FINE SOUNDS FOCUS

A FINE AFFAIR

High-performance brands McIntosh and Sonus faber are on the rise in the UK. But who are they? Who are the team behind them? And what are their plans? EI spoke with Country Manager - UK & Ireland for distributor, Fine Sounds UK, Andy Oattes and Roberto Gamba, Sales Director at Sonus faber.

Who are Fine Sounds UK and the McIntosh Group?

Andy Oattes (AO): Fine Sounds UK is a McIntosh-Group-owned distribution company, responsible for all sales, marketing, and support of our group-owned portfolio, including McIntosh and Sonus faber. But also, very select partner brands that emulate our view on excellence such as Isotek. We focus on the residential integration Ci-Fi, independent Hi-Fi and consumer channels across UK and Ireland.

McIntosh Group is a leading designer, manufacturer, and marketer of high-end home audio equipment worldwide. The company offers a broad suite of premium audio products across multiple brands, catering to a highly loyal base of audio enthusiasts and music lovers. The common denominator of all the McIntosh Group brands is the goal of bringing sound to life through quality products built to perform. McIntosh Group strives to ensure the long-term development of each of its brands in keeping with their identity, their heritage, and their expertise.

Our project went live in August 2020, marking the McIntosh Groups first foray into owning distribution outside of North America. Our plan was to create a company that passionately cared for our community of dealers and worked hard to be the very best business partner day in and day out. We developed our strategy with a customer-centric view from the outset, and so trying to give the dealers what they really need to provide excellent service to their clients. We are always going to aim to be more like a brand than smaller scale distributor and so think big and ambitiously. But each member of the team came from integration companies, retail, or Hi-Fi/AV distribution and so we have been able to take our experiences and form a cohesive plan that excels in service and support.

We started out small-scale like any other new company but have been building quickly and scaling out the team to ensure we give the very best-in-class support.

The Sonus faber Arena series has been making waves since launch

It looks like growth has been strong for you, is this the case?

AO: Yes, thankfully! When we set-out in 2020 to build up our dealer network regionally across UK and Ireland we aimed to work top-down with like-minded businesses that understood quality, shared our values and also believed in long-term relationships and going the extra mile to build excellence into the business. The reception from the market to what we were doing with all of our brands was excellent and so over the last two years, we have seen very strong foundations cemented and are now developing the next phase of growth for the business.

Critically, it’s worth saying that we worked very hard to build an offering that returns great ROI ongoing to our partners, with UK stocking, same week shipping, immediate access to people and support, and all assets including specification, images and .dwg files available at the click of your fingers. So the business case was obvious and well worth the investment.

Regarding opportunity, we think that despite the current negative backdrop, the integration space is looking really strong and set for significant growth over the coming years, especially in the luxury and premium audio and cinema spaces.

What are the key focus’s for residential integration for 2023?

AO/Roberto Gamba (RB): We have quite a lot of exciting developments planned for next year!

Drilling down a bit, we completely align across the group with our Ci-Fi message. Which is fundamentally about creating emotional experience at the heart of residential integration (also applies to yacht and commercial). It’s fair to say that we truly believe in the power of designing and engineering systems that excel in their ability to solicit emotional reaction. It’s what we get out of bed every day to achieve, and it takes incredible engineering to provide the very best experience. The result of the Ci-Fi message for the client is something which we truly believe should be the goal of any company in our space - happier customers and better profitability - what’s not to like?

Between McIntosh and Sonus faber, we have over 110 years of design and manufacturing capability, and so we are really blessed with incredible capabilities across the group (Mc 70 years old and Sf 40). If you look at the incredible statement we set for showroom spaces with the townhouse in New York (https://www.worldofmcintosh.com), you can see that we truly believe in putting excellence and emotional experience first.

Reflecting on the launch of our spectacular new flagship luxury cinema speaker range, Arena at CEDIA Expo 2022. Roberto Gamba, our global CI development lead, worked with the group and incredible like-minded partners such as Trinnov, Officina Acoustica and Barco (along with others), to create a world leading and truly mind-blowing 11.12.6 immersive cinema experience. The queue to get into that demo was constantly 1-1.5 hours for the duration of the show and the overwhelming feedback from peers, press and dealers was that it was the most impressive cinema demonstration of any show, anywhere in the world in the history of our industry - very, very, very cool!

Interestingly, despite McIntosh and Sonus faber being legends at what they do, we entirely believe in the ‘totality of the experience’. Put simply, to ensure that the client gets the very best solution, we should be working together as closely as we can with third party brands that share our vision, and we 100% subscribe to CEDIA’s brilliant cinema grades project (CEB22, CEB23 and Designer facts). The closer we understand and work as an industry to remove jargon and align on excellence, the better the potential for the community and our clients. It’s a simple concept, but with a powerful outcome.

Following on from the dizzying heights of Expo, we plan to have an incredible and unmissable immersive cinema experience for ISE. We will also be unveiling some epic new products that we believe offer ground-breaking performance and value for our space.

We will also be exhibiting at EI Live! 2023 and really look forward to showing integrators and friends some of our latest technology.

Fine Sounds UK finesounds.uk