20 l July 2014
www.psneurope.com
studio
Inside the anechoic chamber; and (inset) the exterior of the Paços de Ferreira facility, with its giant Wavewood-style panel
acoustic panel to put inside shelters…” Bomb shelters? “That one I cannot reveal! It was an interesting product.” He continues: “The product we developed for Microsoft is in our catalogue, but for some clients [like Nato], we don’t mind doing something exclusive.” Carapinha ends our
conversation with “a really nice
“The only way to be on top is to have your own research centre” César Carapinha
can [record] a lot of people – something that you cannot record in your own house – they will stay.”
Custom products and installations for corporate clients are also an important
source of Vicoustic’s revenue: for example, the company partnered with Microsoft last year to develop an acoustic solution for its Seattle, US, R&D lab, where the technology giant was testing the Xbox
One’s Kinetic voice-recognition technology. “I don’t have any problem licensing a product […] if someone wants a specific thing, we’ll do it for them,” Carapinha says. “We already did [something] for Nato: an
story” about one of his favourite installations. “There was a guy with a restaurant, [and] he was very unhappy because people never went there a second time,” he explains. “The restaurant was so noisy – there’s a snowball
effect: when a bunch of people are in a room that’s very reverberant, they start to talk louder, then your neighbour starts to talk louder [and] it gets so noisy that people won’t go there again. “And he was almost about to close the business. All the typical solutions would make him have to close the business for a few days while they build a second ceiling […] that’s what a normal builder would do. He didn’t want to do that – to close a business that was already not good.
“So, we proposed a solution
that [meant] he just needed to let us go in during the night. We glued some panels onto the ceiling and the next day it was sorted. The guy was so happy, he told us: ‘Can I be your reseller? Because I think I’m going to close the restaurant and start selling your products – this is amazing!’ I will never forget that story.”
www.vicoustic.com www.audio-technica.com
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56