retail news
Matt Schaeffer and Gary Bell Educate Car Audio Customers with New Podcast WORDS BY LAURA KEMMERER
On The Old Fashioned Car Audio Podcast, hosts Matt Schaeffer and Gary Bell are helping mobile electronics customers make more informed decisions about what to look for in a shop. According to Schaeffer, these customers will have had something installed that they’re not happy about, or they might be looking to begin again. Often, he noted, customers call in to the shop where Schaeffer works—Sound FX in Lewes, Del.—without any knowledge. Explaining things thoroughly can take up to half an hour. “A client will bring us a car and they might want us to add to it and there’s a lot of things wrong with it, like maybe the left and right channels are flipflopped,” Schaeffer said. “And from the starting point his car wasn’t done correctly even though he didn’t know
18 Mobile Electronics January 2021
that. They just want it to be louder and clearer, but they might not understand sound stage.” The podcast aims to revitalize the passion for car audio we often see in the older demographic. The majority of the work Schaeffer does is for the 40 to 70 crowd. These clients grew up in the heyday of car audio and are looking to revisit that with their current vehicles but won’t trust just anyone to do the work. Schaeffer noted that Bell had worked for Alpine doing demo vehicles with Steve Brown and other people, and that they’d been friends for a long time and had also done a lot of Mobile Solutions trainings together. “Any time we go out, we always enjoy an Old Fashioned, the drink, and that’s where the name came from. It’s paying homage to the old-fashioned side of car
audio, the evolution of it, while giving a comparison or a nod to us drinking an Old Fashioned on air,” said Schaeffer. Though there are several different enterprises doing this kind of content on different platforms, like YouTube and Facebook, Schaeffer considers the podcast angle a more personal touch. The hosts tell real stories, talking to people in the industry. With the first season available for streaming now and a new episode dropping every week, The Old Fashioned Car Audio Podcast also features guests from time to time. In one episode, the show’s first guest, Steve Brown from Alpine, and the hosts talk about Brown’s evolution in car audio. Schaeffer noted that a lot of these kinds of stories resonate with people who have a lifelong passion for cars.
