Hi Jtcf
The tuning days are coming back strong. I was very surprised to see tuning had drifted so far from what we had started back in the 90’s. In the late 90’s we (MGA RoomTune) had saturated the market and it seemed like Tuning would only grow stronger on it’s own. But then the mom & pop audio stores went under and the magazines had bills to pay, so the emphasis moved back to selling boxes. I wasn’t overly aware of this cause I moved to Nashville to work on studios. I did home audio still but could see HEA was going through some issues and I by myself was not going to make my desires stick in a reviewing market that had their sights on selling extremely over priced products. One reviewer told me this (more than one actually), we have a choice push your Tuning for very little cost or sell $20,000.00 amplifiers. I understood where they were coming from, $400.00 for a TunePak vs $100,000.00 of electronics to the same client. Obviously the $100,000.00 choice by Stereophile was going to keep their lights on. What I didn’t understand was why not do both. That’s when my reviewer friends also gave me that answer. HEA manufacturers didn’t want the Tuning Revolution to take off. At that time I had over 80,000 clients. That means 80,000 people might choose to Tune taking away that many potential sales from equipment designers. That’s a pretty big deal when you think about it.
show & tell
When I started showing the industry that you could Tune a $500.00 amplifier and it would out perform a $25,000.00 one, that made folks pretty darn nervous. The behind the scenes word gets around pretty fast and when I showed up at the CES with a set of Marantz Mono Blocks MA700’s and slaughtered the sound of the rooms on either side, the very first night I had folks in my room telling me this was not going to fly with the "powers that be". The industry thought it their duty to tell me not to build Tunable products. Too late, I had already designed Tunable everything and was getting ready to launch an entire "Method of Tuning" and all the ingredients that goes with that pie. I obviously felt (so did others evidently) that the hobby was about to change from "Fixed" to "Variable". But like I mentioned earlier local stereo stores (650 of whom were RoomTune dealers) started dropping like flies, sadly going out of business before they had a chance to learn how to do their on-line store. There went my network.
It really would have been the perfect time to change things over from Fixed to Variable but the folks at the top of the food chain didn’t want to make the jump. Many of them had found their fortunes and didn’t want to have to start teaching listeners how to tune, is what they decided. More money (for the short term) for them to build bigger toys and less of them, then spend their time with the listeners, showing them how to get great sound and be able to play all of their music collection.
I tested the waters a couple of times to bring Tuning back, but decided it would be much easier to bring Tuning back after HEA ran it’s course and started to run out of gas. Now that things like Class D amplifiers have challenged the expensive guys and the expensive buying revolving door is failing, it’s time to give things another go round. I first started to post on the Stereophile forum but was trolled to death from the start, so I just stayed on TuneLand till I decided to test the waters here. Between here, facebook and TuneLand I’m receiving on average 100 messages a day asking about Tuning or making renewed contact with me. This is a good start and one by one folks are coming over to Tuning or renewing their interest. That’s pretty exciting. I’ve even started talks with Agon so that as more folks get into the Tuning toys again we will find the best way to promote.
I believe the best days of this hobby are still ahead, because I believe listeners are experimenting again beyond just doing the equipment plug and play thing.
nice chatting with you jtcf. thanks for letting me share my thoughts on your thread
mg