View from the Bridge 12th May 2007

Connecting people

I recently got together with a few retailers to talk about our business and the industry in general. One of them mentioned over a glass of lager that he's been in the industry for over thirty years. He also reminded me that I'd been in the hi-fi industry for 26 years and hearing it coming from someone else's lips was quite a shock. I also reflected that my father has been in this industry for over 40 years.

You might think that we spent the night talking about equipment, suppliers, customer and the general difficulties faced by all this dreadful new technology that appears with increasing regularity. You'd be wrong because we spent the whole evening and most of the next day talking about music.

Music got most of us into this business. Our love of music enabled most of us to choose our staff because they shared that love and enthusiasm. Our best customers come to us because of that shared passion for music and when I attend concerts (which I do often), I feel as if I know many of their faces. Music has connected me to my job, to my friends, to my staff and to most of my customers.

It puts a smile on my face because often, our job makes us forget that simple fact. Fortunately the i-Pod is getting music into the lives of a whole new generation. When they hear what their device can sound like when plugged into some decent equipment they will the the customers of the future. Arcam recently showed us a dock for the i-pod that can radically improve the way it sounds when plugged into a stereo. Soon they will launch a device that takes a digital output from the i-pod, puts it through a digital to analogue processor and re-clocks it at the same time. This will dramatically improve sound quality.

The other topic of conversation was gigs that we'd attended in the last six months of so and it was wonderful to hear that even some of the older members present were still gigging on a regular basis.

The meeting energised me and made me realise that all this new technology is often little more than a smokescreen to distract us from the fact that is is great sound that is still important to us.

Last week I went to see Roger Waters perform Dark Side Of The Moon at the MEN in Manchester. The evening was spectacular in terms of performance, sound quality and sheer inventiveness. The use of high definition projectors to weave a visual thread around the performance was literally mind-boggling. Certainly the sound was the best I have ever heard in a room that is pretty much a big metal shed. It also shows that when musicians are bothered about quality, getting the sound right is not impossible.  I now wish I purchased tickets for all the other shows Roger Waters is doing in the UK.

Paul Hobson