al7478:
AEJim:At best I'd use these shows as a taster to shortlist anything you'd like to try seriously and then arrange a proper demo with a good local dealer.
This is just it. I'm afraid I think your gripes are just down to the nature of these shows. You're right, some will request music that will make others sniff, but a manufacturer ought to be brave enough to play it (or perhaps be brave enough to say "sorry, it'll sound rubbish, thats not what we made them for..."). You can't have it both ways.
And people cant always hang around to make sure the seating position they want comes available.
Hi again guys, (my apologies to the OP as I seem to have hijacked your thread somewhat!)ÿ
I think you're absolutely right Al, I've always been keen to play anything the listener wants, we try to bring a reasonable selection with us, even better when people bring their own material - but this does count against you sometimes.
One of the complaints I've read quite often about Hi-Fi shows is all of the "tinkly piano Jazz" being played in the rooms, this is understandable as using very well recorded, simple material is a very easy way to show off your product - to me it's too easy though, this sort of music will sound good on pretty much anything! I see it as a cop-out, it's not what the majority listen to.
The downside of offering choice is that some people bring the most awful material and scare everyone else away - I remember a particularly painful show where we had AE1mkIII's on the back of a 10k system and a couple of hairy biker-types (lovely, enthusiastic guys to be fair) asked me to put on a CDR so I had no idea what to expect - I pressed play and Europe's "The Final Countdown" poured forth in all its glory, the room cleared, tumbleweeds blew past in the corridor but they wanted to listen to the whole track... I swear it was a super-extended 40 minute cut, at least it felt like it. I'm not against old rock but that track sounded as flat and compressed as a proverbial pancake (oh yeah, it's pancake day! Joy!).
So you sometimes are punished for being accommodating but we will continue to do it and we will still have some turn their noses up for "our" lack of taste, each to their own and you'll never please everybody! The only thing that annoys me is the looks of absolute disgust you receive from some, to be honest I'd rather not have those types of customers in any case!ÿ
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To Hughes and the subsequent posters -
You're all absolutely right!ÿ
We have been quiet, we have been lacking focus for a few years and I can explain it all! (I try to be brief but I do tend to get on a roll when typing so bear with me...)
Basically until 2002 or thereabouts we were very much a Hi-Fi company, we had products ranging from £150 to £8000 - all stereo speakers. Around that time our MD (the last of the original trio of founders) decided he'd start thinking about retirement and began offloading responsibility for company direction to our head of sales. Under pressure to show that he could move the company forwards he decided to try and get us into more stores, more magazines and generally a wider market. As his direction took hold we started to innovate with our new products to get coverage (world's first Internet Wi-Fi radio, first Bluetooth speakers etc...) - the issue being that this is Sony territory and we really don't want to get in a battle with those kinds of multi-billion $ corporations! All the while we contined to produce the Hi-Fi but with our relatively small team there was the inevitable stretching of resources, we still made very respectable 5* product but in hindsight it didn't quite have the correct market in mind.
The Neo range is a good example of where we got to - they sounded great, looked, well, bland if I'm being kind! Our engineers all came from the Pro industry and looks were not really a major consideration, this was not so much of a problem in the mid-90's when Hi-Fi was still very much an enthusiast only area, but nowadays it's becoming more and more part of the modern home and it has to fit in aesthetically.
The products were as well engineered and built as any, they were still innovative (those neodynium drivers were a first at the price and are still rare in all but high-end speakers) but somehow we hid all that behind the dullest styling and cheap-looking vinyl wrap. A good example is when we took a close look at some of our competition and realised one very popular brand were using plastic chassis on their drivers - you could bend them with your hand! But they looked pretty, were painted like metal and stamped with logo's, our high-quality die-cast chassis was hidden behind matte black paint... Those Neo drivers also weighed very little compared to old-fashioned, heavy ferrite magnets - this made the speakers actually feel cheaper when you picked them up due to their light weight, something we hadn't considered until one of our distributors told us so!
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Fast-forward to today and we've changed a lot of things at AE, those Pro engineers have been moved to our new Pro division where they are in their element! The AE22's have been very well received and are being used in some top studio's already (some very big albums have already been mixed on them!) and we have an active Pro Sub/Sat system literally just in - actually this may even be of interest to the WHF team since they liked the 22's so much!
Our main AE brand is now my department, with our own R&D team (I've been with AE for 8 or 9 years now as Marketing, Tech Support and 3.5 years on the road as National Accounts Manager so I know the market pretty well), we've been in position for just over a year and the first fruits of our labour were the AE1mkIII SE's (what a mouthful!), these have been very well reviewed at £2.5k in about half a dozen publications now (including WHF as mentioned by a previous poster) with numerous comments about them being one of the finest compact speakers on the planet! This was our indication that we're back to being serious about real Hi-Fi and this will be our direction for the near future.
The Radiance Series are our first completely new products with this team, in total they've been about 3 years in development - Our young and enthusiastic head of R&D has been perfecting the metal-cone driver during this time and looking for solutions to get the best from our favoured ring-radiator tweeter. There is much new technology in the Radiance but I only ever had one goal with them - to recreate music! And by that I mean they MUST be enjoyable to listen to, they MUST get your foot tapping! They tick all the "Hi-Fi" boxes, and in our opinion do so better than anything anywhere near the price, but one of my strictest tests in listening was to get all the guys from the office in one by one and get them to play their own CD's (we really do need to get a turntable!) - I watched them from the back of the room and if their feet were still and there heads weren't bobbing then I wasn't happy!
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I've already written War and Peace now it seems so I'd better wrap up, I just wanted to explain where we're at and why we've been quiet. We have been putting all our resources into the new products and direction, the Radiance will be a new entry level for us, the next product you'll see from us will be higher end. We are just now starting to go back to our roots and I hope it means us yet-again raising the bar as we did with the original AE1 back in 1987!
I could go on about the development process more, how we listened to dozens of capacitors over the course of months shut in our listening room - desperate to create the shortest possible signal paths with the highest grade components (and it's not always the most expensive that sound best! You can't always just throw money at problems!!), how we've removed all the resistors from our crossover networks, the benefits of the DXT© lens (and how we hadn't ever thought to ask the company who made it for us what "DXT" actually stands for - much to our embarrassment when Ketan from WHF asked us as we dropped the speakers in a couple of weeks back! - "Diffraction eXpansion Technology" for those who care
)... But I think I'd be waffling...
I've not been too active on the forums so I'll pay more attention and happily answer any questions I can in future, hopefully more concisely than I've done here!
Cheers,
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James Luce
Brand Manager
Acoustic Energy Ltd.ÿ
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