when is the 2010 Awards planned

[chebby]

AEJim:iterally made it the day of the 4pm deadline due to late confirmation from our MD in the US...

I had always thought AE were a UK company.

I just re-read your website's company blurb in the 'About us' section and found no mention of US ownership.

ps Can you tell us what 'embedive' means in... "This alliance has enabled AE to focus attention on further growth embedives" ?

 

[AEJim]

chebby:
AEJim:iterally made it the day of the 4pm deadline due to late confirmation from our MD in the US...

I had always thought AE were a UK company.

I just re-read your website's company blurb in the 'About us' section and found no mention of US ownership.

Technically: Owned by World's largest volume speaker manufacturer "Formosa Prosonic Industries" in Malaysia since the mid 90's (they build many of Sony/Toshiba/Panasonic's speakers amongst others), but run as an independent UK company - they have no say over what we do and certainly do us no favours! (we have to buy all our parts and stock like anyone else!) We are pretty much a handy marketing tool for them to help showcase their manufacturing capabilities to the large volume Far East companies.

Our MD and last remaining original AE founder retired about 3 years ago and the ex head of Boston Acoustics in the US came over to run the company as we had a good working relationship distributing Boston in the UK (also sharing much manufacture from the Malaysian parent company, who also build for other UK Hi-Fi companies). He's still based in the US but is over here about 1 week in 5 - the rest of the company are all from the UK and mostly local to Cirencester, all reference product is still built here too! Myself and the head of R'n'D are very English indeed and responsible for all product design, though he drinks coffee so is partially foreign, myself resolutely sticking to PG tips as often as possible! Hope that clarifies it all!

 

[John Duncan]

AEJim:Myself and the head of R'n'D are very English indeed

Is that Daily Mail English?

 

[AEJim]

JohnDuncan:AEJim:Myself and the head of R'n'D are very English indeedIs that Daily Mail English?

To be fair I think it's a shame more UK companies haven't survived without overseas investment, a poor reflection on UK manufacture and government attitudes in my opinion (Cadbury's sale to Americans being quite sad I thought).

Out of the big loudspeaker manufacturers known as "British" I don't think many still actually wholly are, Monitor Audio being one of the few remaining examples that spring to mind from memory... I haven't delved too deeply into that so I'll add "allegedly" as I'm sure there are many examples to prove me wrong but good on them really!

 

[AEJim]

chebby:
ps Can you tell us what 'embedive' means in... "This alliance has enabled AE to focus attention on further growth embedives" ?

I have not the foggiest idea!

The website was built on a new system but ported much of our two-generations-back site over due to the method of it's construction. The company info section would have been copied from that and possibly tweaked by our mildly dyslexic website developer! I built many of the new pages but am still refining the new site, mostly info for distributors in the dealer section at present. I'd consider this build of the site as a "Beta" and I'll hopefully have it all looking far more slick in a few months - including a far nicer pic of the building! Cheers for spotting that!

 

[John Duncan]

Probably developers doing global search and replace on the content to clean up HTML and stuff, and they tried to replace 'init' or similar with 'embed' (or something).

We've done the same with the new forum - I think you'll find that Joel, for example, now loves streaming media.

 

[chebby]

JohnDuncan:I think you'll find that Joel, for example, now loves streaming media.

And loves the Naim sound too