Ged Carroll

Search results for: “hi-fi”

  • Apple iPod HiFi – throwback gadget

    Introducing the Apple iPod HiFi

    Now and again Apple makes some odd diversions in direction and focus. One of these was the Apple iPod HiFi. The best way to describe it is imagine of Dieter Rams had made over one of Panasonic’s old RX DT75 with the motorised ‘cobra’ top. Which is why it made my blog as a throwback gadget.

    It will take a stack of D-cells like a traditional boom box. The speaker arrangement and handle on each end reminded me of iconic 80s boombox the Hitachi TRK 3D8 portable stereo. Holding it reminds me of lugging one of those round in the back of my first car on long trips, because my car didn’t have a radio or cassette deck, let alone a CD player.
    iPod Hi-Fi

    How hi-fi is it?

    The HiFi as in high-fidelity in the name Apple iPod HiFi is a bit of a misnomer, but it does a very good job on the electronica that I tend to listen to at home. It’s sound isn’t coloured per se, but it does a better job of some genres than others.

    If you like a string quartet playing classical music, it probably isn’t the device for you. But then neither would a Bose Wave either, which would be the obvious competition.

    As with most Apple products there were design details all over the box. It sits on a rubber pad that covers most of the box length with iPod written in the middle, despite the fact very few people will ever see it.

    Many people decried the Apple iPod HiFi for its lack of features, but it was designed as an appendage to the iPod rather than a device in its own right. I use the line in on it to act as an occasional sound bar to the television which it does an adequate job of. Apple discontinued it just over a year after it was launched and now they can found occasionally on eBay. More gadget related content here.

  • Beats + Apple post

    Before Beats there was Mega Bass

    Before you can talk about Beats, you need to go back into the history of consumer electronics. If you had a Japanese made personal stereo in the 80s through to the early noughties the words ‘Mega Bass’ meant something. It was printed on everything from clock radios and boom boxes to personal cassette and CD players.
    Sony Walkman WM A602
    It was the button you pressed to give the bottom end of the music you listened to more umpf.

    Different Japanese companies had their own spin on it. I remember Hitachi luggable cassette systems having ‘3D Bass’ or a ‘3D Woofer’ label on the speaker grill to highlight their sonic capabilities. Aiwa had personal stereos with a more sophisticated bass function on them called DSL.

    Before Beats – Boodo Khan

    Sony took this experience to its logical conclusion with the Sony Boodo Khan Walkman (DD-100) and its matching headphones (DR-S100). This was designed to provide dynamic bass amplification, a function that Sony previously had developed for high-end hi-fi’s. The DD-100 used a system called DOL.
    Sony DD100 Boodo Khan reproduced from Sony's 1987 product brochure
    The Beats brand replicates the less sophisticated Mega Bass feature in the headphones rather than the smartphone or iPod to which they are attached. From a design point of view this approach makes perfect sense. However the science of personal bass amplification doesn’t seem to have moved on much from the late 1980s. Any pair of Beats that I have listened to boom on the bottom end and sound ‘muddy’ higher up. Beats headphones sound less clear to me than the original Sony Boodo Khan combo from two decades ago, despite the advantages of digital technology.

    Why Beats?

    So why would Apple care about possibly acquiring Beats?

    • Buying Beats takes the brand off the table for both PC and mobile device manufacturers. H-P  used to have Beats as a feature on some of its laptops as did HTC smartphones
    • Apple buying Beats at a premium price would raise the acquisition cost of other businesses that have a unique offering to augment the mobile experience. It’s cash mountain gives Apple cheap capital and such high acquisition costs could be a barrier to entry for the likes of Lenovo or Huawei
    • Buying Beats takes a subscription-based music platform off the table, the team could be used to strengthen a future iTunes subscription product or simply open doors in the music industry wider for Apple. Tim Cook is not the media mogul that Steve Jobs was, he doesn’t have the Pixar studio that made him the peer of other media companies
    • Beats is a premium priced brand, it has a good fit in its hardware alongside many Apple products
    • Beats gets a different demographic of music lover. EDM has put dance music back on the map commercially and is now more important to Apple
    • Beats may provide Apple with an alternative brand to go into new media and product areas that would benefit from its urban and dance music caché

    Whilst Apple has done a good job of getting a lot of dance back catalogue into its library, problems remain with regards dance and urban music consumption patterns and iTunes. It is probably no surprise, given that Apple was more comfortable having The Pixies as the soundtrack to it’s latest advertisement rather than say Skillrex.

    If one looks at the way Apple iTunes treats ‘DJ’ artists like DJ Honda or DJ Shadow and bands with ‘The’ in the name like The The or The Bar-Kays  you can see that they didn’t think about dance music in their design to the extent that they should do. All ‘The’ bands are treated alphabetically so The Beatles would go in the B-section after The Beach Boys but before Bomb The Bass. By comparison all DJ artists are grouped together.

    Other examples of the way iTunes doesn’t get dance music is that you can’t get music in the way that you would buy it in a shop:

    • You can’t sort or search by record label
    • You can’t sort or search by remix producer

    Dance music generally isn’t like other genres, the band may not be the hero. Labels have their own ‘sound’, the educated consumer knows roughly what to expect looking at the label whether it was Tamla Motown, Salsoul or Horse Meat Disco. Remix producers like Tom Moulton, Sasha, Tony De Vit, Todd Terje or Skillrex all had their followers looking to buy their latest work.

    Lastly and probably most importantly, dance music and urban music has been the place were many niche competitors like Bleep.com and Beatport have managed to build niche, but profitable footholds. This also indicates that there could be opportunities for direct Apple competitors. More related content here.

  • The Today Club

    I have advised the founders of the Today Club in Shenzhen since January. Shenzhen has changed a lot. It is no longer just a place of industry, but also has a large financial industry. It’s stock market acts as tech oriented exchange for China.

    In addition, Shenzhen has built up a creative scene of sorts. Products are no longer made, but also designed there. This it in turn has brought in architects and artists.

    The Today Club is designed to be a private members club that brings people of disparate disciplines together. Financiers and business people can rub shoulders with artists and designers.

    The club also showcases a mix of Chinese artist works and Chinese product design. When I was there, it was showcasing high-end vacuum tube powered hi-fi amplifiers and speakers.

    The Today Club is based in the former industrial area of OCT or Overseas Chinese Town. It was here the the first Taiwanese and Hong Kong companies built factories in Shenzhen. The area that the Today Club is in has been rebranded as OCT Loft Creative Culture Park. The site was originally a television factory. The former industrial buildings have now been converted into creative office spaces, studios and retail units by local architecture firm Urbanus.

    Here is a video explaining what they do far more eloquently than I can

    More details on their website. More Shenzhen related content here.

  • Observations from Shenzhen, China

    I spent some time in Shenzhen recently and here is some of the things that I found during my stay.

    The pace of development is slower than it was before, the number of cranes I saw and ready-mix concrete wagons on the road was less than before. There is still a lot of building work but there is less of it

    Odd products showing up in Shenzhen.

    A case in point being an Orange-branded MiFi router that I used whilst I was there. It was your standard Huawei mobile internet Wi-Fi router as sold to Orange customers across Europe. We used it with a China Unicom 3G SIM in the device. It wasn’t just a case of badging, the device had an Orange admin page and served Orange-branded ‘no internet connection available’ error pages.

    Just how did this device end up in Huawei’s back yard? Did the product ‘fall off the back of a wagon’? Are they being dumped in the marketplace? Is there some black market ‘carousel’ sales tax scam going on?

    Smartphone users

    Talking about mobile devices: a quick poll of a mix of people I met:

    • Advertising agency owner: Apple iPhone 5S
    • Creative industry entrepreneur: iPhone 5C for personal use, an iPhone 5S likely to be gifted
    • Professional photographer and interior designer: iPhone 4S
    • 7 taxi drivers: 5 Samsung, 1 iPhone 4 and one Xiaomi handset
    • Businessman who owned a pharmaceutical distribution business and various properties: Samsung
    • Businessman: Samsung
    • Museum/ gallery curator: Samsung
    • Professional driver: Samsung

    It is hard to explain the ubiquity and usage of:

    • Weixin (WeChat) – running out of your data package cuts you off more than running out of voice minutes. My friend has her 70+ year old mother WeChatting her incessantly
    • TaoBao – the impact of TaoBao can be seen on the streets with a volume of delivery people darting around the city. Electric mopeds were banned in Shenzhen for anyone who didn’t work for a delivery company as the devices were a silent killer who ran over unsuspecting pedestrians. Shenzhen still has electric bikes (more professionally handled) by delivery people delivering online shopping. TaoBao and its sister site TMall are the e-tailing game. Apple recently opened a store on TMall in parallel to the Chinese version of its familiar online store

    The Chinese creative industries are coming on in leaps and bounds. I met with an advertising and design agency owner and was bowled over by the quality of the branding design that they had done for a new creative hub. Having worked alongside western big branding agencies in China working for Chinese clients I can say that the work was equal, if not better in quality.

    This is also matched by the creative infrastructure that the Chinese central and regional governments are putting in alongside private enterprises. A classic example of this is the continued development of the OCT LOFT complex. This was once an area of factories run by Overseas Chinese as a separate Town, these sturdy concrete buildings have been converted into retail areas a la the Truman Brewery, offices, studio spaces, co-working spaces and social clubs.

    There is a live performance space in OCT LOFT called B10 with a really well engineered sound and lighting system. This has managed to attract sponsorship from the likes of MINI. China is serious about building a creative class and is doing something meaningful about providing all infrastructure needed within a cluster.

    Talking of live performances, I got to see a local band play at B10; I don’t know if this was just this band but the crowd did much more interaction with the band on stage, singing along, dancing, synchronised clapping and a lot less viewing the performance through their smartphone than I had been used to in the UK and Hong Kong.

    Electric vehicles are big business; Shenzhen now has blue and silver taxis from local firm BYD that are electric powered. BYD is a famous battery company and Warren Buffett is a shareholder. Admittedly, the electricity probably comes from a lot of coal-fired power stations as well asnuclear-powered ones, but China is serious about the future of transportation.

    Hailing a cab is pretty much done by app, the Chinese version of Hailo is as ubiquitous on peoples phones as Weixin.

    Changing perception of western country brands. This is just anecdotal stuff speaking to a couple of people, but the brand of the UK in China has changed over the past couple of years. It used to be that the UK was thought to be a great nation to do business.

    David Cameron’s recent trip to China and launch of a Weibo account was seen as an act of desperation to try and capture inbound investment. Now the view that I heard expressed is that Britain is a good place to visit and shop (for luxury goods), to get an education or learn English – but that’s it. Entrepreneur visas didn’t hold that much appeal to the people I spoke with.

    There is a change in what it means to be made in China. Over the past few times that I have been in China there has been a move away from products that are good enough to providing a quality experience. Brands like retailer Emoi have been at the head of it, alongside Oppo whose Blu-Ray players give Denon and Onkyo a run for their money.

    This time friends of mine have set up a venue, one of the primary purposes of the venue is to showcase quality Chinese-made products from craftsmen made ceramics, to furniture, modern art and vacuum-tube hi-fi amplifiers. Just as China is raising it’s creative game, it is also looking to make better quality products. However this isn’t a universal move; there are still value-orientated companies, particularly those in the business-to-business space. More china related posts here.

  • Clone

    I wrote a bit about my experience speaking with a consumer electronics salesperson on a post I wrote for PR Week. It was this conversation where I heard the phrase clone used.

    When I heard clone, I thought of Dolly the sheep, or the lumberjack ‘castro clone’ subculture in the gay community that borrowed from 1960s rockabilly and drove the Levi’s 501s as fashion movement. It also had a clear influence on grunge fashion of the early 1990s

    However n this context it meant a piece of consumer electronics badged with the brand name of, and sold by a famous Japanese brand that has been made in China by an ODM (original device manufacturer), and where many of the critical  components were not sourced from within the industrial group of the Japanese brand. It was a negative term implying that the product was in many respects counterfeit or unauthentic.

    The concept in itself isn’t a new idea. During the golden age of Japanese hi-fi you saw similar ODM relationships. The most egregious example is from some 30 years ago it was well-know that  Ferguson’s Videostar machines were re-badged JVC models. Show a picture of a JVC HR-3300 to your average British person of a certain age and they might tell it was a Ferguson Videostar or a Baird. Grundig and Philips shared a similar relationship back in the 1980s.

    What is interesting is the corrosive effect that the clone accusation must have on a brand, particularly when it comes from a figure like the sales person I spoke to who would be considered by the consumer to be a domain expert.  I gnaws away at reputations based on quality and design over decades and explains how globalisation and digital convergence has destroyed giants like Panasonic, Sony, Pioneer and Sharp.

    This contrasts sharply with the perception of Apple, which uses a similar ODM-based supply chain yet has managed to grow from strength-to-strength. More gadget related content can be found here.

More posts