Up and running in the US, VUE Audiotechnik is coming to a company near you in Europe. But what kind of company? asks Phil Ward
Points ofVue
“A LOT of work, but a lot of fun.” That’s how Ken Berger describes the creation of VUE Audiotechnik, the new brand name in loudspeakers launched earlier this year. The brainchild of Berger and Jim Sides, a duo with parallel roots and an easy, buddy-buddy outlook in common, you’d expect both effort and affability. How that translates to a changing world could be the story of 2013. Berger is typically bullish about
the DNA inside VUE. “It’s all about our commitment to the channel, our relationships and
our experience – especially mine at EAW and Jim’s at Apogee Sound, Nexo and Meyer,” he says. “Speaker products have come a long way and the base line is pretty good everywhere, but there hasn’t been a lot of envelope pushing – really wanting to make things better. We also want to get back to the personal touch, and not look at the market like a big corporation would – slicing and dicing it and basing it all on the quarterly performance. “Of course success and
performance matter, but they matter in the long term and with
all of your industry relationships thriving year after year. Jim and I have spent time in large organisations and we want to avoid those things that they’re bad at. It’s been great building this up from scratch and finding how hungry people are for this kind of company.”
SPEAKER CONNECTIONS And a very 21st century kind of company it is, too. With its headquarters near San Diego, where design leadership, sales, operations and marketing are all based, VUE adds global R&D
and manufacturing resources via founding partners Speaker Connection of Solingen Germany and its dedicated production facility in Asia. The German and Asian teams are “capable of manufacturing almost anything we specify – from transducers and enclosures to analogue or digital electronics”, points out director of marketing communications Kyle Ritland. “That’s a powerful resource to have in place for such a young company.” Sides has spent much of the summer touring the US with a
truck full of demo stock and shooting from the hip in front of every kind of audio business: a process that has won new friends but also reunited these veterans with a lot of old ones. This was a deliberate alternative to the formulaic demo day prescribed by modern convention: rent a hall; send out the invites. The aim was to make each encounter personal. “We really wanted to get the
products to the clients,” he recounts, “rather than the other way round; to get inside their facility and mingle with all the staff. It was also untypical in that