The BADA blog

Use Us or Lose Us

2011-03-24T01:51:00.000-07:00

Guest blogger, Vernon Hamblin of Unilet Sound & Vision and BADA board member asks us to ponder a few things...

Unilet Sound & Vision Ltd has survived for just over 42 years. It has survived, like thousands of other independent and privately owned shops and businesses the length and breadth of every High Street in this land, for two principal reasons:

First, it is a SPECIALIST retailer. It is staffed and owned by specialists. It is stocked with specialist equipment that those specialists know every inch of. They know how each bit of Hi-Fi and Home Cinema works. Why it does or doesn't work with other components. “Knowledge is Power” as someone once said. But fanaticism is something so much more powerful. Pick our brains......we are fanatics!

Second, Unilet survives because it wants to. We genuinely care that your Hi-Fi or Home Cinema looks and sounds as good as it possibly can for the budget you have set yourself. It prides itself on its levels of customer service. Its competitive prices. Its incomparable choice of product lines and unrivalled facilities.

But now Unilet Sound & Vision, like all independent specialist retailers, is at war. This war started quietly a few years ago......almost Guerilla like. Now that battle is full-on open warfare. Who are we in conflict with?
The answer may shock you......it's you.
Yes, YOU...the customer.

The customer who spends too much time on the internet. So much time, in fact, that it is neither good or healthy for you. Please stop believing that the 'Best price is the Best deal'...it isn't. You are doing yourself a disservice. Get out and get among us. We're nice people just trying to do a good job. Come and talk to us and look and listen. It's so much more interesting than the computer screen!

In the meantime, we'll keep on keeping on......”Cry 'Havoc' and let slip the dogs of war” is a call to arms for us all. Do it not and the High Street we know and love simply won't exist!

www.unilet.net
www.bada.co.uk

Turn it Up

2011-02-16T07:04:00.000-08:00

“I love it loud, I wanna hear it loud, right between the eyes, Loud, I wanna hear it loud.” And so the, oh so poetic, lyric from the KISS song goes on.

Driving down the elevated section of the M4 towards Heathrow last week, I noticed a poster for the new Mercedes AMG 480-something BHP monster. Making it look a bit like KITT, from that masterpiece of TV that was Knight RIder, this very imposing car is adorned with an array of LED lights on its bonnet. Closer inspection shows it’s actually an overlaid volume control indicator from a portable music player which is set on maximum. The strapline for the advert reads - “It’s Loud!”

And then there are the media reports on the ever increasing volume of today’s recordings and how certain CDs are mastered just so loud that even die hard fans are complaining. Who would have thought that Metallica fans would ever say their favourite band’s new album is too loud! That’s exactly what happened with the release of Death Magnetic from the world’s biggest heavy metal band. Even the mastering engineer, Ted Jensen, sided with the critics, saying, in response to an email from a fan "Believe me, I'm not proud to be associated with this one." The problem comes about as a result of the battle to win what in marketing parlance is called the share of voice. In a world of almost infinite, and largely throw away, media content, being loud tends to get you noticed; so artists and the record labels are pushing all the sliders to 11. The result is a greatly reduced dynamic range - the loud parts of the music are loud and the quiet parts of the music are also loud! The subtleties in the music are lost and the fine detail just disappears into the mush. With iTunes and the portable compressed music formats being by far the most popular way to listen to music, the record companies are tailoring their output to suit these formats. The low quality ear buds supplied with iPods are incapable of reproducing a broad dynamic range and so the music is mastered in such a way as to make it work on the reproduction equipment.

So it’s obvious that there is an obsession with “loud” sweeping the world. It seems like quality really doesn’t do it for the masses any more, which frankly is a crying shame as people just don’t know what they’re missing, which I’ll come back to in a moment.

In the meantime, this week has seen the big announcement from Apple that iTunes now offers The Beatles re-mastered albums for download. Whilst it’s great that such iconic music is made available to the young iPod users, via a format they understand and possibly the only format they ever consider, isn’t a shame that they’ll only experience it at compressed music quality? There’s a consensus amongst many audiophiles (hate that word, as it conjures up images of the weirdo with food in his beard!) that the recently released Beatles remasters on CD don’t actually sound as good as previous releases. And therein lies another myth of the marketing hype surrounding remasters of classic albums - remastering doesn’t necessarily mean better. So not only are they buying new versions of classic albums that arguably don’t sound as good as they could, but they’re buying them in a compressed format that will detract from the performance even more, but tragically they either don’t know or don’t care.

Coming back to what people are missing, and to coin a phrase, there are unknown unknowns here - there just isn’t the awareness of what constitutes good quality. It feels in some way as if the rug has been pulled from under our feet on the question of quality music reproduction. Hi-Fi has always been about quality, with the founders of our industry and their successors constantly trying to find better ways of reproducing music (and now movies). We were the guardians of good sound quality and that was understood by the public, but now there is a lack of concern for quality as quantity has overtaken it. There is an ‘am I bothered’ and ‘whatever’ attitude towards what we do and so it could be argued that our role is becoming increasingly redundant in a world ruled by the mp3.

But before I slip any further into a morose epitaph for our industry and earn my place on Grumpy Old Men, I will regain my sense of pride in what we do. We make fantastic products that make listening to music and watching movies an absolute joy. We owe it to ourselves and all the music lovers out there to shout about it and to keep chipping away at the public’s consciousness. Of course it is easier to do this as a collective than as individuals, which is where a trade association such as BADA comes into its own. Let us not forget our roots - there would be no CI without home cinema and no home cinema without hi-fi and hi-fi is all about quality. We are all members of one industry and if we work together under the auspices our trade association and in conjunction other complementary associations, we stand a better chance of changing people’s perceptions of what we do and how relevant we are to their lives. Let’s join the obsession with volume and turn our message up.

You're just a click away. Part 2

2010-09-14T00:53:00.000-07:00

How to get started?

The key is to get organised in advance of starting anything. This is no different from any traditional marketing communications activity - it’s all in the planning. Let’s use the BADA experience as an example of how you could potentially plan a social media strategy.

It was decided that, as BADA’s communications efforts are done on behalf of its members, the overriding strategic objective was for the new BADA website to be designed as a portal through which consumers could easily reach their local retailer. To be successful at this, it was obvious that it would need to do well in Google searches and be a site that people thought of when contemplating hi-fi and home entertainment purchases.

The tactics were fairly simple:

to design the site to be naturally good with search engine searches (through careful consideration of the language used, numerous links, regular updates etc.)
to concentrate on maintaining the SEO (search engine optimisation) through the services of a specialist SEO company
to reach out to as many potential customers through Social Media with the aim of directing them to the website

We started by identifying who we wanted to communicate with. In a nutshell (and this will be the same for any business operating in our sector) we wanted to talk to existing hi-fi/ home cinema users, music lovers and movie enthusiasts. From this we determined which applications they were likely to use and which of those applications give the opportunity to segment and target by interests. In our case we came up with two lists. The primary one consisted of the main apps that we’ve all heard of: Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Blogger and Flickr. It is these that we have implemented first and our secondary list, which includes things like gogoyoko (a music focused site) will be implemented later.

To start we setup a BADA Facebook fanpage and added some basic content to it, this was followed by a Linkedin company page and the creation of a Twitter account. Flickr was next and this was populated with a variety of photographs

One of our must-haves was to make the integration of our chosen applications as seamless as possible, to reduce the amount of time needed to keep them up to date by enabling them to talk to one another. The trouble is, they’re all written by different companies and getting them to interact isn’t as easy as it should be, as my experience with Flickr and Facebook demonstrated.

The BADA blog had already been running for a while and this was then joined by a Twitter account. What we did then was to start linking the accounts using 3rd party software. It is possible to use software such as Ping or Atomkeep, which enable you to enter information once and it is then automatically spread to all your other social networking applications. This is by far the easiest way in terms of management time, but it does limit your flexibility as everything you post will go everywhere. We opted not to go down this route, instead we set up individual links between some of our applications so we can have more control over what appears where. You may decide that the one stop shop option is best for your requirements.

The crucial thing is the targeting and how that is set up. There are numerous applications that let you specify the type of people your communiques are sent to. For example, we used something called Twollow, which automatically allows us to follow people on Twitter who are talking about specific subjects, and Twitter etiquette says they should follow us in return. As we have links between Twitter and the Blog and the website, it should drive traffic onto the BADA website and hence onto the members.

Social Media is a vast subject and one we can only scratch the surface of in this article. Hopefully we’ve whetted your appetite and you’re hungry to find out more. It can be a fantastically powerful communications tool, and talking to our customers and potential customers is possibly the most important thing we can do. In the meantime join us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, follow us on Linkedin and read the BADA blog - all accessible from the new BADA website at www.bada.co.uk

You’re just a click away. Part 1

2010-09-08T02:19:00.000-07:00

Unless you’ve been in hibernation for the past couple of years, you can’t fail to have noticed that something called Social Media is all over the news and on everyone’s lips at the moment. Along with websites, email, apps, mms, texts, good old fashioned phone calls and, shock horror, face to face conversations, it’s one of the seemingly endless number of ways we now have to communicate with our customers.

Before we go any further, take a minute to consider the six main benefits of Social Media:
It gets people talking about your brand. It gives very quick results. It can be easily targeted. It improves your search engine rankings. It works alongside your traditional marketing. It can cost nothing.

But how well are we coping with this plethora of communication methods? I know from working on the new BADA website that it can be very time consuming. BADA has embraced the world of Social Media, on top of the regular website updates, newsletters, news releases and magazine columns. It could easily be a full time job just keeping on top of all the communication tools at my disposal, never mind anything else. It’s taken me a day to get the link from our Flickr page to the Facebook fanpage to work properly, and that’s just the mechanics, never mind actually making use of them for communications.

It’s difficult to get an accurate figure for the number of social media sites, but it’s well in excess of 200 and there are literally thousands of apps that work with them. And here are a couple of really mind-blowing statistics: Facebook has 200 million active users and there have been, as I write this, 21 billion tweets on Twitter.

So you would be forgiven for thinking it must be nigh on impossible to actually reach the people you want to talk to. It’s overwhelming; how do you sort out which applications to use, how to target effectively and what sort of time to allocate to maintaining them?

Next time in part 2, how to get started.

BADA's new website - designed to help you find you nearest specialist retailer

2010-07-23T09:37:00.000-07:00

The British Audio-Visual Dealers Association, the specialist hi-fi and home cinema industry’s leading trade association, has today launched its new website, which is designed to help consumers find their nearest specialist retailer and give advice on buying quality home entertainment products.

Just two clicks of the mouse, via an interactive map of the UK, and the enquirer is taken to a map of their area, with rollovers showing the details of the closest store. From there they can view the store’s own website, send an email, call them or get directions.

The interactive map locator has been installed on every page of the new site, so the visitor is never more than two clicks away from their local BADA member.

“Want to know why you should visit a BADA retailer?” Here you see an explanation of the benefits of shopping at one of the network of BADA members, with information about their commitment to customer service, comparative demonstration facilities, impartial advice, and most importantly, their membership of the UK’s only national network of retailers trained to agreed industry standards.

BADA's new website, designed to help consumers

2010-07-23T09:19:00.000-07:00

The British Audio-Visual Dealers Association, the specialist hi-fi and home cinema industry’s leading trade association, has today launched its new website, which is designed to help consumers find their nearest specialist retailer and give advice on buying quality home entertainment products.

Just two clicks of the mouse, via an interactive map of the UK, and the enquirer is taken to a map of their area, with rollovers showing the details of the closest store. From there they can view the store’s own website, send an email, call them or get directions.

“Want to know why you should visit a BADA retailer?” In this section you will see an explanation of the benefits of shopping at one of the network of BADA members. With information about their commitment to customer service, comparative demonstration facilities, impartial advice, and most importantly, their membership of the UK’s only national network of retailers trained to agreed industry standards.

Check it out at www.bada.co.uk

Will the digital revolution kill music?

2010-07-13T00:57:00.000-07:00

There was a time when music was a thing to be cherished, now it could be argued that is just a commodity which is unvalued and throw-away.

It would be churlish for me to say the music of yesteryear was better quality and the charts now are full of talentless pseudo-celebs. But, regardless of my personal prejudices, there is certainly something fundamentally different about what’s being bought now compared to 20 or 30 years ago. It may not necessarily be the quality of the musicianship or composition, but simply just the quality and all that that word encompasses.

Everything develops and music is no exception, but is there perhaps a fundamental shift in the importance of music in our lives? It is true that there are many more people listening to music than ever before, but how critically are they listening? Do they even hear what they’re listening to and what are the implications for the hi-fi industry?

Hi-Fi is a luxury product and with such a purchase goes a degree of pride of ownership. I would like to think that most people who buy hi-fi equipment do so because they appreciate the benefits it gives to them in terms of enjoyment of the music. The owner is justifiably proud of the new equipment and is probably just as proud of the music played on it. When music was purchased on vinyl, cassette or CD there was a tangible element to the purchase. Both the music and the carrier medium were inseparable items to treasure, it was as if one couldn’t exist without the other. The human interface with a music collection was rather similar to the action of taking an old book off a shelf or a bottle of wine from a rack, blowing the dust off and settling down to enjoy it.

There are some startling statistics on downloads, which really do give food for thought and I’ll leave you with these whilst you ponder on whether the digital revolution will be responsible for the death of quality music and hi-fi or the opportunity to reach out to a new market.

From the British Music Rights survey:
84% of 18-24 year olds own an mp3 player
63% of those questioned illegally download music
80% thought music was the most important thing they bought in a given month
Of those still buying CDs, only 7% buy them for the sound quality

Reporting from the Gadget Show Live

2010-04-07T09:24:00.000-07:00

Just been to the NEC to the trade day of Gadget Show Live. As you'd
probably expect, there's 3D TV everywhere and it's drawing a lot of
attention. But it's also great to see a good amount of hi-fi on show.
BADA members, Pioneer are hosting the Hi-Fi Theatre along with Hi-Fi
Choice, Home Cinema Choice and T3 magazines, with the company's
Dominic Feeney taking part in a Q&A panel with Jason Kennedy of Hi-Fi
Choice and Rik Mucha from Superfi.

BADA itself was also on show, sharing billing with its Associate
members Onkyo, The Chord Company, KEF and Dolby. And our fellow trade
association, Cedia, were there also, hosting presentations on the
technology to look out for this year.

The show runs until Sunday and is worth a visit if you get the chance.

BADA welcomes Focal to its membership

2009-11-20T07:38:00.000-08:00

The British Audio-Visual Dealers Association is pleased to announce the addition of Focal JM Lab UK Ltd. as the latest manufacturer to join to the growing list of Associate members of the UK’s leading hi-fi and home cinema trade association.

Focal has been expanding its presence in the UK market over the past few years, at the same time as BADA has been strengthening its position as the most progressive of the UK trade associations. At a recent meeting of Fraser Robertson, UK sales director for Focal, and Simon Byles, BADA chairman, the joint responsibility of BADA and the manufacturers in the setting and upholding of standards in retail was discussed and agreed. Focal's indicated support for BADA's Demcraft, Salescraft and soon to be launched Visioncraft courses is very much welcomed by the association and therefore the application for membership was approved unanimously by the board of directors.

Speaking shortly after the application was approved, Simon Byles said "We are delighted to welcome a company of Focal's calibre to BADA and it is fitting that their growth in the UK has mirrored that of BADA's. I look forward to working with Fraser and his team for the benefit of the wider industry."

Fraser Robertson said “We have been steadily increasing the market penetration of the Focal brand in the UK over the past few years and it has been impossible to miss the growing influence and importance of BADA and its standards focussed efforts during that time. We felt that the time was now right for Focal to take a seat at the table with other like minded manufacturers who, as BADA Associate members, want to help the work being done by the association to drive up standards in the UK industry for the benefit of consumers.”

www.bada.co.uk

The public's view of mp3 'v' CD

2009-11-13T08:27:00.000-08:00

I've just had this video link pointed out to me:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/working_lunch/8351921.stm

It's really encouraging to see something like this on the BBC - it kind of vindicates everything that BADA dealers have been saying for years about mp3 quality. There's no denying that it's a superbly versatile and useful format for transporting music and opening up the ears of millions of people to music, but we've all known for a long time that it really is the poor relation when it comes to sound quality. And sound quality really does matter - that's why the best recording studios exist and why the best engineers are worth their weight in gold. So watch this and then dig out yor CDs and enjoy!

BADA really screwed it up in Room 101

2009-10-01T08:54:00.000-07:00

At the National Audio Show , in a presentation entitled “How to really screw up your hi-fi system and what to do about it”, the UK hi-fi industry’s trade association shared elements of the multi-award winning Demcraft course, normally used to train dealers in the art of system setup, with hi-fi consumers. Demcraft trainer, Roger Batchelor, along with BADA chairman Simon Byles and operations manager, Phil Hansen, demonstrated the importance of correct system setup to scores of people who visited BADA in the ironically selected Room 101.

Using two separate hi-fi systems, a £1,800 system well set up and a £7,000 system very badly set up, the trainers were able to show that the carefully prepared system sounded better than the significantly more expensive system that had been badly prepared. After putting right the 10 faults that had been deliberately introduced into the system it was demonstrated again, clearly showing how much its performance had improved. The attendees were shown the faults and given explanations of what their effect on the sound was and how they were rectified, so they could check their own systems and make simple, free, improvements to them.

BADA succeeded in training all customer facing staff in all BADA members’ shops earlier in 2009, creating the UK’s first ever network of hi-fi dealers trained to the same standard.

Find your nearest BADA dealer at www.bada.co.uk

Ads like this don't help

2009-09-29T02:54:00.000-07:00

There's so much more to buying technology than just getting the lowest
price. Will dixons.co.uk install, setup and calibrate your new plasma,
nevermind advise you on the right product for your needs? I doubt it.
This advert I've just spotted on the tube network is indicative of the
obsession with getting the lowest price and the increasingly blatant
advice from, amongst others, some of the media, who seem to think it's
perfectly reasonable to use the expert retailers for advice, wasting
their time and then to go buy from a discounter.
OK, so the shop this ad is hinting at (notice the use of yellow) isn't
a specialist independent, but the principle is just the same. Support
your local specialist - they won't be the cheapest, but they will give
you the best advice, service and back up.
Check out www.bada.co.uk for your nearest.

How to get the best from your hi-fi system.

2009-09-22T00:52:00.001-07:00

Advice from BADA on how to get the best from your system.
BADA will be at the National Audio Show, 26-27 September, Whittlebury Hall, nr Silverstone; where we will be giving practical demonstrations on how to get the best out of your hi-fi system.

"How to screw up your hi-fi system. And what to do about it" is a 30 minute workshop that will be running at intervals throughout the show. Learn how to maximise the enjoyment of your system and hence your music, from the hi-fi industry's trade association - the people who teach the hi-fi dealers how to do setup and demonstrate equipment.

Visit www.chestergroup.org for information about the show.

How to really screw up your hi-fi system.

2009-08-21T05:07:00.000-07:00

How to really screw up your hi-fi system. And what to do about it.
The British Audio-Visual Dealers Association, the UK industry’s trade body, will be showing you how to get the best out of your hi-fi system with a cut down version of its award winning Demcraft course at the National Audio Show, 26-27 September, Whittlebury Hall, nr Silverstone.

Every member of staff in every BADA dealer has completed the Demcraft course and so, for the first time ever in the UK, there is a network of hi-fi retailers all trained to the same industry agreed standard, who can present you with the best possible product demonstrations. When you sit down and listen to a selection of equipment in a BADA member’s shop, you can be sure that the dealer knows it inside out, has set it up correctly, has matched it correctly and knows how to show you its capabilities, so you can make an informed decision.

BADA winning more awards!

2009-07-17T05:00:00.000-07:00

We've been winning awards again for our acclaimed Demcraft training course. This time the leading UK trade magazine, SVI, has conferred on Demcraft the Training Course of the Year award in recognition of the work BADA has done with Demcraft to raise the standards throughout the UK hi-fi retail sector.

You can see a video of BADA's operations and marketing manager, Phil Hansen, collecting the award by following this link:

http://uk.cinenow.com/videos/2162

Petition to save FM broadcasting

2009-07-01T09:42:00.000-07:00

You may be aware that the UK government is keen to push through proposals to turn off FM radio by 2015, and to force everyone to buy new DAB radios.

This means, if you ever listen to the radio, either at home or in your car, you will have to throw away your existing radio and replace it with a new, more expensive substitute.

DAB has a lower sound quality than FM broadcasting, and it's reception in cars can be very erratic. With the exception of the BBC (who have a vested interest in DAB), most broadcasters do not want and do not support DAB. A number of broadcasters who undertook experimental DAB programming have since withdrawn from the service. The UK does not yet have 100% coverage for Digital Broadcasting, and in some areas there is no commitment to ever provide a service. For TV and at home you have the option of using a satellite service, but that is impractical for a portable or car radio.

Do you want to be forced into adopting a broadcasting system which offers lower performance, poorer sound quality and less coverage than the FM system we have at present?

If you feel strongly about this please add your name to the Downing Street Petition against switching off FM radio:

http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/AM-FM-Radio/

Of course, if this goes ahead, the government will then sell off the existing FM radio band to the highest bidders, raising another small one-off amount of money to help repay the crippling debt they have committed us all to.

Please forward this to anyone you know who will be affected by the FM shutddown.

Welcome

2009-06-30T03:54:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the BADA blog. Here we will post any interesting news stories about hi-fi, home cinema and all things BADA related.