Another overpriced Music Server
16/04/08 08:12 Filed in: Audio
I will say it up front, I am not a fan of dedicated
music servers, with a few exceptions such as the
QSonix model. Now, the news
here is that NuVo Technologies have released a
new model, the NV-M3 pictured below.
The NuVo Technologies NV-M3 has a full half-terabyte of space and an even more astounding price tag, more on that in a minute. On the unit itself, you'll find a polycarbonate, capacitive touch front panel interface with a tiny OLED display and a bunch of ports on the back. Now, the price.... US$2,999!
When it lands here in Australia, this will translate to a whopping $4999. Sure it is cheaper than an Imerge Music Server, just, but who cares? For $5000 you can buy an Apple Mac Pro, load it up with 2TB of storage and either connect it to your LCD/Plasma screen, or buy a nice Apple display and still have change. The benefit?
An infinitely better music server and cataloguing system, far more flexibility, and a continually upgraded operating system and user interface, something which every single dedicated music server rarely ever gets.
The NuVo Technologies NV-M3 has a full half-terabyte of space and an even more astounding price tag, more on that in a minute. On the unit itself, you'll find a polycarbonate, capacitive touch front panel interface with a tiny OLED display and a bunch of ports on the back. Now, the price.... US$2,999!
When it lands here in Australia, this will translate to a whopping $4999. Sure it is cheaper than an Imerge Music Server, just, but who cares? For $5000 you can buy an Apple Mac Pro, load it up with 2TB of storage and either connect it to your LCD/Plasma screen, or buy a nice Apple display and still have change. The benefit?
An infinitely better music server and cataloguing system, far more flexibility, and a continually upgraded operating system and user interface, something which every single dedicated music server rarely ever gets.
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Murano Audio out of business
09/04/08 23:43 Filed in: Audio
Headphone Sales Leaderboard in Australia has a new leader
07/04/08 23:27 Filed in: Audio
The Australian headphone market has been booming ever
since the iPod started to dominate the portable music
player market. For many years the market was
dominated by two major players: Sony and Philips.
This begs the question: "Why is the market
dominated by two non-specialists, instead of the big
name specialists such as Sennheiser and
AKG?"
The answer is pretty simple really: Sony and Philips do deals with the major chain stores to sell their headphones in place of other brands, so the general public is 'force fed' inferior products purely because the stores in question have little concern with offering the best product, and of course they want to retain the ability to sell the other products which these two companies make.
However, through substantial marketing by Sennheiser both globally and locally through it's Australian distributor Syntec, Sennheiser has now become the number one headphone brand, not in the number of units sold, but in the dollar value of those sales. I have to say, they deserve it too, as they have a massive range of quality product and their packaging is the best in the business.
So between Sennheiser, Sony and Philips, they own about 90% of the Australian Market, leaving around 10% for ALL the other players. This is staggering considering the big names in that small group, names such as AKG, Beyer Dynamic, Audio-Technica and Shure, all of which are specialists, and then there are the many other brands that are not headphone specialists.
The one big mover in the last year has been Audio-Technica. Formerly distributed by Yamaha Australia they were virtually unknown to the Australian Consumer due to no effort being put into advertising the brand. Since being taken over by TAG (Technical Audio Group) the sales and awareness of Audio-Technica has soared. In the last two years sales of Audio-Technica has gone from virtually nothing to 3% of the Australian market. I would expect that to grow to at least 6% in 2008 if current sales are anything to go by, so hats off to Max at TAG for doing a great job in marketing this great brand.
So what happened to brands like AKG and Beyer? Well, Beyer I am not sure about, but I can certainly shed some light on the failure of AKG in Australia. The problem is their distributor, Audio Products Group. APG are very particular about who they give their products to, and prefer not to go the 'box mover' path of the major chains, instead focussing on the independent stores, you know, the ones which are going out of business at a rate of knots!
Have you ever tried to buy an AKG headphone? Try finding someone who sells AKG and you are likely to give up in frustration, particularly if you search online, because AGP hate online resellers with a passion. Instead, they tread the well worn path of: "If we ignore it long enough it will go away". (The same path the Independent resellers have been treading up until the day they went out of business) They also detest anyone discounting the products they sell, so combine discount price with online sales and you have not got a chance.
AGP it seems will continue to limit the sales of AKG through ignorance of how consumers want to buy. This of course forces the Australian consumer to buy AKG online from an overseas vendor, bypassing both the local resellers and their own distribution. So long as AGP and other distributors continue to ignore online vendors in Australia, sales of the products they distribute will continue to be limited at best, and at worse, decline.
This situation is a real shame, because AKG make great headphones, all they need is a great distributor with a contemporary view of selling, an understanding of the global economy we are now working in, and the declining relevance of geographical location to the end user.
The answer is pretty simple really: Sony and Philips do deals with the major chain stores to sell their headphones in place of other brands, so the general public is 'force fed' inferior products purely because the stores in question have little concern with offering the best product, and of course they want to retain the ability to sell the other products which these two companies make.
However, through substantial marketing by Sennheiser both globally and locally through it's Australian distributor Syntec, Sennheiser has now become the number one headphone brand, not in the number of units sold, but in the dollar value of those sales. I have to say, they deserve it too, as they have a massive range of quality product and their packaging is the best in the business.
So between Sennheiser, Sony and Philips, they own about 90% of the Australian Market, leaving around 10% for ALL the other players. This is staggering considering the big names in that small group, names such as AKG, Beyer Dynamic, Audio-Technica and Shure, all of which are specialists, and then there are the many other brands that are not headphone specialists.
The one big mover in the last year has been Audio-Technica. Formerly distributed by Yamaha Australia they were virtually unknown to the Australian Consumer due to no effort being put into advertising the brand. Since being taken over by TAG (Technical Audio Group) the sales and awareness of Audio-Technica has soared. In the last two years sales of Audio-Technica has gone from virtually nothing to 3% of the Australian market. I would expect that to grow to at least 6% in 2008 if current sales are anything to go by, so hats off to Max at TAG for doing a great job in marketing this great brand.
So what happened to brands like AKG and Beyer? Well, Beyer I am not sure about, but I can certainly shed some light on the failure of AKG in Australia. The problem is their distributor, Audio Products Group. APG are very particular about who they give their products to, and prefer not to go the 'box mover' path of the major chains, instead focussing on the independent stores, you know, the ones which are going out of business at a rate of knots!
Have you ever tried to buy an AKG headphone? Try finding someone who sells AKG and you are likely to give up in frustration, particularly if you search online, because AGP hate online resellers with a passion. Instead, they tread the well worn path of: "If we ignore it long enough it will go away". (The same path the Independent resellers have been treading up until the day they went out of business) They also detest anyone discounting the products they sell, so combine discount price with online sales and you have not got a chance.
AGP it seems will continue to limit the sales of AKG through ignorance of how consumers want to buy. This of course forces the Australian consumer to buy AKG online from an overseas vendor, bypassing both the local resellers and their own distribution. So long as AGP and other distributors continue to ignore online vendors in Australia, sales of the products they distribute will continue to be limited at best, and at worse, decline.
This situation is a real shame, because AKG make great headphones, all they need is a great distributor with a contemporary view of selling, an understanding of the global economy we are now working in, and the declining relevance of geographical location to the end user.
Competition for iTunes?
04/04/08 20:54 Filed in: Music
The rumour mill is running hot with talk that
there'll be an announcement in the next week,
launching the 'MySpace Music Store',
where people will be able to legitimately access
music from a complete range of all the major music
companies.
This has the potential to be the biggest threat to iTunes dominance yet. Where all others has failed because of a poor distribution model or just downright lousy user interface, MySpace could succeed for one simple reason: regardless of it's possible flaws, it has a truly massive captive audience.
Few people realise the size of the social media web sites such as MySpace and FaceBook. Each of these sites receive as much web traffic as Google! It will be interesting to watch if this does come to fruition, stay tuned!
This has the potential to be the biggest threat to iTunes dominance yet. Where all others has failed because of a poor distribution model or just downright lousy user interface, MySpace could succeed for one simple reason: regardless of it's possible flaws, it has a truly massive captive audience.
Few people realise the size of the social media web sites such as MySpace and FaceBook. Each of these sites receive as much web traffic as Google! It will be interesting to watch if this does come to fruition, stay tuned!
Audio-Technica ATH-ANC3 Noise Cancelling Headphones
01/04/08 13:07 Filed in: Audio
