Demagnetising LP's & cd's

Richard, do you sort all your own marketing etc aswell as building the units?

Do you do mu R&D for new products or are your current ones the mainstay?

Fair play to you, running a business one handed is no light labour.

 

it is very simple as to why we had to obey the powers that be"directors/managers" if you did not comply to the sales figures they set for you to achieve you were passed on, just like in sport, those of us who revelled moved on, we were not given an ultimatum, simply move on, we "well most of us" did revel and stayed loyal to what we belived was a choice for customers to make not to shove a certain brand down their throats and in those days we used all sorts of music, reggae was mostly, funk, rock and so forth, but they would only allowe to demonstrate their eq. with the music that will make the eq. sound good, as for the smile it cost nothing but made customers welcome, and as victorian hi-fi if it wasen't for us therew will be no techno, i worked for island records with amongst reggae legends, and saw how slowlly this industry was more involved in to making aa quick buck then chage course when they could no longer get away with their tactics. spoken.

 

What marketing

I have a wife and cat to help me.

 

p.s. i liked his amps "nva richard's" that is why i sold them against my boss wishes.

 

Was a genuine question Richard, not sure if the smiley is sarcasm or not.
So I take it you go by reputation and minimal/no marketing.

My cats are certainly a hinderence whenever I try do do anything productive.
Todays decorating disturbed by one trip to vet with poorly cat and another one jumping on to a freshly painted window sill..

 

oh dear, bless them , did everything turned up ok?

 

The cats?
Yes, poorly cat had an anal probe and injection and has now started eating again.

Paint cat left a nice paw print trail for us to follow and a sill for me to repaint tomorrow.

House is in disaray at the moment with building work etc going on but have just hooked the speakers up and am now chilling.

 

super, my wife and i at 1030 off to the music room and listen to the pouring rain over some cool modern jazz,

 

Enjoy!

After weeks with no tunes it is bliss!

 

Ah, you see if blind testing had been the norm back then, the brainwashing would have been useless and ineffectual.

Sorry couldn't resist

 

Very true, I have a P50 2 box pre with phono stage from that period and it is definitely metal.

 

I would have thought it is obvious that I have no marketing. I have listings at ebay which tell things about the products and quote old reviews from the 90's. I have an archive website which again is about the 90's products that was put together by an old customer who is now sadly dead.

Basically I sell by reputation and word of mouth. My biggest mistake was to start my own forum (though I am passing it on) because I kept getting booted from the other forums for basically saying the same things I am saying here, and Rob and Dev seem to be tolerating me for the moment. By starting my own most discussion of nva moved there and off PFM WW etc where I used to get lots of customer promo. Now they just all talk to each other at Subjectivist

So even though me personally posting has nothing to do with promoting nva (in fact as some people say it might hinder it), forums have been a very good source for picking up recomendations and customers. Others take a chance at ebay because they get a 30 day free trial and just about all of it sticks.

So I have nothing to do with retailers, I have nothing to do with reviewers (apart from personal friendships), I have nothing to do with magazines, I don't advertise, so that is why I put the smilly on, though perhaps it should have been a laughing one instead of a sarcastic one.

Yes I do everything myself, but remember I am building on 40 years of experience and work. The product basically design themselves, they are just variations on a theme. But I sub contract the cases and the PCB's so all I do is join things up. It is not difficult. Most of the tech work as to CE and the written stuff was done in the 90's. My admin is very simple as all I need to do is keep simple coomputer accounts as ebay does everything else, they make life very easy admin wise for their trade customers which is why I much prefer to route all sales through them then try to remember and control orders placed privately. Paypal is simplicity itself and I have the money up-front as I build to order, no problems trying to get dealers to pay their bills. So because of that I can pay for all my supplies up front and negotiate better prices. All in all it is a win win situation.

The alternative :- Rent for a factory, wages for staff, and all the other overheads and costs of a normal company, with all the inherent cash flow risks that are involved. My way I can just not do anything for a month, go on holiday, like this month I could have gone on holiday (Exposure used to do this for August), but I have stuff to prototype as I have decided to get the Statement stuff fully up and running and I will be showing them at Whittlebury, plus I now have this project with Figlet producing his Music Computer (as I call it). December again is quiet so I go on holiday somewhere warm then.

Life is easy and I have my Tai-Chi school as well to maintain but I don't teach anywhere near as much as I used to, mostly now it is instructors I have trained who run it. One side of my workshop (and yes it is a largish converted bedroom) I have my assembly bench and my test and soak bench. the other side is my office with computers and tea . So while something is drying or I want a slurp of tea, I check emails and forums and post, then back to work again, and that could just as easily be a Sunday at midnight as any other time, I have complete freedom to choose. The really nice thing is rolling out of bed in my Jammy's in the morning and working until I can be bothered to get dressed, no tubes or trains, no drive to work, no time to be there, take any days off I want as long as I meet my orders.

I love it couldn't be happier

 

Sad but true....

Nothing has changed. The marketplace always has and always will make the decision. We all buy what we want to buy...period.

 

Richard's 'fantasy world' was nothing of the sort. When I was in retail. I was the guy at the shop who had to get rid of product reps with gear that didn't fit the profile. Most were easy to shake off - have you got a review? No... get one. Yes... if it was bad, go away. If it was good, well reviews don't matter. If it got to an audition, you'd play it against the anointed rival and then chuck it out for not sounding exactly like the anointed rival. If it did sound like the anointed rival, then you switch to 'why would we want two identical-sounding products'?

Despite all this, there would be products so damn good that you really couldn't bring yourself to go through the whole Catch 22 process. That would be when the senior members of the team came in and explained that they couldn't stock the new guy's product because it would undermine sales of existing product lines.

I got out of this as soon as I could.

A few dealers resisted this protectionism, and some of them are still going and deserve praise for trying to play a straight bat. I won't name them out of not wanting to appear partisan, but they remain independent and well respected and commonly listed among the White Hats. Sadly, they are disturbingly few in number.

I'd like to say those protectionist days are over, but all that's happened is (some of) the names have changed. A new brand is slightly more likely to make it into a store today than 25 years ago, but it remains not so much an uphill struggle as trying to scale a 50' wall of glass while wearing rollerskates.

 

Not true - there was no flat playing field - it was polluted and corrupted. Even proof of the Linn rep buggering up the suspension of a Pink Triangle when he was left alone in the dem room, all caught on the security camera. And when it wasn't as gross as that just the frown and the question "why do you want to stock that" was enough, but this was all before they came out in the open and contracted a percentage of the shops turnover, sell under it and you lose the agency. Plus we had the contribution from BADA which for the first few years was dominated by Linn Naim dealers.

I can talk about it because I didn't go bust I went export, and I am still making an annoying bugger of myself. But do I really have to list the products and companies we lost because of it, it reads like a whos who of the British hi-fi industry. Stuff that now fetches good prices on ebay and has a devoted loyal following and fan clubs. Forget NVA look at Exposure, their amps literally pissed on Naim amps, could they establish a good dealership netwrok, nope, and eventually had to go to the wall to be reformed as the current company, who at least have now decided to give into pressure and produce some of John Farlows classic designs. And then we had the dealers like Signals who swore they would never sell Naim, but in the end they went for the easier sale and the money instead of the pursuit of excellence.

On a post at Pink Fish I even sat and worked out and listed the companies we lost in the late 80's and early 90's, and it was over twenty companies, that given a flat playing field most would still now be in business.

 

A few spring to mind as possibilities:

STD
Logic
Myst
Albary
JBE
Quantum
Walker
Dunlop Systemdeck (not the new co)
Lentek (came back later as Audiolab)
Ariston
Crimson (came back much later)
Syrinx ?

But then again others seemed to successfully battle through the storm despite the constant drubbing from the flat earth machine:

Cyrus
Sugden
Audiolab
Quad (though now gone - IAG Quad is not Quad IMO)
Musical Fidelity

 

Perhaps because there was no conspiracy or windmills? Perhaps it's as simple as those folks, like Linn and Naim, built a quality product and one the marketplace wanted at the time.

Why is it we never, ever, hear of complaints from other specialist manufacturers about Linn and Naim "harming" them?

Why is it no one complains when the large Japanese giants rule(d) their market?

Linn and Naim haven't been splattered on every cover of every hifi magazine every month for the last twenty years, so how much longer is Mr. Dunn going to use "The Axis of Evil" as an excuse?

 

Excuse for what?

 

For not achieving the level of success or whatever it is your on about.

 

Daft sod read the posts, since when has this been about me, I deliberately avoided using nva apart from when it is used on me. It is all the others as has been chronicled who suffered.

Why are you so concerned about trying to protect Linn and Naim reputations, you say yourself you have had no connection for over 20 years, so what is the problem for you that the truth is out! Plus you are Stateside, a completely different hi-fi environment, where Linn and Naim or their employees or distributors could have behaved in a totally different way - this is a UK forum looking at the history of the UK market and how it effects the present - so what is your contribution to this?