Arcam has continued to launch products which are steadily changing how customers experience serious hi-fi.
With products like the Solo (pictured below) they’re aiming at an audience turned on by the idea of excellent sound with discreet styling but turned off by the thought of venturing into shops where jargon often takes over and products can look like industrial machines lashed together with thick cabling.
Solo was the business’s first departure from the conventional audiophile practice of delivering amplification, tuner and CD playback through separate units. Accordingly, says Stokes, its design had to signal the new direction clearly while still communicating the same quality.
He explains: ‘The audience we were aiming at was different and so more receptive to other approaches. They want excellent sound reproduction but not the paraphernalia normally associated with rack-mounted hi-fi separates; something less obtrusive, but well designed. We argued for a break away from the usual references, for example the ubiquitous large volume knob and arrays of protruding buttons scattered across the fascia.’
Stokes won the day, though he says even Brennan was initially nervous about making the break with convention. ‘The buttons read as a single element with the CD drawer, and the fascia and cabinet read as one, too. The ways of interacting with the product are different to the norm for audiophile products. For instance the focal point is the power switch, which is the first point of contact and draws the attention of the user and has its own character.’
The rewards have been great reviews from the industry press and beyond, new customers and sales currently around £9m, though profitability has been hit by the downturn, as it has across the sector. And the business has to invest around 10% of sales in R&D to keep up with emerging technology.
That’s nothing new in a world where change has been part of daily life since stereo sound appeared in the 1950s, but now the pace of change is quicker and the foresight needed is keener, especially in home cinema. While profitable in the 1990s and early 2000s, when demand for DVD players and home cinema receivers helped Arcam grow by up to 20% per year at times, it’s now a sector where it’s expensive just to stay in the game.
Inevitably, fingers can be burned. Arcam found itself £1.5m out of pocket and 18 months behind schedule after a new BluRay player was sent back to the drawing board when a chip developer pulled out of the project without warning. The player is now due for launch in 2010 but the experience has been a lesson in the ‘technology traps’ that Brennan says constantly lie in wait for consumer electronics businesses.
‘If you’re in the premium end of the market, people want the latest and greatest and if you’re a small business like us that can be hard to keep up with. We spent three years developing a home cinema receiver that launched 18 months ago and has been very successful. So having been through the wars we’re now ready to appeal to the existing home cinema market but also broaden the appeal of the products and the brand with things like the rCube.’