by Michael

Questions for Distributors to ask Manufacturers

We came up with a list. Trying to be exhaustive here, so please let us know of we missed something.

Some of these questions are a little delicate – but it is better to know the answers before hand, before misconceptions and unwarranted assumptions eventually get everyone’s knickers in a twist, isn’t it?

1. Does the manufacturer (M) sell directly to customers in this country?
2. If so, will they agree to pay the distributor (D) the amount over best export that they sell the products for?
3. How important do they see shows being?
4. How many shows per year do they want to show at ?
5. What type of systems do they want to show [percentages each for statement level systems, midline, and entry level]
6. Who staffs shows? [just the D, or does the M send staff / themselves]
7. Do they expect to sell things at shows?
8. If so, who gets the profits: how are they divided up between the exhibitor, the D, the M, and the local dealer[if any]?
9. Who pays for shows: Shipping? Fees?
10. Does the M plan to advertise: online? print? To what extent / frequency?
11 If so, who pays?
12. Is there a repair center in this country?
13. Who pays for repairs? Warranty? Off-warranty? Shipping? Parts? Labor?
14. How are prices determined? Does the D set them? Are they set by the M? Are they the same world-wide?
15. How was the line previously represented in this country?
a. Did they sell direct at discounts? Did they raise the price more than 10% above the price elsewhere in the world? [i.e. does the dealer population now hate this brand?]
b. Did they setup dealers? How many? What quality?
c. What did the M like about the previous D? Not like? Why did they let them go? How long were they distributor? What quality of distributor are they?
16. Does the M expect the dealer network to be expanded? How important is this? What quality of dealers do they want – does it matter? How many / year?
17. What are the targets for the top line revenue growth? YoY? In 5 years?
18. How long is the lead time for products? entry level? midlevel? statement level?
19. Is there a M rep here in the country we are supposed to work with?
20. Numbers: what were sales like last year? The previous year? Both worldwide and here.
21. What has been the best selling products? What does M want to be the best selling?
22. What kind of marketing has the M been doing? The previous D? Are any changes foreseen?

Suitability of Products

1. Does the general appearance of the products appeal to the typical buyer in this country. If not, will they appeal to any buyers at all in this country?
2. Is the performance competitive at the price?
3. How is the packaging? Will each product sold need to be re-boxed by the distributor to withstand the slings and arrows of our reportedly worse-in-world shippers?
4. How is the reliability?
a. Will each product need to be opened and tested before shipping to customer to prevent an above average rate of DOA sales?
b. Are there spurious failures in the field?
c. Are the products small enough to be shipped when the fail? Or will there have to be on-site repairs?
d. Is there at least one repair center in the country?
e. If so, do the people at the repair center know their stuff? Do they respond in reasonable time? Are they suitable pleasant to customers? Do they keep the product clean – or leave it a filthy mess?
5. How heavy/large are the products? Will they be a pain to warehouse? To send to and setup at shows?
6. Are the products UL / CE inspected?
7. Does the product ‘work well with others’ in actual systems that people may have? If an amp, can it drive real speakers? If a speaker, can it be driven by real amps?
8.

Hmmmm.. not all of these appear to be in the English language, but hopefully you get the gist.

in High-end Audio HiFi and Stereo / How-to / Philosophy 0 comments
 by Michael

Won't Get Fooled Again – Computer Audio

We have NOT gone over the the Dark Side

I have been talking about streaming music here a bit lately. While bored waiting for CES to get here, I surfed around a bit and came across an article on Audiostream.

Audiostream,com is Stereophile’s new spinoff computer audio zine.

Some of the perspective there on this stuff got me to thinking that you all might think we’ve gone to the Dark Side.

Nope.

Not us.

Not ever.

Not to pick on anyone in particular, but lets look at this article on the Musical Fidelity V-DAC II.

He does a excellent job describing the Musical Fidelity family sound and hints at their version-itus. But the overall context of the review reveals even more about how we are are experiencing yet another…

Worse is Better – Don’t You Clueless People Out There Get It?

… event in high fidelity audio.

Kool Aid Flavor #1 – If you don’t get it then you must be old or stupid

Now, about the AARP crack in the article… and that young people being are comfortable with ripping, no wait burning, no wait… downloading? streaming? digital music? computer audio? online music?

Heaven help me but I agree with Sam Tellig – “There’s so much uncertainty and confusion surrounding computer audio and high-resolution downloads.”

First, I think young people, the under 23 crowd, think all this junk is for middle aged geeks who have a lot of extra time on their hands. The desktop is seen as old school and not seen as an entertaining piece of hardware.

Second, if one tries and follows where the big money is going, what is being invested in, it is not,… well, it IS really confusing.

Kool Aid Flavor #2 – There is no confusion

First, there is Amazon and Apple and Google investing in their cloud services – which are, in this context, essentially, places to store music and videos and photos on a website somewhere. This is all because they figure this is currently the best way to monetize music and videos [they can make money off of subscription services (my prediction as the winner of the end game) – but not nearly as much. I mean, otherwise, how are they going to sell you the same pieces of music, over and over again… DSOTM say, about every 3 years we have to buy a newer better one right? :-)].

But you have all these blogs talking about ripping your CDs and saving them in some format or another across hopefully striped terrabyte drives on some noisy PC and playing it back using clumsy itunes or some such software. Seems like a big disconnect to me. Besides ripping being illegal [another stupid law written by corporate lobbyists, I agree, but…] and the RIAA and unscrupulous lawyers happy to use these laws to extort the most harmless of people, this is just a Transitional Technology – people making some money as we all make the transition from physical media to online media.

But on the hardware side, there is real confusion, IMHO. You have Google TV and Android TV versus Apple TV versus Smart TV versus the now ancient iPod and several thousand it seems boxes that sit on your network and pump music from place to place.

There IS a lot of confusion here because nothing is winning [although I heard that 9 million people have now permanently dropped cable and moved 100% online – aka cutting-the-cord – to netflix et. al…. so people WANT a solution now, they are diving in even without one], The idea being that music is online and coming back to the family living room from a long hiatus – and if 99.99% of people are going to be listening to music in their HT then that is the hardware source we maybe should be looking at making high-fidelity hardware work with.

Kool Aid Flavor #3 – The cheapest of the new sounds better than the most expensive of the old

Remember those $200 CD players back in 83 and 84? How they were better by far than any turntable? Well, they’re… back…. [here is where the horrified scream needs to be forcibly suppressed so as not to freak out Neli].

You really going to let yourself be fooled again?

Here is the quote [and I see this kind of thing said EVERYWHERE by the computer audio crowd, not just on this site] “That’s because I can enjoy a bargain as much as the next guy and the idea that you can buy a device for $349, connect it to your computer on one end and your hi-fi on the other and play music that’ll make your CD player weep with envy is cause for celebration. ”

[OK. Hard to hold back that scream huh?].

Be interesting to put up an $200 Oppo DVD/CD player [the cheapest player that is widely recommended] against this combination of several thousands $$$ [check audiogon if you do not believe. Well, when they get a category for this, anyway, until then search CD players and these show up] computer audio system with $349 external DAC. Interesting also to see which wins on the typical – usually bright sounding – solid-state system most computer audio people have and an ultra hifi system and see if the Oppo weeps or, perhaps, kicks ass. I think it would be close, but it would be a fun shootout, huh? 🙂

————————————————————————————-

In conclusion, We are Not Drinking no Darn Kool Aid.

As we explore various approaches and solutions for incorporating online music into our casual, or exploratory, focused, or ultimate music experiences we will do the following:

1. We WILLfocus on fidelity fidelity fidelity

2. We will NOT lie and tell you it is Better than what it is not better than [ *sheesh* ]

3. We will NOT say people are stupid if they do not see how obvious all this non-obvious stuff is

4. We will NOT throw away the good of the past [but we do expect to see a lot of very cheap CDs at yard sales in a few years. Can’t wait. :-)] but we will NOT hang on unnecessarily to past assumptions that are no longer as important [ultra flat screens now allow video to be brought into the high-end audio listening room, similarly the tablet/smartphone now allows more interactivity with our music in the listening room, etc.]

in High-end Audio HiFi and Stereo / Music / Philosophy / Sounding Off 0 comments
 by Michael

How does it make you feel?

Reading an old post from 2006:

Where No Low Powered Amps Have Gone Before

Although being a little old-love-letter-embarrassed about some of my ecstatically enthusiastic exclamations… there was this:

But this is not about how the speaker or system sounds.

It is not.

This is about how the sounds affects the listener.

In the end why should I care about the sound, beyond a certain minimum standard, any more than I care about the minute construction details of the chair I sit in, or the the type of weaving and glue the carpet underneath my feat uses? What we CARE about REALLY is how comfortable the chair is; about how pleasant the carpet is to look at and feel underneath our feet.

What if all reviews and all show reports paid attention to nothing except how the sounds …made …them …feel.

I bet the Stereophile list of Class A components would look a lot different than they do now.

Ah, the old days of Stereophile recommended lists and innocent youth:-) [They are so far down into mid-fi these days that they just are not relevant from our perspective].

So, having this discussion, this argument, with both Peter Qvortrup, and on this blog with Joe Roberts, about their perspective that the ultimate is the ‘absolute sound’ and how anything else is, essentially, worthless candy that is just a passing fashion….

I see their points, and do not necessarily disagree with them if one is trying to make a LOGICAL choice about what their system should sound like… but I keep coming back to the above sentiment. I may not care, and my feet and toes do not care, if the carpet under my feet is a Persian carpet from one of the oldest families and a very valuable antique. Authenticity is not always the highest priority. Sometimes it is softness, and attractiveness, and smell and cost and numerous other things that are independent from authenticity.

Sure, if authenticity has all the features you are looking for, and you can afford it, then you are in the best of all worlds, and you just have to do some investigation and find the most authentic instance of whatever it is you are interested in, whether it be Persian carpets, Winterthur Queen Anne chairs, or home audio reproduction.

But if you are looking for that gestalt, that symbiosis with the Now, that unnameable something, then perhaps some more introspection is required and deeper evaluation of just what it is that our particular souls are looking for.

Which is, of course, the problem with using ‘how do you feel?’ methodology – it relies on us being introspective, and being introspective is difficult. It also relies on us being extremely honest with ourselves- and that is nearly impossible for any of us. It is easier to rely on one’s ‘betters’ to tell us what to buy and what to think. And then move on.

Facts… unfiltered and unprejudiced facts… are great and I am not suggesting anarchy [ala TAS].

But if you can understand ‘how you feel’ about something with minimum contamination from all the hordes telling you what you feel, then I believe THIS is the way to determine the true worth of something that is much art as science.

[This is a fun movie clip, but in truth, I find the newer Star Treks juvenile, shallow and self-indulgent, including much of what is at the end of this clip (after Spock’s mother appears). But I LOVE the original series, written by the who’s who of sci fi authors and inspiring several generations at NASA et. al. … and little ole me. ]

How.. do… we… feel?

Not an easy question. In fact quite difficult, for all of us.

Funny, I like PQ’s Audio Note gear precisely BECAUSE of the ways they can make me feel. 🙂 [to wit, it makes me feel good or ecstatic, and does not make me feel bored or irritated]. That some of this gear is as close to authentic we can get with current technology, approaching the ‘absolute sound’, well… that’s just great too. 🙂

in High-end Audio HiFi and Stereo / Philosophy 0 comments