Bay Audio as Reseller Wants to De-Emphasize Custom Integrator Role

Bay Audio, supplier of high-end custom speakers for the AV integration channel, launched the PTM+ home theater service that includes final tuning of speakers in customers’ homes -- and a $1,000 dealer bonus -- as part of a custom electronics project, CEO Ira Friedman told Consumer Electronics Daily.

Friedman, who started Bay Audio some 15 years ago after a long stint as vice president of Boston Acoustics, has expanded the sales and project design role of Bay Audio to give dealers sales tools to write a full-scale order they might otherwise cut back on in an effort to make a sale, Friedman said. And the company assumes the role of designing a system and tuning it after installation to make sure it meets spec, he said. The company gives dealers a “completion bonus” with each system sale so the process is followed in the right way and that the client knows “we're invested in the process,” he said.

The PTM+ speakers are manufactured to be flat, with no particular sonic characteristics of their own, so they can adapt to clients’ tastes, Friedman said. “Our engineers can go out in the field to make the speakers sweet and punchy, however the clients want them,” he said. The speakers boast drivers that can handle a “tremendous amount of power” so they can manipulate the frequency response +/- 6 dB in certain frequency ranges, he said.

The speaker market has changed in the past five years due to custom electronics budgets shifting to the “non-visceral” part of the system, Friedman said, meaning automation. “Automation has been expensive, cumbersome and exciting,” and it sucked the budget out of video and audio, he said. “That has hurt the speaker side of the business in a fundamental way and it’s been a race to how cheap you can make a product that appears to be a good product at a high price.” He said that’s changing as the cost of automation is coming down and its percentage of an overall budget is “less onerous.” At the same time, that control customer isn’t looking for a $50,000 home theater system, he said, which makes it all the more important for speaker companies to grab the business that is there.

Friedman has turned to the psychology of selling to buoy sales of the company’s multiple speaker offerings, which cover home theater, outdoor, architectural speakers and smaller niche areas of residential loudspeakers. With more dealers coming from the integration side of the custom business, Bay Audio was seeing a boost in calls from dealers who said specifying and tuning a speaker system was over their heads, Friedman said. In the case of outdoor speakers, dealers asked if they could send the company a plot map and a Google Maps photo of the property so Bay Audio could specify the landscape speakers for jobs. Bay started doing such specifications on a regular basis “to the point where we have an elaborate system” with full documentation, graphics with speakers’ dispersion patterns and sound-pressure level measurements, he said. “It became a presentation piece that dealers started using with their clients,” he said. Now it wants to extend that to home theater.

The psychology comes in during the product recommendation process, Friedman said. “When the dealer says, ’this is what I recommend,’ the client tends to question it,” he said. When a dealer says a speaker array is recommended by the manufacturer, then “they stop questioning it,” he said. “A client might comment on the scale of a manufacturer-recommended system,” but tends to acquiesce with a sense that “the manufacturer must know what he’s doing,” Friedman said.

Many times, dealers “are not considered the experts,” Friedman said, and customers fear they're being oversold. A negotiating process starts and dealers tend to whittle down a system to please the customer so a 32-speaker/four-subwoofer proposal based on specs and measurements becomes a 28-speaker-three subwoofer sale, instead, Friedman said. Dealers then “capitulate,” he said. The client sees “it’s not a true recommendation but a sales presentation,” Friedman said.

When that happens, dealers install a system that’s “less than ideal,” Friedman said. From the manufacturer side, the system isn’t as good as it could be, he said, nor is it as profitable. Friedman estimates when a dealer clips the scope of a project to make a sale, Bay loses 10-15 percent of the overall system sales price. From the dealer side, the dealer has lost control of the sale and profitability suffers because the client is in control when he no longer feels the dealer is the expert, Friedman said. Bay Audio’s reputation can suffer as a result, he said.

Bringing in the manufacturer-supplied specs gives the dealer a tool to help the client appreciate what the system has to offer, Friedman said. The approach is based on Friedman’s experience and research that the company is presenting to dealers as part of training called “referential selling” -- being the “referrer” put dealers in a stronger position than being the seller, he said. The message with Bay is that the company “makes a great product” that can be customized to the customer’s needs, he said. He likened it to an interior designer who recommends a highly respected cabinet maker, painter or tiler.

Bay takes over much of the role custom integrators played in the past with system design and tuning. The company gives dealers two forms for customers to fill out: one that’s performance based on how loud music needs to be, for instance, and the other on look and feel, including any constraints such as cabinetry, dimensions and color. “We custom make the speaker cabinets to fit the room,” he said. The dealer fills out the forms, returns them to Bay Audio with a budget, and the company comes up with a plan, sends architectural drawings with wiring diagrams, a parts list and a project estimate. “That’s a much stronger presentation than, ‘Let me design a theater for you,'” he said.

Once a project is installed, Bay sends engineers to the home to tune a system -- an eight-hour process that includes tuning the digital signal processing and setting the phase and levels to ensure that it sounds like it was designed to sound for the room, Friedman said. Although installers have trained for this through CEDIA classes and classes with manufacturers, Friedman said, “It takes years to understand how to tune a theater to make it sound great from an acoustics standpoint,” he said. “The chance that a typical dealer can make it sound great is really really low,” he said. Smart dealers, he said, understand that they're not the experts in everything, but they know the experts, he said. Bay Audio wants to “take responsibility for the sonic attributes” of a theater, he said.