Hi to all critic's & enthusiasts

After several years and considerable expense i am coming to realize that launching a new product into the commercial audio market is near impossible.
I have e-mailed, phoned & cold called without one single real return of enthusiasm.
It wasn't till my last call when i asked a high end installer would he by my product, even if it was cheaper, better sounding & better built than his preferred brand, the answer was still no......so much for recommending the best product for the client.
I have even directly e-mailed various reviewers within the industry but even they can't drum up a reply, even if negative !!!
Even the review panel now seen in most magazines look like a line up of husbands waiting to pick up their wives after a night at the bingo, i thought their hearing & eyesight should be on the blink by now.
Now where is all the new AV blood...sorry i forgot i did get one reply from a 'nameless new young editor' when asked to help me with some expressive content to describe my product, he replied send me the draft and i will spell check it !!!! even at 43 myself i can use the spell check on my own pc and i don't think that was the help i was looking for.
Why the lack of help, why the silence...
Anybody else tried to '' have a go '' and failed or succeeded !!!!
Please share your thoughts on the industry and advice from so called professionals
Thanks..mike

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AV HEAVEN DON'T MESS AROUND /SCANSPEAK/ATC/VOLT FRONT END TWIN HAWTHORNE AUGIE 18'' OB ACTIVE SUBS

But your spell checker doesn't seem to pick up the difference between 'by' and 'buy'..... i guess that's what editors are for!

Seriously though, darkmatter is right, a show is probably the best place to drum up interest from reviewers, they come around and hear what you've got and on that basis decide if a review is worthwhile or indeed interesting to their readership.

Dealers also prowl shows as an easy way to see a lot of product in one place, rather than waiting for it to come to them.

The answer is in your headline question - you pay! That's what professional means: you do it for a living. There are plenty of contract professionals who will do a product assessment for you - some quite well known names do this sort of work as well as contract design work for well-known manufacturers. They will of course only report to you, not the market. You will only get magazine reviews when you actually have the product on the market, which means that you have all the statutory CE/UL etc certifications in place, decent glossy literature, professional instruction manuals, a professional-looking web presence and some sort of outlet to the retail market in place, even if it only an ebay shop or similar. You will need to have a reasonable stock so that you can do demos and loans without much prospect of actually selling these particular items. Hopefully you will have arranged product liability insurance, set up your company, got your accounts set up. And as Darkmatter says some exposure at shows with favourable reactions. All this will cost money.... and of course you may find the market doesn't like your product after all, or that when you cost all the overheads properly you can't actually sell it cheaper than the opposition. That's why it's called risk capital - there's a lot of risk and a fair bit of capital involved.

How far off a finished product are you? Are you happy with the sound and design? Are you ready with a complete package with point of sale material, instructions with things like a wall cut out template? Are your pricings sorted? Without wanting to sound all Dragons Den, do you know your market? Looking at your website I see a good looking product made with premium raw materials so I assume you are pitching this fairly high end. Do you come in at the right price to compete with allowance for your and the dealer profit margins. Do you have a friendly dealer you can road test the speakers with? Have you got some ready for long term loan/sale or return? As you are in norf London do you go to Grahams or the Cornflake shop? Pick a quiet time to pop in to give yourself a chance to chat.

See what CEDIA are offering. I am due at their show this year but I havent been before so I dont know if they are mainly static display or if there is a chance to share a space with other manufacturers. I have a couple of friends I will contact and I will contact you through your website, enquiries@visual? No promises!!!!

Thanks kengale
Things seem to be getting a little heavy, i only want some opinions from sympathetic colleagues who simply enjoy their HI-FI and not a full business plan.
If what your saying is correct then there is no possible chance to launch a new product in this market.
The comment about reviewers not wanting to help before the the final product is launched only confirms what i have heard before, anyway most true hifi followers take magizine comments with a pinch of salt as we all know reviwers have their own favourites, and some even have employment ties to individual products.
So much for an un-biased review.
I nO mi punktuation etc is bad,i simply design,build & listen.
I want to perfect a quality product , unlike the overpriced units already on the market.
thanks.

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AV HEAVEN DON'T MESS AROUND /SCANSPEAK/ATC/VOLT FRONT END TWIN HAWTHORNE AUGIE 18'' OB ACTIVE SUBS

thanks ken again for you advice.
you speak of a team, unfortunately i'm on my own there. this is one of the reasons why i would like to do some demos and show the product to anybody who may want to give an opinion.

unlike amplifiers, cd players etc they all seem to have fairly clear guidelines when it comes to technical levels being judged on frequency response, noise levels, jitter and so on. these all play a major part in the complete ''audio review'' and a product can almost be judged on these specs alone.

speakers on the other hand seem to be more of a grey area, a good speaker in my opinion should be judged on a flat frequency response, good sensitivity and a uniform impedance. as for the imaging, focus etc this can largely be achieved by build quality and positioning.

as you know i have based my units around high performance studio drivers in an attempt to produce the most accurate reproduction available, this however is not a sound always a favoured by the hi-fi reviewer.

take ATC units, flat response & highly revealing but this is what attracts the odd negative comment, how can this be.
the only answer i can see is that the listener has ended up buying a better quality unit than the studio used to mix the master recording in the first place or alternatively the sound engineer was well due for a hearing test and should pass the job on.
either way the speaker its self is not at fault and should be reviewed accordingly, the fact that it may produce unwanted background sounds should lie with the recording studio or other poor source equipment.
this is why human reviews on speakers are so floored as they are largely based on what they hear ''personal choice'' rather than tech spec.
just popping out will continue the debate later
thanks mike.

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AV HEAVEN DON'T MESS AROUND /SCANSPEAK/ATC/VOLT FRONT END TWIN HAWTHORNE AUGIE 18'' OB ACTIVE SUBS

about my level of skill,
to be truly honest its the pure aesthetics & build quality which are the areas i excel, also a good eye for contemporary interior design which has led me to produce my current ideas.
the two baffle concept has only come from the the industry itself, taking isolation of both the high & mid frequency drivers away from the bass section. this is a basic but effective principle only employed by a few high end manufacturers.
the same applies to the crossovers, again away from the enclosures.
also the whole combination gives a much greater mounting & positioning flexibility especially with height & off axis positioning.
as for professional design & measurement the external crossovers and drive unit combination have lets say ''been designed by a nameless third party with conflicting work issues''. and i am more than satisfied that specs will impress.
the issue on flat response is that tricky one again, so this brings me back to my previous message, what should the correct response be ''could somebody put it in writing so we all know where we are'' and a standard can be set for the industry.
one thing your comment is leading to is room acoustics, reflection etc. this is a major headache for all people as most do not have a dedicated listening room.
however i still think this is where the problem lies not the speakers themselves, the only one useful addition to a review would be a small addition on ideal room volume & positioning this would at least give the consumer a quick guide and narrow down the choices available.
dont forget though, room analyzation has now come along way, and i know hi-fi purists won't like it but i think it will be hear to stay especially when the wife finds out i can do away with the large freestanding acoustic panels dotted around the room.
the question about other manufacturers not producing a similar design, well the in-wall market is relatively new and I'm sure they soon will. the only problem are lesser quality companies wont be able to hide the modest drivers employed and ask the prices the want.
i think attention to correct mounting, wall insulation and suitable reinforcement are key factors in in-wall development but some of this will be down to the custom installers themselves. take an in-wall speaker like genelec or kef, plastic baffles & clips designed to hold the unit in flimsy plasterboard, this already sounds like an audio nightmare but coincidentally i have never read any issues reported on the subject.
my aim is to bring quality to the AV marketplace, something which is clearly lacking.
the comment about personal choice regarding reviews on the sound is exactly what i am talking about, just because the reviewer likes it doesn't mean you will, likewise they may also not perform well in your living space. this is why i am pressing towards a more technical review taking these other variables into account.
cheers mike

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AV HEAVEN DON'T MESS AROUND /SCANSPEAK/ATC/VOLT FRONT END TWIN HAWTHORNE AUGIE 18'' OB ACTIVE SUBS

The ideal response is of course perfectly flat at all angles in every room, and is equally of course totally impossible. There is no "industry standard", nor could there be, because every different room has a different ideal characteristic, and even then only for the particular listener who likes a particular balance of direct and reverberant sound. Every speaker design will have to be aimed at a particular part of the market with its own aesthetic requirement, income group, typical room size, likely musical taste.

Whether your judgement on aesthetics is sound I have no way of telling, but selling build quality as a DIY craftsmen is a definite no-no - you will never reach the standards of build quality which a fully CNC manufacturing plant can achieve.

Quite honestly I think you are whistling in the dark here - a speaker is a technical thing and needs technical skills to design, develope and productionise. And speakers in particular need sufficient equipment back-up to enable their performance to be evaluated, documented etc and to carry out Goods Inward inspection and production testing and quality control. Believe me, I have worked as a speaker designer (mostly active in my case) and without the right equipment you are just stumbling around in the dark. You are just trying to sell your own particular theories on speaker placement and styling using a recipe approach to drive units with "in" names and third party electrical design. And your jibe "my aim is to bring quality to the AV marketplace, something which is clearly lacking" is very wide of the mark - some of the best names in the business have some very impressive products aimed at the AV market, and I would be extremely reluctant to attempt to take them on at their own game. You probably won't find them reviewed in HiFi mags but in mags aimed at their own market, using their HiFi credentials as a mark of audio quality. And in trying to sell your ideas on in-wall placement you appear to be trying to sell your skills as an architectural acoustician.

"i think attention to correct mounting, wall insulation and suitable reinforcement are key factors in in-wall development but some of this will be down to the custom installers themselves" - wall insulation sounds like such an easy thing - but it isn't, especially using current "green" construction techniques. And I suspect you're to a degree confusing wall insulation and wall absorbancy - two very different and often conflicting things. The vast majority of builders and domestic premise designers have minimal acoustic skills, to the degree that by-laws have had to be brought in to enforce even a minimally acceptable degree of isolation within blocks of flats and between terraced dwellings. I'm really unclear what it is you're trying to sell - speaker units, your skills as a styling guru, your skills in architectural acoustics, consultancy on speaker choice and room placement. What is your target market? What are you actually selling?

Until you've identified your gap in the market, proved it exists, proved your product fills this gap and can show you have the technical expertise and experience necessary to fill at at a competitive price and performance you're never going to be able to raise capital to finance your product and get it into the market.

No professional reviewers will come forward unless you pay them - AND you will have to provide the listening environment and the comparative speakers at your own expense. And then they will only report to you, with caveats that their conclusions are only true for your particular listening environment. And most reviewers don't actually believe in blind testing, and are most unwilling to subject their own judgement to this sort of scrutiny.

You're really approaching this back to front - you need to carry out objective measurements to show whether your design achieves its required technical performance in the environment you envisage for it, and develope the design until it does. There are ISO specifications for test rooms to simulate real room environments, and many tests have been published using multiple spot measurements in such room which give a very good idea of what the subjective response will be. Not perfect, but a good starting point. MLSSA or similar will help you to identify rogue resonances, unexpected cancellation dips etc, and you will be able to tweak the crossover until a decent response is achieved over a suitable range of environments and speaker/listener positions.

Once you've got this far, THEN you can start exhibiting a real product.

From my own experience you will need at least a man-month of technical effort in the lab/listening room with suitable test gear to assure yourself you've got a product delivering what you're aiming for with minimised hot-spots or nulls - and that's assuming you've got the ability to tweak the crossover/matching as you go along and adjust cabinet/baffle dimensions as well. It was easier for me because with most of my designs being active it was quick and easy to adjust relative unit levels, crossover points and order and phase response, and incorporating amplitude response equalisation. It is a lot harder with passive crossovers.

Think of it like a car - No manufacturer would ever design a car from scratch and then submit it to Autocar for reviewing without even having exhaustively tried it out on their own test tracks to find out what its top speed / handling / acceleleration was like. Ford employed Jackie Stewart to review and help them develope one of their cars (the Mondeo) , but you can bet your life they paid him well, and he reported only to Ford, until the final production car was ready for public release.

Hi Mike,

I will certainly come for a listen and comment, if you are going to be at the "Whittlebury Hall" Show again this Sept.

Simon

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"Quicquid Nitet Notandum"

During my time as BFA Chairman I spoke to may people who had designed the next killer product. We didn't offer free consultancy but generally a ten minute telephone call was enough to realise that the product design wasn't actually final to the point of being able to make many consistently, the pricing was completely unrealistic and none of the necessary support stuff was in place.

Now, I'm not saying that this is the case here but a day spent with a product/marketing consultant might be money well spent before you go any further.

sorry dark matter i missed you out.
i will love to do whittlebury hall again, but this time i will need a room.
a new syndicate would be a good start as i need help with source equipment. somebody like bryston would be good but i think they are tied up with PMC.
anybody got any ideas or better still fancy joining the syndicate.
thanks..mike

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AV HEAVEN DON'T MESS AROUND /SCANSPEAK/ATC/VOLT FRONT END TWIN HAWTHORNE AUGIE 18'' OB ACTIVE SUBS

Hi visualacoustics. I feel your pain!

A few years ago I started my own hi-fi cable company, but alas, I've had very little support from the mainstream hi-fi press. If it wasn't for a few favourable reviews in Hi-Fi Critic, Hi-Fi World, Audiophilia and TNT Audio I'd be living on bread and water!