Selling Lossless Audio When good enough isn’t good enough. BY HENRY CLIFFORD
I traveled to San Antonio in early May for the ProSource Spring Conference. It’s a fun event where our vendors bring all their latest toys to show off. This year saw demo rooms from Focal/Naim, ARCAM, JBL, Klipsch, Origin Acoustics, KLH, Polk Audio, and many more. The amount of killer sound on display was amazing, and I came away with a singular message: good enough isn’t good enough. In a world where many are happy to listen to the tinny warbling of Amazon’s Echo Dot, there are still plenty of thirsty customers yearning for amazing sound experiences and superior equipment. I listened to demo after demo in Henry Clifford is president of Livewire, an integration firm in Richmond, VA. He San Antonio, always with the same also writes a bi-monthly blog for www. music. All of the speakers I auditioned residentialsystems.com. sounded great, and it got me thinking. How much of our day to day is spent delivering killer demo experiences for our clients? Not much, it turns out. Our business (and I’m sure I’m not alone) is increasingly about single-room audio/video solutions with speaker bars and very little true surround sound anymore. Does it have to be this way? Of course not. We’re in charge of our own destiny and whether or not we ask a client if they might be interested in something better in the family room or maybe a dedicated listening setup in another room. The truth is, we don’t ask, and we could easily make that change. If today’s consumers are all about experiences, what better offer exists in our world than the escape of true high-fidelity sound? We’re planning to focus on three key areas in our business based on San Antonio’s aural extravaganza:
of our industry. We all have our strengths. I may not know much about wine, but I know what good wine tastes like. All that said, it’s a good idea to understand the fundamentals even if only as a basis of comparison. Your customers will appreciate the plain talk. Common Music Bit Rates: Apple Music: 256 kbps Spotify: 96–320 kbps Pandora: 128–256 kbps YouTube Music: 128 kbps SiriusXM: 128 kbps Tidal: 1411 kbps CD: 1378 kbps Vinyl: 650-1030 kbps (equivalent for comparative purposes only — vinyl is analog only) As you can see here, “one of these things is not like the other.” Tidal is hands down the best quality streaming service (by a factor of at least 4x) out there and the only one we should be using to audition high-quality sound systems. Tidal is like listening to your music in widescreen after hearing AM radio content for the last 20 years. By understanding the quantitative difference between the streaming music most people listen to and what’s possible, it’s easy to have a conversation about quality using examples customers can understand.
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Understand It If you’re like me, maybe sometimes you feel like the dumbest guy in the room when hanging around some of the more audiophile members
“High-quality sound has taken a backseat to convenience for too long. We finally have a blend of both with services like TIDAL and can reach out to more than just the audiophile niche.
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Control4's new Smart Home OS 3 offers MQA support — read the full review on page 36.