strategy & tactics
THE BUSINESS OF STEREO The principal trainer for Educar Training takes a closer look at the differences between car stereo and audio, and how mobile electronics businesses can become more confident in their tuning abilities to make more money.
WORDS BY KEN WARD
I started in this field in 1986. Back then, most of our clients were people who cared about their cars—their Corvettes, BMWs, Porsches, Mustangs, Mercedes— and wanted good sound in them. Since then, we’ve seen the in-dash CD receiver revolution come and go. We’ve seen the rap-and-subwoofer revolution come and go. We are seeing the smartphone integration revolution start to fade, as new cars come with CarPlay and Android Auto at every price point. The tide has come in, the tide has gone out, and what we’re left with is people with cars they care about, who also care about great sound. Those clients never went away, but our industry just isn’t as skilled at helping these clients as we
42 Mobile Electronics June 2018
ought to be. The skills were developed during the eras of CD receiver installation and amp and subwoofer installation are not going to sustain us through the era of DSP-enabled audio tuning. We may not like the added complexity, we may resist change—but in the words of General Eric Shinseki, “If you don’t like change, you will like irrelevance even less.” Today, we have tools more powerful than any we dreamed of in the eighties. We can apply delay, many different types of crossover filtering, dozens of bands of definable parametric equalization, and even play in files with more information than a compact disc was intended to store. Now many products include all-pass filters so we can even equalize phase! More products have a
DSP chip inside than ever before. Well, with rare exceptions, anything with a DSP IC inside it needs a “tune” setup before the client gets their car back—and while we have at least four times as many DSP-enabled products as we did five years ago, I don’t think anyone would say that we have four times more DSP-competent technicians than we did five years ago. Our percentage of DSP-competent techs is barely creeping up, and it’s still a minority of the technicians in our industry.
Why is DSP Necessary? Why do we sell DSP? Simply put, we sell DSP to control the outcome. Us oldtimers remember installing great equipment and sometimes getting surprisingly mediocre results, and having few tools