Executives from SpeakerCraft, Control4, Runco, Magnolia and more react to Jon Myer of MyerEmco’s grave predictions.

HTSA’s Richard Glikes comments on the future of specialty retail.

When MyerEmco announced it is shutting down it got people thinking about the future of the specialty electronics retail — a market in which regional retailers are struggling, downsizing and dropping like flies.

A day after announcing his stores’ closings, here’s how Jon Myer summed up the specialty market:

“The future of every multi-store specialty retailer is extremely lean,” he said, adding that when Tweeter went under, it effectively meant the death of half of the multi-store specialty retail business in the country.

“If you are a multi-store regional specialty retailer — and there aren’t a lot of them left — you need to restructure immediately to survive.”

He cited declining product margins and “the trailing credit game that vendors are playing.” Specifically, “we pay the vendors in 30 days, but they don’t pay us for 90 days, so in essence, we are financing the equipment purchases,” Myer said.

Myer isn’t alone. Specialty retailers nationwide are struggling with a trend in which manufacturers develop products and create instant rebate policies for their high volume partners, according to Jim Ristow, executive director of buying group BrandSource’s specialty electronic leg Home Entertainment Source (HES).

Read the rest of the Article at CE Pro.
]]> http://blog.htsa.com/2010/03/is-specialty-retail%e2%80%99s-future-%e2%80%98extremely-lean%e2%80%99/feed/ http://blog.htsa.com/2010/01/photos-from-ces-2010/ http://blog.htsa.com/2010/01/photos-from-ces-2010/#comments Wed, 27 Jan 2010 19:40:21 +0000 HTSA http://blog.htsa.com/?p=236 The Industry’s Biggest and Brightest go to Vegas

HTSA’s own David Berman was out and about at this year’s CES event and snapping some of the best booths at the show. Sony, LG, Panasonic and Microsoft are just a few of the many vendors that were in attendance. To see more pictures from the event, click here.

Spotlight on 3-D: Specialized cameras will be required to provide content for 3-D televisions. Credit: ESPN

Glasses-free 3-D television is still a long way from the market.

By Erica Naone

Television manufacturers and content producers started out the year pushing 3-D television hard, hoping to ride the wave of success enjoyed by the 3-D movie Avatar. Though glasses-free 3-D is still some ways away, manufacturers hope to entice consumers with a flurry of products that make the best of the difficulties with bringing 3-D content to the small screen.

Producing a 3-D television that doesn’t require glasses is “impractical for the foreseeable future,” says Peter Fannon, vice president of corporate and government affairs for Panasonic.

Demos featuring glasses-free 3-D television technology have yet to pan out into real products. Two years ago, Mitsubishi attracted attention by showing off glasses-free 3-D research technology, but the company has no products based on the work.

Fannon says that a key trouble with glasses-free 3-D is that it would significantly raise production costs. Most glasses-free TV displays use a lenticular lens, which gives off light at different angles–so that a different image reaches each eye. Such a display requires images of the same object to be captured from many different angles, forcing content producers to film and process the same scene from a dozen or more angles at a once. “That’s a production cost no one can bear,” he says. Lenticular lenses can also distort a picture, and viewers often have to watch from a specific angle.

Read the rest of the article at Technology Review

Those surveyed are members of the Home Theater Specialists of America who made picks in the categories of music players and distribution, speaker systems, HDTVs, projectors, video players, and controllers. Prices range from $300 to your personal limit.

Click here to read the multimedia press release with exclusive HTSA Videos!

Click here to watch just the videos on the HTSA.com Video Gallery.

Richard Glikes, executive director, Home Theater Specialists of America.

How to put plans in place to stay in front of the market

By Mike Cottrill
Smart Business Philadelphia | November 2009

Richard Glikes sees the change coming, and he’s telling everyone he can about it.

As the executive director of Home Theater Specialists of America, he knows that people have changed the way they think about home entertainment drastically in just the last few years — and the more technology improves, the more they’ll expect.

So at HTSA, the 60-member cooperative of home theater and systems integration specialists, Glikes is constantly pushing the group to be ready for tomorrow.

“The business model is changing rapidly,” says Glikes of the group, which did $450 million in sales last year. “Our members who are retail stores are going to end up being like general contractors, they’re going to be like technology specialists … and there’s going to be a lot of new technology that we’ll have to understand and communicate to them.”

Smart Business spoke with Glikes about how he keeps his priorities straight while keeping up with those changes and about what Bob Dylan taught him about training.

Stay on track. I had a directing project in graduate school at Villanova, and I had a scene that had about 15 people and I called a rehearsal and I’d gone to all my friends and said, ‘Do you want to be in the play?’ And they all said, ‘Sure’ and about five people showed up. I called it again and eight people came. So what I did was I cut out the scene. Basically what that taught me to be was flexible — you have to be able to adjust on the fly, and you can’t be rigid.

You have to be able to adjust to the situation and be intelligent about it, and a lot of people get overwhelmed. If you have 10 different things you have to get accomplished, my way of business is you attack them one at a time. Other people get overwhelmed because, ‘Oh, I have 10 things I have to do; I can’t get them done.’ That’s because they’re trying to deal with 10 things at once. I will sort them out and deal with them one thing at a time. The same with personal problems: People have three or four personal problems, they get overwhelmed, they get stressed out. Deal with them one at a time.

I try to prioritize; I make lists every day. I have a yellow pad that’s on my desk and I try to prioritize who I’m going to call, and then I check them off as I call them, and I work through a list on a daily basis. You also have to prioritize where you’ll get the most action. I’m fortunate I have some very good assistants that I can delegate specific responsibilities to, and they do a very good job.

If you write it down and refer back to it, you get it done. If you just leave it to your imagination, you’ll get distracted. It’s much easier for me to have it down on paper, in front of me, and I know I’ll get through it. I don’t believe in calling people back the next day; I believe in calling them back the same day.

Read the second half of the article at Smart Business Online.

The first topic, the one cited in the by-line, is more of a correction to a non-sequitur than a reveal of a nefarious marketing tactic, but it sets up a more important corollary thought, so stay with me.

1.    You can’t measure black!
Yup, that’s right. For all the focus on this important image quality parameter, we can’t truly measure it. We measure “Black Level” with light meters. If the face of a display were truly black (absent all light) we couldn’t measure it! We can only measure a screen’s inability to give us a true black. Even then, the “light leakage” on screen has to be above a certain (very small) level before even the best, most expensive, state-of-the-art instrumentation can quantify it.  Wordsmithing, you say? …..well maybe, but it gets me to a more important issue.

2.    A display with a measured .002 ft-L black level will produce a better C.R. (contrast ratio)
in my Home Theatre than one that measures .004 ft-L”
uh, maybe not. In fact, in my experience installing and calibrating hundreds of theatres, PROBABLY not. Here’s the thing. The very “best black” you are going to achieve with any display in a given environment is the “room black”. We calibrate all displays with something called “Pluge” patterns that allow us to “just barely see” a 2 IRE stripe or 2% of the light output on the way to peak white. Some of the best discs provide a 1% stripe, but the difference is almost academic. The point is your room has a black level “floor” determined by the ambient light leakage from all sources that can “see” the screen, i.e., light leakage from behind curtains that don’t perfectly seal off the windows, a lamp turned on in an adjacent room, the red, yellow, green and blue LEDs on the face of the equipment rack (even though it may be several feet from the screen), and even, yes, viewer’s clothing. A competent product reviewer would never attempt to measure a very low black level wearing a white shirt! In other words, unless you have a pitch black dedicated theatre with a black velour cloth draped over the front of the equipment, you are probably NOT going to take advantage of that ultra-low black level specification on your new display. Truth is, it was probably manifested as an ultra-high C.R specification (based on a very small denominator). Same deal. Ya ain’t gonna get it without “The Perfect Room”. So while I still concur that REAL contrast ratio remains the most important parameter of those normally cited, it shouldn’t be overemphasized if your light environment is like most I’ve seen – less than perfect.

3. Edge Enhancement
I see this term more and more turning up on user menus as though it was a desirable feature. It’s not. It’s an artifact, and ALL artifacts are undesirable! It’s another trick to try to improve “apparent” C.R. It puts things on the screen that weren’t in the source. Turn it off.

4.    BD vs. DVD … “I can’t really see much of a difference”.
I (and most of you) have read the hilarious exchanges on the various forums that allege subtle differences in viewing content on Blu-ray versus standard DVD. These folks should either be rushed to the nearest Lens Crafters for emergency care or be made to realize that they may NOT see a huge difference if they are basing their observations on one of the new crop of $99 BD players connected to a $500 LCD panel with a $14 HDMI cable. All things in balance, folks. On a reference system, or even one a cut or two below in quality, the difference between BD and DVD (audio OR video) is larger than the number of mugs on facebook.

5.    “Hold on! Don’t buy anything. 4K is coming”.
We are speaking, of course, of 4,096 lines of vertical       resolution (Uber-HD), starting to be touted in a few places. Well, so what. Any content that exists in this format, for now and for the next few years, will likely be prohibitively expensive to get to your living room – never mind the four-times-normal Studio paranoia that will have to be overcome. Unless your screen is larger than any interior wall that I have ever seen, the improvement in image quality per incremental dollar spent is simply a bad bet for now. There is so much high quality 1080 available today, if you wait for 4K, you’ll never catch up!

6.    Color Space. “We have 130% more colors”
Yeah, I know. I hit this one pretty hard last month, but    it remains a huge marketing “distortion”, and therefore deserves another mention under this month’s topic. There is only one correct color space for the vast majority of what we currently watch – High Definition television and Blu-ray movies. It is NOT as wide as it can be. Technically it’s called rec. 709 and it has very specific places for Red, Green and Blue which define the palette upon which everything we watch is drawn. Over-saturation is as offensive to some as bad de-interlacing or blatant motion artifacts. Unless it can be “fixed” with one button on the remote, sets that feature “larger gamut” are worth less than those that don’t.

As long as consumer electronics companies employ marketing departments, we are destined to be bombarded with “questionable” features, specifications and rhetoric. Our only real defense is to read, question and relentlessly seek out the Truth.

Diogenes, where are you when we really need you?

David Berman, director of traning for the Home Theater Specialists of America (HTSA), comments about how even though attendance would be down at CEDIA, he would be having a “the glass is half full” attitude. His comments made it to a featured article on the front page of The CEDIA Daily newspaper.

Read the full article. (PDF)

Sharp offered two-day courses taught by Michael Amati of Sharp Solar. The first of the classes took place in Huntington Beach, California, July 27-28. The second class took place at the Sharp facilities in Mahwah, New Jersey, August 24-25. These classes included hands-on installation and design as well as many hours of classroom instruction and testing.

Read The Whole Article at Residential Systems Magazine

Read more at Going Green