 grand now.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Cameron Keating: So the Fezz, you know, they’re a volume company and this is part of the little issue that they had. They said okay, well I think Lamposader was producing a handful of Dax a month.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Cameron Keating: And Fezz’s requirements were like 2, 300, 400 possibly. and that’s just scratching it.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Cameron Keating: So there was a little stumbling block there. But they seem to have that in order now.

Pylon is known as one of the best box builders in Europe

Andrew Hutchison: Okay, so, so pricing wise we’ve discussed Piga’s, you know, goes up to $600,000 which is. Yeah, it starts at three to five. fares quite well priced I believe as well that tube amplifier, what a channel into. Did you say into four or into 400?

Cameron Keating: Into four. Yeah. So 100 by two, into four and that. Okay. So that is 12 grand as it is. So that includes the cage, which their other products don’t generally include a cage or a moat or the sub line out. So these are standard features that come with the Olympia.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Cameron Keating: So this is, you know, you don’t have to tick as many boxes. The only thing you need to tick it as far as a box is the color.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, yeah.

Cameron Keating: And then down the back, you’ll see a little card slot. You can screw that out and in time it’ll be about October. There’ll be an option of the Bluetooth streamer.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

01:00:00

Cameron Keating: Or you can go for a Phono stage or a dac.

Andrew Hutchison: All right. They all plug into the same little socket.

Cameron Keating: Plug into that same socket. But it’s only one that you can slot.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, you have to choose one.

Cameron Keating: Yeah. And that’ll be six. About $600. And they currently produce a solid state amplifier. And I said okay, is the phono stage going to be as like that or. And there’s a deck to be like that. He goes, no, no, in both cases the DAC will be better and the phono stage will be better. So we’re used to that now already we do a brand called cos and they have the slot in modules and it works really well. So we’re expecting some good things out of this guy.

Andrew Hutchison: That’s, that’s. Well, it’s. It makes it upgradable. But in theory I guess you can. If you’ve lost interest in records at some point, you can plug a DAC module in.

Cameron Keating: Plug the DAC module in. Or if you just want to simplify your life and just have one product on the shelf.

Andrew Hutchison: Well, yeah, you stick the Bluetooth in. I guess it seems like it.

Cameron Keating: Yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: Well, bit of a, you know, compromise.

Cameron Keating: I had a few conversations yesterday about Bluetooth, but anyway. Yeah, we don’t recommend it as much.

Andrew Hutchison: Well, no, it’s, it’s not serious fidelity, I guess.

Cameron Keating: So for the car, it’s great.

Andrew Hutchison: Oh absolutely. Yeah. Hey, I, The loudspeakers, which I am. I mean, does that say pile?

Cameron Keating: You’re envious of those, aren’t you? From your background.

Andrew Hutchison: Well, I mean they look, they look like a few different UK speakers. Really. And But you know, I mean, I, I don’t know anything about Pylon.

Cameron Keating: Pylon. Okay. Similar to Fezz. They’re a big company so you’re dealing with 55 plus people.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, I feel like, I feel like I’ve heard of the brand over the years as some kind of. As a perhaps. Are they a man manufacturer of other people?

Cameron Keating: They are, they are indeed.

Cameron Keating: Yeah.

Cameron Keating: So they don’t like to tell too many people about that.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Cameron Keating: but they do produce for a number of high quality brands.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Cameron Keating: Known as one of the best box builders in Europe. Yes. And they have a number of ranges and products within those ranges. Well, you know, with the Amber is one product but it’s multiple finishes. The Zircon, is one product but multiple finishes. And in this series here, we call it the Diamond Mark 2 series. So this is, this taps out without going into the extra finishes. You can employ this, taps out at eight grand for this particular pair.

Pylon is expanding into Eastern Europe with new loudspeakers

Andrew Hutchison: That seems like a lot of loudspeaker. What we’re talking about is it’s got twin six and a half bass units, a five and a quarter mid by the looks of it. And a very nice little soft dome tweeter that kind of looks like a very popular Scanspeed model that Sears. It’s a Sears though. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Cameron Keating: So these guys have within their range of Jasper series, they run with Scanspeak, with the diamond series they run with Sears.

Andrew Hutchison: I’ll say they’re, they’re all Sears drivers.

Cameron Keating: M. But they’re modified.

Andrew Hutchison: Right.

Cameron Keating: So Pylon is that big a company, they can force the change. And so they said, okay, well the previous series we bought off the shelf, but now we want to model for the next series. And a lot of the push came from the customer base. So like for example, India said we want to, we want a bit more robustness out of the Sound. So they said, okay, we can make it more powerful. We can do this, we can do this. And so the feedback came around and they said, yeah, okay. So it took a while. A slightly bigger box, much bigger presence in the sound. we’re delighted with it. It’s just a matter of, you know that the Polish government has given both Fezz and Pylon a bit of money to do some exit exhibitions here and there. and just to spread their wing and get the brand going. So that’s why you’ll see more of the Pylon and the Fezz now. they’re venturing into these, this territory.

Andrew Hutchison: Of the world and Pylon, Eastern European country.

Cameron Keating: Eastern European, family business again. So they’ve been running for quite some.

Andrew Hutchison: Time in for some reason I thought Estonia, but no, Poland. Poland as well.

Cameron Keating: Yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: You got a love of Poland, haven’t you? I do at the Moment Polish show too much.

Cameron Keating: I actually haven’t been and they keep promising.

Andrew Hutchison: Everyone says it’s amazing.

Cameron Keating: They do say it’s amazing but it’s cold at the time. I do well really want to go, you know. so they keep showing me pictures.

Andrew Hutchison: Of snow and I’m the nice thing.

Cameron Keating: About have a look at my pool. It’s beautiful at the moment.

Cameron says Innuos sound better than previous streamer offerings

Andrew Hutchison: Hey, fantastic Cameron, it’s great to see you here with an interesting range of products and the Innuos.

Cameron Keating: We didn’t talk about the Inuit.

Andrew Hutchison: Well would you like to?

Cameron Keating: We can talk about Innuos

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Cameron Keating: Well in us has been the streamer server product that we’ve been handling for m. Many many years. So we’ve into I guess in this case not so much the fourth generation but, but when I first started talking to the guys I said listen Cam, it’s the next series we want you to take on so don’t jump on board just yet which is the Mark 1 series. Come on board with the MK2 and the honest relationship we had in that discussion. so really it came about and there’s a lot of trust there. So they said okay so MK2 we ran, we’re running MK3 at the moment. So MK3 being server streamer combinations. Then we’ve got the Pulse series which is a streamer only. what they’ve done is they’ve integrated their own player so a lot of people use Roon

01:05:00

Cameron Keating: whereas the Innuos, you don’t need to, you can now use their own which I think is better because a it’s cheap, it doesn’t cost you anything.

Andrew Hutchison: Doesn’t cost anything.

Cameron Keating: Yeah. sound wise it’s better because even though Roon might be a little bit better featured I think the, the Inuit sounds better and most people that have gone back to not paying the annual.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Cameron Keating: Have really said wow, we really enjoy the sound. So that’s a great thing.

Andrew Hutchison: that’s what it’s kind of all about.

Cameron Keating: That’s what it’s all about in my world.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Cameron Keating: And, and now some of the added features of this of this player that they’ve got is you can actually bolt on a USB stick at the back on top of the streamer only units and then you can just pull the music off the, of the USB drive.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Cameron Keating: So they didn’t have that before but now they’ve got it. Not a lot of people know about it. I said well it’s not just the streamer anymore so that’s The Pulse series, it’s pretty, pretty cool. Even the Zen series, you can do that as well. Kind of an extra drive.

Andrew Hutchison: My memory of the pricing is that it’s super affordable, speaking.

Cameron Keating: Yeah. Relatively.

Phil Sawyer: Yeah.

Cameron Keating: Well, we can’t compete with the Chinese being made in Portugal and the fact that they’ve got their own app and then they’ve got this service that just never ends, you know, so it’s well beyond the warranty appearance of two years. It just doesn’t stop.

Andrew Hutchison: So if you’ve got it, if you buy a piece of Inuit and you, you’ve got an issue. They’re out there. They’re there.

Cameron Keating: Yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: That’s kind of nice. Yeah. Really lacking in some products. Of course.

Cameron Keating: I hear bricking going on.

Andrew Hutchison: Not that anyone knows until it happens, I guess.

Cameron Keating: Yeah, Correct.

Andrew Hutchison: So Portuguese.

Cameron Keating: Portuguese, yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Cameron Keating: So they cut their teeth originally in the uk, but Amelia, in Uno, you know, when Brex Exit was coming about, they decided let’s, let’s get out of here.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. Yeah.

Cameron Keating: So they, they, being Portuguese of origin, they decided that they’d now go home. Go home, start. Start fresh. A little bit more affordable as well.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. and it’s a bit nicer.

Cameron Keating: Weather is much nicer. Yeah. So they’re going great guns at the moment. And the, the what we’re featuring today is a Zen next gen which got launched last year and that’s a streamer server on board. And unlike the previous series where the. You, could see the CD drive, this one is just a bolt on it via a USB drive. So you like a verbatim or a TDK drive, just whack it on the back and all the smarts are still on the inside. That’ll do all the ripping for you.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Cameron Keating: Yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: I mean there’s still people wanting to rip their own. I mean, I guess if you’ve got a solid CD collection and some of the stuff that you got is not available on a streaming service, I guess that’s what you’re going to do is.

Cameron Keating: Well, you know, we stream like we look at a home. You know, we’ve got Apple Music because we use that in a car. It’s great in that car. we’ve got Netflix, we’ve got Disney, we’ve got we sometimes we run ko but we’ve got all these streaming things going on. and then there’s a lot of people like of our vintage M. We’ve got a huge CD collection.

Andrew Hutchison: You think? I am.

Cameron Keating: Wow. I’m just going by the Salt and pepper. That’s okay. Salt and pepper.

Andrew Hutchison: It’s only salt, I think.

Cameron Keating: Little bit of pepper.

Andrew Hutchison: Not much.

Cameron Keating: So, you know, it’s, you know, we do like to archive our music and we’ve been collectors, over the years. You know, people are still buying vinyl even though it’s 80 bucks a record.

Andrew Hutchison: But, well, they’re buying them in ever increasing numbers.

Cameron Keating: Yeah, they are. They are.

Andrew Hutchison: I’ve never seen so many records in my life. There’s stacks of records in people’s rooms. Not in your room.

Cameron Keating: I’ve tapered off a little bit. As soon as they hit 80 bucks a record, I go, yeah. Now we’re kind of losing it a little bit, aren’t we?

Andrew Hutchison: Well, there’s price tickets on a lot of people’s records and a lot of them are way more than 80 bucks.

A lot of people having trouble streaming, says M. M.

Oh, way more.

Cameron Keating: But I think, you know, anyway, so we’ll go back into the CD side of it. So the archive, you know, like in on this floor, you’ll find that streaming, is a little bit tricky. And I’ve got a 5G external network.

Andrew Hutchison: Oh, there’s a lot of people having trouble streaming.

Cameron Keating: Yeah, I don’t have that. And I sort of built in for the fact is that we might have that issue. And so I’ll go from the streamer to the internal. Most of what I’m playing at the moment is the internal. I don’t have a glitch.

Andrew Hutchison: No.

Cameron Keating: And it sounds, it sounds fantastic. So, you know, I’ve got real high res files in there and it’s working a bit. And then I’ll go to somebody’s occasional Boz  request and I’ll play it. And that’s nice. And,

Andrew Hutchison: M. It’s actually a good album. It is a good. There’s a couple of tracks that are played to death at high five shows.

Cameron Keating: But it’s, it’s thanks to you. Yeah. So anyway,

Andrew Hutchison: Yep, that’s the one.

Cameron Keating: But we, we do, we do enjoy it. And so as far as the archiving is concerned, there are a lot of guys that like to work off the grid, so to speak, and don’t want all these subscriptions.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, well, of course. Yeah. So, I guess that’s a, that’s, that is, is a reason. Yeah.

Cameron Keating: And the fact is you can buy it with one and expand this one out to 16 terabytes of storage.

Andrew Hutchison: It should be enough.

Cameron Keating: That’s enough.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s excellent. All right. Hey, thanks very much for your time.

Cameron Keating: Thank you.

The show’s clearly been going quite well this year compared to last year

Andrew Hutchison: The show’s clearly been going quite well. It’s pretty busy.

Cameron Keating: I’ve enjoyed this show more so than last year.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Cameron Keating: And the year before.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Cameron Keating: So I think the, the attendance has been good. I think there’s been a lot more new faces.

Andrew Hutchison: I. Yeah, there’s a distinct lack of the

01:10:00

Andrew Hutchison: regulars. I think you see a few familiar faces but there’s a lot of new faces.

Cameron Keating: The weather may have helped a bit. Last year was atrocious.

Andrew Hutchison: Last year the weather was a problem. Yes.

Cameron Keating: Well, I’m definitely You know this room, we’ve, we’ve had a quite a paired back system. As in the last year we had a system in in excess of 280 grand. Just one of them was that. And then this year we’re like the piegas top, you know they’re 16 grand.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. I did catch my eye that you’re you’ve, you’ve got a. Yeah, a more of a value orientated.

Cameron Keating: Yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: Rather than a super high end system.

Cameron Keating: Less is more. and really, you know, last year we had so many people come in and go wow. And then they walked out. They just said too expensive. Don’t want to even listen to them.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, see that’s, that’s. I mean you want, in some ways you want to show off the best that you’ve got but keep it real. That the problem?

Cameron Keating: Yeah, yeah. So in this case we’re trying to keep it real and even though the pylons are half the price of the piagas, we say they’re a different market. but they’re both punching way above their weight. absolutely.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. Solid value.

Cameron Keating: Excellent.

Andrew Hutchison: Hey, thanks again. Good luck for the rest of the day and we will speak again soon.

Cameron Keating: Let’s have our coffee. Yeah, let’s have a coffee.

Andrew Hutchison: Thanks Cameron.

01:11:06