Lenbrook ‘Invested Heavily’ in Digital Music Experience Center Plan For AV Specialists, Miller Said

SAN DIEGO -- Lenbrook America is hoping to open 50-60 of its digital music experience centers in specialty AV dealers’ stores over the next 2-3 years, CEO Dean Miller told us at the Home Technology Specialists of America conference last week. Lenbrook invested “quite heavily” in the first beta site at The Little Guys store in Mokena, Ill., and two more are in the works, he said, citing test centers at Listen Up in Denver and Gramophone in Timonium, Md.

"The first time we rushed a few things and spent more than we had to, but then we learned how to scale this to make it more mass-manufactured,” Miller said. The showroom build-out, specified for 450 square feet of floor space, currently stands at $28,000 and “we would like to get it more to $25,000,” Miller said. The fee includes retrofitting the entire room from ceiling to floor for lights, ceiling, electrical, displays, fixtures and installation, Miller said. Miller was inspired by digital signage at Apple Stores’ Genius Bars where LCD screens deliver information to a captive audience, and he designed in LG signage panels with a looping message that provides tips on using your computer for audio along with definitions of audio terms used in digital audio.

The program and plan belong to Lenbrook, but there’s “latitude for product selection,” Miller said. “Everybody has their best interest in mind,” he said. “It wouldn’t be credible” if products were exclusively NAD and PSB, he said, referring to the company’s electronics and loudspeaker brands. Required gear for dealers participating in the program include $16,979 worth of NAD and PSB equipment, plus additional requisite and optional add-ons, some of which can be selected according to dealers’ product lines. At The Little Guys, no prices are posted next to the equipment to reinforce that it’s a learning -- not selling -- environment, said Miller and Little Guys owner David Wexler.

Under Lenbrook’s plan, each experience center is divided into six zones to emphasize a different application of computer audio. Zone 1 is a welcome area where customers are qualified at an Elo touchscreen station that salespeople can use to tailor a system to a particular residence such as a studio apartment or a four-bedroom house, he said.

Zone 2 features a desktop system for a dorm room showing wireless technology built around a desktop or laptop and higher end NAD/PSB gear, including headphones, he said. “We're computer-agnostic,” Miller said, and Lenbrook encourages dealers to show both Windows and Mac computers, with dealers’ choice of powered speakers to show how to beef up the sound at a basic level. The step-up Lenbrook system in the space includes an NAD wireless digital-to-analog converter and integrated amplifier with a pair of PSB speakers, Miller said.

Zone 3, a single-room solution with a portable speaker dock, spotlights NAD’s one-piece VISO 1 wireless digital music system. Dealers are required to include other speaker docks priced at $499 or higher such as B&W’s Zeppelin, the Arcam rCube and Bose systems, Miller said. An Airport Express or Apple TV completes the package. Multi-room, multi-source audio is demonstrated in Zone 4 using an NAD DAC and a Peachtree Audio DAC along with Sonos wireless multi-room audio equipment. High-res audio is the focus of Zone 5, where equipment is set up to show the benefit of 24-bit audio recording on NAD gear, using a Mac Mini as the music server for 24/96 recordings. Blu-ray is demonstrated in Zone 5, too, using an NAD Blu-ray player coupled with an HDTV of the dealer’s choice to demo Dolby Digital 2.1 audio, Miller said. The “statement system” in Zone 6 showcases top NAD and PSB audio gear with 24/192 audio playback.

Sonos, used for the multi-room portion of the Lenbrook experience centers, has been the go-to multi-room music system for specialty dealers for the past few years, but Wexler of The Little Guys referred to possible additions or substitutions for Sonos in his Zone 4 setup later in the year. When we asked Miller if one of those upcoming solutions might be under the NAD and PSB brands, he told us, “I can’t talk about that.”

Keeping up with the fast pace of changes in digital media “will be an ongoing challenge,” Miller conceded. The company has hired a full-time general manager to handle that responsibility for the experience centers, but Miller wasn’t ready to disclose the person’s name. Miller said “it’s hard to say” how often products will be recycled to stay current, but it helps that Lenbrook has moved to a modular design, with segments that “slide in and out of most products,” he said. “We planned it that way for that purpose, “to forestall obsolescence,” he said. “You can pull them out and just update the module instead of the entire product,” he said. The decision to go modular was a matter of survival, Miller said. “Vendors aren’t selling enough units today compared to the market 15 years ago,” he said. “It’s a completely different market.” The experience centers could easily consume half of the company’s marketing budget in the near future as Lenbrook looks to adapt to a new customer base, he said.

Definitive Audio in Seattle plans to open a Lenbrook experience center, according to Mark Ormiston, president, who told us Definitive would have been the initial beta site except that the company is “fussy about interior design” and wants a merchandising look “that fits our fussiness.” Ormiston was part of the original group that first discussed the idea when “a number of us felt that the traditional look of AV specialty stores wasn’t current” with trends in headphones, network devices, streaming media players and computer audio in general. “There hasn’t been a change in merchandising in this industry in a long time,” he said. Ormiston is more than ready to devote one of his A-B switching rooms to the Lenbrook program and create more of a “vignette” atmosphere for next-gen audio. “People have changed the way they shop,” he said.

Lenbrook, based in Pickering, Ontario, near Toronto, hopes to open its own company-owned experience center “maybe in Montreal,” which will serve as a kind of evolving lab to keep up with changes in computer audio, Miller said. So far the digital music initiative is exclusive to the U.S. “We haven’t talked about bringing it to Canada yet,” he said.