MI Pro

Having been at the top of UK pro audio distribution since the days of the original Turnkey operation (when it pioneered the home recording business), Andrew Stirling is one of best-placed commentators to reflect on how the industry has changed. And in particular, how it has come to interface so closely with sectors of the MI business in recent years.

Today, he co-runs SCV London with Julian Blyth – distributing Fostex, Audix, Audient, Summit and a host of others. A bit rarefied for an MI platform? Perhaps not these days, as sharper MI retailers have moved into the still-growing high-tech area. But who is SCV and how did Andrew Stirling become a part of it?

“Originally, SCV was a French company, the biggest pro audio distributor in France, and Julian Blyth ran the UK office. Some years ago, the mother company in France went bankrupt and Julian bought the UK company from the administrators. He has been running SCV ever since.”

In the interim, Messrs Blyth and Stirling had also been partners in Audient, of which Stirling had been one of the founding shareholders and he ran the successful Stirling Audio distribution business, too. 

“Then, two years ago, we decided to merge the two companies, Stirling Audio and SCV. It made a lot of sense because there were economies of scale to be had and we were non-competing, so the product mix was good,” he says.

One the first things that happened following Stirling’s arrival was the abandonment of a couple of mainstream MI lines – Hughes & Kettner amplifiers and Blade guitars – which had seemed a bit anomalous in amongst the company’s otherwise resolutely high-tech offerings. Was that why they had gone?

“I felt they didn’t really fit and we weren’t making any money out of them, so we parted company with both products to focus on pro audio, which really is my background. We were also coming into the recession, we didn’t really understand that side of the market and our resources were better concentrated elsewhere. It was time for us to stick to our core business.”

SCV’S CURRENT MODEL
“The main corporate pitch – and I think it’s the one that works for our dealer base – is that we don’t sell to the end-user. Stirling Audio was originally a dealer and started distributing almost by default, because manufacturers of high-end products, like Lexicon, decided to go into the MI business, which made us a bit of a hybrid retailer/distributor and caused problems. With SCV that is definitely not the case.

“One of the reasons dealers like dealing with SCV is that trust element. They can share client information with us about a potential sale and they don’t feel threatened by us in any way. It’s quite a traditional business model – a big warehouse with a big inventory, so we can deliver product very quickly and a lot of people like that, too.

“As for the products, they’re quite diverse, but we always seek out products that have a distinct technical or commercial edge. We started with Fostex, which used to be core MI but is now very top-end pro in many different areas, including live sound or film recording. That said, its speakers are MI and we do very well with Fostex loudspeakers in that area.”

At which point, Stirling reveals a surprise: “Fostex is pulling out of the multitracker market. Firms like Tascam, Zoom and Roland have done very well there and Fostex has decided to switch gear to use its expertise in slightly more specialist markets. So over the next 12 months, Fostex will pull out of the small multitracker market. It’ll still be doing the 24-track machines and it’s still doing the RAM recorders for live sound and the digital recorders for the film business, and it will be doing more with its speaker business, too.”

If this change of direction sounds as if it might push SCV out of the range for MI retailers, it won’t, because one of the company’s other brands, the microphone manufacturer Audix, is not only mainstream MI, but growing rapidly. In doing so, it reveals one of the SCV’s most distinctive qualities – an absolute refusal to consider a market so sewn-up that it is not worth trying to break into.

Traditional wisdom in the MI business has it that the microphone market is set in stone, with Shure dominant, Sennheiser a strong second and everyone else quite some way behind. So what price a new entrant – especially one aiming at the very heartland MI side? But as it has turned out, SCV and Audix are doing extremely well in this area.

“Audix is one of our fastest growing lines and has grown enormously this year. In fact we’ve doubled our business with Audix this year, which we’re very pleased about given the difficult trading conditions. I think there are two reasons for this. One is that nearly all the other microphone companies are focusing on the market for condenser microphones for studio uses – that and the fact that everybody is importing cheap Chinese microphones. Audix, on the other hand, manufactures almost everything in the States and has focused very much on the core, backline market. The main players there are still Shure, Sennheiser and Beyer, and that market is less plagued by the cheap Chinese copies. Audix has also produced some unique products and we’ve worked very hard with it to gain the confidence of the dealer base.”

Audix has also learned the lesson taught to the microphone business by Shure in the 1970s and followed by Sennheiser a couple of decades later – that microphones are hard to audition, so customers are very swayed by endorsements. Following suit, Audix has striven to gain big name users and, Stirling says, this is paying-off with sales.

FINDING A NICHE
Stirling and Audix have also worked at niches in the market – building a strong following for instrument miking and percussion/drumming.

“The vocal mic market is a much more complicated prospect to enter,” Stirling says. “Shure owns it, followed by Beyer and Sennheiser. We’re making inroads – we have a good product – but it’s more difficult to penetrate. Percussion is our biggest area, with instrument miking also doing very well. I took the view a few years ago, do I try and sell one microphone to a singer, or six to a drummer? It’s the same effort, but for more microphones and, in fact, the drummer market is where we focused initially and it worked well for us.”

Indeed, there are those who say that Audix’s D6 dynamic bass drum mic is now the market leader – which is no small feat for a relatively new brand in such a short space of time.

Another SCV brand storming away is Focal – French-designed reference monitors which are doing extremely well in the project studio market – and not just through the specialist studio-oriented pro audio retailers, Stirling reveals, but also in MI/high-tech retailers, who have had great success with it.

Once again, it seems, Stirling and SCV have proved that however crowded a market may look, there is nothing to prevent a newcomer gaining share, if the product and marketing are right. 

“Yes, the speaker market is very, very crowded, but we’re very fortunate that we have a sales guy here, Gary Robson, who knows the studio business very well and takes the products round to all the top producers. All the business is channelled through the dealers, but we do a lot of direct demo marketing to the top end of the market, to facilitate those dealers, and that has worked extremely well.

“As with Audix, I think the endorsement programme we run has helped Focal. Using the top producers that Gary has introduced Focal to has really helped musicians to make a decision.”

But not everything in the SCV house is quite so aimed at the top of the market, it appears. “No, because at the real cheaper core end, we do Superlux microphones which are very, very well-made Chinese products. You don't go rushing around saying you’ve got a Superlux mic, but they sell in tremendous numbers in the pub and club market and to churches and schools, for which they offer a good quality, cheap microphone.”

So how cheap is cheap?
“We do models from £29 and even though there are lots of cheap Chinese microphones around, Superlux has done nicely because it is a well made product.”

Appetite whetted? If so, then yet another page to turn to in the SCV catalogue of product types you might not previously have thought about is the Universal Acoustics Foam range of panels for home and project studios, which SCV now handles worldwide. Few serious musicians don’t have some kind of home recording set-up and few, equally, don’t have problems with acoustics. Cue Universal, says Stirling.

“Again, we’ve done very, very well with that. Dealers like it – it’s a no-brainer to sell and with no after-sales problems.”

With the honourable exception of some very interesting (if sometimes overlooked) bass and guitar pedals from Aphex, most of the other lines offered by SCV are, it must be said, pretty hardcore pro audio. So how is that market faring, vis-à-vis MI? Word suggests that the top end – the stadium side – has been suffering badly due to budget cuts by public authorities and commercial enterprises responsible for major projects, but Stirling says that the side of pro audio in which SCV specialises has been doing rather well.

“I’ve seen pro audio develop very nicely across this year. The demise of Sound Control benefited one or two dealers and enabled them to put a lot more resources into the pro audio side. Without being too cruel, musicians have always been skint, so whether there’s a recession or not, it doesn’t make a great deal of difference to them and we've seen a consistent, steady business on core products throughout the whole year and growth in two or three areas. Corporate business at the very top end of pro audio has definitely suffered – the post-production market is definitely down as well, but the MI pro audio side – the home studio market – has held its own quite well.

“If you look at the transducers around the computer – speakers and microphones – most of the people in that market have done pretty well this year and most of the products seem to have been able to hold their perceived value very well.  A wooden box with a piece of cardboard flapping in and out has a much higher perceived value than two and half years of software design – which everybody wants for free.” 

Reinforcing that thought is another SCV product – the Bricasti Reverb, which SCV sells using the argument that it offers the processing power of three Macs. Stirling says there seems to be a growing realisation among end-users that there is a lot more to good sound than plugins and Bricasti has so much more processing power at its disposal that you would have to be virtually deaf not to be able to tell the difference.

“We’ve opened quite a few eyes with that,” he says. “It has done phenomenally well and the dealers like it because it is a nicely profitable piece of hardware for them with that perceived value that I was talking about. Offer a plugin and the reaction is so often ‘Oh, I’ll go and see
if I can download that for nothing from the internet’.”

Stirling remains well plugged-in to the finances of the industry and is very aware of how the only serious money being made by most musicians today is from live performances. He believes this is being reflected in growing markets for good quality audio products for live sound and he suggests it’s the need for excellence that is driving the move upmarket with products like Audix. So is he intending to look further into that area?

“Definitely, and by the end of the year we will have a PA speaker line. We’ve been offered a few and we have a desire to get into the smaller speaker market for pubs and clubs. We have something on the burner at the moment and we hope to make an announcement before too long.”

One of the problems facing SCV and others in the high-tech, but also MI, market is how best to promote itself. The high-tech magazines, like Sound on Sound and Music Tech, are one obvious route – but where else? There’s not a lot of point advertising in the ultra-conservative guitar magazines, so where does he spend his advertising money?

“The sad thing about page advertising is that we often do it to stay friendly with the people we need to be friendly with – but the real business comes through the internet. That said, I don’t think there is any studio, home or pro, that I go into that doesn’t have a copy of Sound on Sound and when I want to communicate with the dealers, I think the MI Pro concept of trying to get to the guys in the stores works. They can be very insular and I’ve always felt that something like MI Pro that gives them a wider view of who’s doing what, should help them.

“But my business plan for next year is to put probably half my marketing budget into banner advertising, employing a young man to work Gearslutz and the other forums on the internet to keep people up to date with what we are doing. Of course, the beauty of internet marketing is that you can monitor it – you get a report each month telling you who looked at that page and how many times. But it’s trial and error.

“Personally, I don't even have a Facebook account and the concept of doing it horrifies me, but that’s where it’s at now. You’re talking to your customer directly and you’re getting feedback directly from your market.

“I think the thing that I would want to get across is that we need to expand our horizons. Look further than what you are doing and look to see if there’s something you could be doing that you’re not doing now. And don’t give business away.

“I speak to so many people who say ‘Oh, we don’t do that’ – why not? Educate yourself and expand your horizons. There’s a lot of business to be had if people will look for it.

“For example, one of the things that is fascinating at the moment is how Digital Village and some others are selling back into Europe. Thomann has been selling into this market for ten years now, with everybody bitching and moaning, but it has taken ten years for someone to challenge it.

“We all need to get off our butts and challenge these guys and not let that firm take it away from us. And you can challenge – there are ways of doing it and it’s taken us a long while on our insular island to fight back a bit.”

Coming from a man who has successfully challenged both the microphone and monitor markets in recent years – regardless of the conventional wisdom – these are words well worth considering as we enter a
new year.

SCV London: 020 8418 0778