The Home Cinema Alliance - Tech Talk Podcast
A consumer-facing podcast hosted by industry veterans, Stuart Burgess from Immersive Cinema Rooms and Simon Gregory from Cinema Rooms.
Each episode, we bring you News, Reviews, and Interviews from inside the industry covering Home Cinema, Home Theatre, and all things tech.
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The Home Cinema Alliance - Tech Talk Podcast
Inside the industry - An exclusive behind-the-scenes talk with Hidden Home Tech
This is the first episode in a special series of podcasts which go behind the scenes in the Cinema and Home Technology Industry. We've already shot quite a few, so be sure to like and subscribe so you don't miss out.
In this episode, we sit down with Dan from Hidden Home Tech to gain his inside view on our industry, including some of his history in technology and where he thinks his brand is headed in the future. We also discuss his likes and dislikes, and if money were no object, what would his dream set up consist of?
Find Dan at - https://www.hiddenhome.tech
Find Stuart at - https://www.immersivecinemarooms.co.uk
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The Home Cinema Alliance are a group of UK-based businesses that provide amazing #homecinema and #hometheatre to discerning clients. We use our YouTube and Social Media channels to highlight these spaces and the companies that design and build them.
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Hi guys, and welcome to this week's episode of the HCA Tech Talk podcast. I've literally just finishing this inside the CI interview with Dan from Hidden Home Technology. In this episode, we sit down and talk about his history, where his business is now and where his business is going in the future. This forms a very special series of episodes where we talk to manufacturers, distributors and installers about their business, about their feelings of the industry, about where their businesses are, where they have been and where they're going. We hope you enjoy them. Hi Dan, thanks for having us up to your home, stroke, show home, stroke, business unit in Bath. Self-indulgent room. Yeah, very self-indulgent, yeah. I think before we even started doing this, we sat down for a good hour and a half listening to music.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, no, I like to
SPEAKER_02:show off. Well, it's the geeky thing in us, isn't it? We may enjoy this industry, but we also enjoy being in this industry as well.
SPEAKER_00:100%,
SPEAKER_02:yeah, that's how I got into it. So, tell us a bit about, before we get into your business, tell us a bit about yourself, what What was your education at university? You mentioned you went to Canterbury University. What was your education and what led you on to this? The less I know about that, the better.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so how did I get into it? I think that's probably a safer question. As a kid, I think my earliest memories are probably in the, I don't know, maybe about 12 or something like that. I was in bands, I was getting into music. My parents had like a Technics hi-fi downstairs. It was all right, to be fair with hindsight. I don't think they knew, but it was all right. So I... I think I was just inspired by that and I started to want my own. And maybe I think like one of my other friends who was in a band, his dad had like this mystical hi-fi thing in a room downstairs. And because we were always listening to music and chatting away at night when you'd sort of do a sleepover with your friends from school or whatever, bandmates in this case, I was like, I need a hi-fi. So I started researching, I think what hi-fi was pretty much the only thing at the time. Maybe there's a few others. That's pretty much what you'd see in the newsagents. So I started looking at that and I ended I ended up buying a Marantz CD player, a little Technics amp, and I'd run out of money, so I bought a pair of Jammo speakers out the back of a Kays catalogue or something. But I set it all up properly. I had stands, cables, things like that, and I really did set it up properly in my bedroom. I had a nice little, because my dad worked from home, I had one of those high-back office chairs that were really comfortable. I just discovered this thing of like soundstage and music and details. And it was just opened my eyes completely. I didn't realize that was in music. I used to like, you know, people putting like a ghetto blaster or speakers tied together and it was just audio. Just shouting at you. Yeah, just music coming from a space. And that was it really. I didn't understand that there was this soundscape that had been so carefully engineered. And then I discovered that. And that was quite young in life. And so the journey's been long and really progressive. And when I went to uni, I started having student loan installments that, you know, should have been spent on sensible things and they weren't. They never were. So I get, you know, whatever it was at a time and I'll probably be able to like spare like 400 quid. So I started going up to Hi-Fi that went from like 150 quid a box kind of thing up to like maybe about 400 pounds a box and stuff like that. So it's starting to get quite serious. It's a Myriad CD player and a pair of Ruark speakers from a place in Maidstone. And yeah, I just thought I'd really... getting addicted to it, I think.
SPEAKER_02:I think the thing is, it's like, I think if we look back, it's really similar. I mean, we've known each other, but I don't think we've met before today properly in person. And it's exactly the same. You know, my first Saturday job was working for Dixon's. I remember selling my best friend, I think it was a Technics, Wi-Fi, you know, stack system. But actually, when I had my first proper job, still living at home with mum and dad, you know, a 32-inch cathode ray tube TV, um, I had a 5.1. I think it was Kev Polk. Yeah. Because I think Polk were the only ones who did a shielded center speaker that went on top of the cathode tube TV. Yeah. And then a rail subwoofer. Yeah. So I had completely with you there. Should have been spending my money. Should have been spending my grant on education.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. It was going on the hi-fi. Yeah. Laser disc player. Exactly. So I did that. And then it was my last summer job. I was working in a shoe shop in Bath. I had my little uniform on with the brand on. And I was buying a pair of audio note speakers. They're about a thousand pound ANJs for and Radford's in Bath and guys phoned me up at work and sort of said you know thanks for your order and stuff but do you want a job and I was like oh yeah alright yeah maybe I do but there's a bit of a catch I've got to go back to uni for a year and they were like that's probably not a problem because the guy who's leaving is going to the police they do academic year intake so that'd be September so as long as you can handle that so I was like yeah that's fine in theory brilliant you know take it on paper accepting we're chatting a year when I've came back it was a bit like tumbleweeds I couldn't get hold of them for one reason or another I didn't try very hard to be honest but couldn't get hold of them so I was walking around and I saw there was a job advertising seven oaks in Bristol so I took that and then it was a bit awkward really because I really enjoyed that. And Mike at Seven Oaks was lovely. Andy Ford, the people there, they were just like lovely people. And I loved the industry. But then this job offer came up and I'd be higher up in the shop and I was just so torn. And I had to like break the bad news. It was like sort of breaking up with a girlfriend or something, you know, like I was leaving and going to Radford. So I worked there for a few years, realised there was a glass ceiling in the, you know, payroll effectively if you're going to work in retail, even though it's luxury retail. I got offered a directorship. There was no shareholding. And, you know, again, I felt that was a bit iffy because I had legal responsibility and stuff like that. It sort of seemed good on paper, but also it seemed good in principle. But on paper, it's terrible when you analyze it. Yeah. So it's kind of like it's a good effort keeping me. But thanks. But no, thanks. I set up by myself. I think slightly before that as well. I was kind of the only one out of all the branches that really understood multi-room. audio doing things like link connect systems and i merges and kai bars and all these like database so
SPEAKER_02:in in a timeline when was when was it you sort of thought about starting up
SPEAKER_00:that was i finished uni in like 2001 or something like that so yeah we're talking like 24 years ago yeah that i started in the industry this was pre pre-streaming yeah pre broadband, realistically. Pretty domestic broadband, anyway. You'd perhaps have broadband at universities and things like that, and public spaces. Yeah, because I think streaming didn't really... It was Sonos, really. Sonos 2006. Because I remember going to... I probably shouldn't say this publicly, but I remember going to a Cedia, because this is back when Cedia was the big trade show, in Brighton. So that dates it. Blimey, yeah. And Sonos were there, and I'd just set up by myself, and I went up to them, and I was like, yeah, I'm in trade, can I get an account? And they went, yeah. And I sort of said, yeah, asking the question, what's the margin? And they said, 10%. And I went, no, no, sorry, you're mistaken there. I'm trade. And they were like, yeah, 10%. I was like, no, no, I'm trade. 10%. I was like, this can't be right. I was doing the maths. I was like, if I get 10 grand sale, I make a thousand pounds. If one box goes wrong, I've got to replace it. Let's wipe my margin out. I was like, this can't, how do you have a high service industry based on 10% margins, which 10%, overall margins, fine. But 10% before you've even started and 10% before you've run over on time but want to maintain that really good relationship and not bill for that extra half day because something cropped up and it wasn't quite as planned. For me, that's high service. You shouldn't charge for that.
SPEAKER_02:No, and I think if you look at it in the same scenario, I think that a lot of people look at our industry and think, you know, it's high ticket items, high profitability. But I think there are a lot of things like, you know, without not wanting to mention the brand too much, but like with Sonos, TVs in general. I mean, even to this day, we do jobs where people are like, oh, I'll buy the TV off you. I'm like, it's up to you. I mean, I could do it and we You can get the five-year warranty through LG, through one of our suppliers, or buy it from John Lewis and get a John Lewis warranty or somewhere like that. I think that it is a case of that there are brands out there who want to do high-ticket items. And I think anybody coming into this industry has to be aware of that. And some are buying from us as well.
SPEAKER_00:All Margin offers people is better service. It doesn't offer me more money because I will be... fair every single time to my own detriment realistically with the money i've made from a job in the sense i won't just pocket it and that's gone that that services the job certainly for the warranty period even to the point where labor's free for me most of the time except for in exceptional circumstances it's different if like the house floods and everything gets replaced and yes it's chargeable it's insurance it's all those things but if it's something like you know they've got a faulty skybox even. It's not even my thing, but I need to come and just help them swap it out. Those things, for me, they just go under the radar. I don't go for them. I look after the client based on the fact that the original job was profitable on day one. And I
SPEAKER_02:think that if you speak to a lot of the HCA members, I think a lot of us are similar in respects of like, I've got clients that will phone me up on a Saturday and, you know, we've got, you know, IP controllable power supplies in there and they can perfectly reboot their own Skybox and that. But it's like, you get the WhatsApp message, can't watch Sky, give me five seconds on the phone, on the laptop, because you know that that person is going to,
SPEAKER_00:you know, He's a good customer. And I think without doing the maths, I would say that every bit of money I make on day one, by year 10, I've spent with that client back to them. And then what happens is they move house on either system update and the whole process starts again. It's a journey. It's a journey and it's a relationship. And that probably is the biggest ethos I have outside of like the passion for why I deal with certain brands and certain products. If I've got a passion for the business, that's what it is. the money comes in, but then the money gets fed back to the client in service. Service is absolutely everything. It's like the absolute goal of what I do is an honest, really, really beneficial relationship for the end user.
SPEAKER_02:So if we look at like the noughties, so if you, obviously we briefly touched on Sonos and Multiroom Audio and, you know, the advent of, you know, the internet a bit more than the old fashioned dial up used to get. If we go into the noughties, sort of like your 2010 to 2020 sort of what was your typical sort of system
SPEAKER_00:yeah okay so I probably have to rewind a little bit further to base on where I came from so I came from things like Link Connect and Link Connect was brilliant in the sense that I think it still has principles behind it for how you build it in terms of like quality per room and things that even modern day multi-room systems C4s URCs RTIs don't fully cater for but in the sense that you'd have like a room box, which was like your bog standard amplifier, your Sonos amp, your whatever like that. Then they'd just have like a preamp box and they had a whole range of power amps. You could specify for that. So every room could be entirely tailored to everything. And even like the multi-channel systems had the input from the central system. So you'd have local multi-channel system with input from centralized systems. And that was all stored music. It was archived onto a hard drive from your CD. You'd rip, it would look up over Grace Note. No Spotify in those days. No, no, no, it's ripped CDs. Napster, probably just, but that was illegal then. Yeah, the irony is you come back to a product like an Inuus, and that's what you do there. You rip all your CDs into a database, you combine it with Rune, ideally, and then you've got streaming and that side-by-side in complete harmony, and only if you care can you separate them back out again. Otherwise, they're lumped together as this just music for you. So, Lin described it in the days as like, music's like water. you can have your tap water that's your streaming services your your room amps your bog standard stuff but then you can have your sparkling perrier with a dash of lime and that's your really high-end amplifier with a mega streamer or cd player or turntable in that localized room so they would see everything's water everything's music but you can have it at different standards and that was a perfectly good thing and that's come back into where we are now so i'm jumping like your gun here a little bit so i'm going to go back uh because i'll tell you about about how we principle it now. So where were we then? Living control, I would say. It was living control with iMerge servers, so centralized equipment. in structured wiring networks, so we've been in that since day one. That would be then Philips Pronto in a room with IR fed back through a keypad in the wall.
SPEAKER_02:Funnily enough, second to the Philips Pronto thing, I was on eBay the other day, because I'm doing some stuff inside the trade for one of the manufacturers of a remote, and I was just looking, like, I wonder if you could still pick up like an old Sonos remote, like the original one with the spinny wheel, and like the Logitech Harmonies, And the Philips Pronto. There are still working Philips Prontos. Yeah, I reckon I might have a couple lying around the garage or something. I don't know how you're supposed to program now because I don't know if the software's still
SPEAKER_00:working. Yeah, I reckon I've got a laptop in the loft that if you put a new battery, a BIOS battery, it might just have it on there somewhere. So it
SPEAKER_02:sounds like you're, I mean, obviously being in this room here now, it sounds like your background is quite more hi-fi.
SPEAKER_00:I would 100% that there's a passion for hi-fi music. I mean, right there is a Fender custom guitar and stuff. I've always loved music. I love music production in the sense of like the reproduction and the recording process and everything like that. I've always just loved that capturing and then recreating of something special. That is a big deal for me. But like that principle applies to movies. It applies to like everything really, like from that point of view, video, all of it's the same. Like I think I'm into the art of it all, you know, the art of cinematography, the art of soundtracks, the... How the director intended is something that's often banned around in our industry. Yeah, I would... But it's almost like... Yeah, you can get me on a high horse about that comment a little bit because I often think that what we did better than the director ever even imagined was even possible. I'd be amazed if they'd been in a screening room as good as some of the systems that we'd install. So I think some of it is happy access I was listening with a client. We did this amazing thing. We acoustically treated this lovely room, did a proper deep bass trap wall and everything. Like we were talking earlier, it was a bit like a compromise. We had to just treat it where we could treat it, but boy, did we treat it. And then we sort of massive Macintosh, the dual hybrid mono amps. So they're mono amplifiers, but they've got two amps in, solid state for the bass, valves for the high frequency. So it's like a 350 watt solid state amp with a 150, 200 watt valve amp on top. So for, just hold it there for a second.
SPEAKER_02:But that's Macintosh as in Macintosh, not Macintosh as in Apple Macintosh.
SPEAKER_00:Oh yeah, yeah. Macintosh as in under the Griffin cover, don't tell me it's under a Griffin cover. Just
SPEAKER_02:in case anybody's wondering, I didn't realise Apple made that. Yeah,
SPEAKER_00:yeah. So these massive amplifiers, and I don't even know, the Klipsch Jubilee speakers, they are enormous. They're like wardrobes, like massive horn-loaded things. Yeah. We put those in and it was like an out-of-body experience listening to that in that room with that client. And we both looked at each other and he said it and I just couldn't agree more. It's like, do you think these artists even know they created this? I'm not so sure they did. But that's what's so beautiful about this stuff is it, no pun intended, it literally amplifies the experience. So they knew they created something special and emotional and they put their heart on their sleeve and they put it down on analog tape or whatever it is in Pro Tools. They put it down there. They literally put their heart out and then you can magnify that experience, whether it's a movie, whether it's music. And it can literally make you cry, I think. And that, for me, is the passion. It's the goosebumps. It's the tears. It's the lump in your throat at the end of a film. Whatever it is, it's that.
SPEAKER_02:I mean, I love coming. I mean, from my point of my business, we are so much home cinema than hi-fi. And I think we touched on earlier, whenever I go back to one of my clients who's got a hi-fi system, or we come into here where you've got a really good hi-fi system, system. Because I'm not always surrounded by that, or I am surrounded by cinema all the time, it actually reminds me how good music is. And I always say that when you can sit down in front of a good pair of two-channel speakers, or you can sit in front of a good cinema, just the enjoyment you get out of, in this scenario, music, but obviously movies as well.
SPEAKER_00:I know it's extreme because you're turning down dialogue and all that sort of stuff, but if you put a horror film on a TV in the olden days and have the sound on, it's terrifying. turned the sound down and it's almost comical after time watching the actors and stuff like it ruins.
SPEAKER_02:It's almost like if you take the music out of
SPEAKER_00:it. Yeah. Yeah. In the soundtrack is all the fear, all the tension, all the excitement is everything is in the soundtrack. Like you don't realize it when you actually look at actors acting without soundtrack. It is comical half the time. It's rarely is it inspiring. You know, the visual is actually surprisingly two dimensional a lot of the time. I mean, I'm totally, you know, dumbing it down but it's more just to point out the fact that you know movies without a soundtrack or almost nothing even silent films had live orchestras and live bands playing to them because it made all the difference so I think the audio in a cinema is really critical like yes picture massive picture I think I was saying it earlier wasn't I that in when you have a big screen, it makes cinematography leap out, even to the complete philistine, the guy that goes, oh, I don't care about cinematography. It's just cameras. I can see it. It doesn't matter. When you see the composition of somebody here looking into that, and it's all laid out, like a movie poster's art, like those stills that aren't still on a moving screen, it leaps out when it's massive. And you can't fail to see it. And I think it's similar with Hi-Fi. to these massive pictures that you can't fail to see the soundscape and realize what's going on. I mean, what was the
SPEAKER_02:track we listened to earlier?
SPEAKER_00:The Queen Mary one. That's it, Queen Mary.
SPEAKER_02:I mean, again, from someone who is more from a multi-channel background, just the soundstage of that where you could have told me you were sitting in a 5.1 system. Yeah. There were speakers hidden behind these curtains. Yeah, the clicking hi-hat thing that pans. Yeah, because it was almost like I can remember listening to Dolby Atmos music when it first came out, I think. Tidal or when Apple did it as well, it was just, it was that soundtrack or that song was just, there's so much more to
SPEAKER_00:it. Yeah, and there's some weird effects that even you're not conscious of to start with. It seems like the sub bass, it sort of seems to like pour out onto the floor. It's sort of, it's really weird because it's actually in height dimensions. I don't understand really how that's ever created, but it definitely happens. So what's a,
SPEAKER_02:what's a, okay, so let's say, what's a sort of typical install for you, maybe let's say five, six, Well, let's go back into the noughties. So let's say 10 years ago, what was the sort of
SPEAKER_00:typical... Okay, so yeah, again, the story was, the whole background really, I guess, of how I got brand allegiances and built my business is, most of it's, again, built on honesty and integrity. And I think if a brand doesn't represent that, I've got problems with them. And that's why I think Sonos, I'm not massively behind them. I use it when I'm forced to, but I'd rather not. Blue Sound is my honest, you know... I
SPEAKER_02:think, in fairness, for Sonos, they are... I think in the few years, there's been a few characters that are trying to step more into the CI market.
SPEAKER_00:Yes, I just don't think they represent the right service industry. If they're saying that 10% is what, and I'm being honest, I shouldn't be saying it publicly, but if they think companies should be surviving off 10% in a service industry, they're wrong. They're not building the types of dealer that the end user's best shopping with. The Bluesand stuff that has... not loads more margin, but enough more that it, and it sounds better and it performs better. So it's kind of like a win for everyone. The client pays basically the same money. We have more money to service them with. and they get a better sounding, better performing, more open platform product. It's like more honest from every angle. It's more honest as a business proposition. We'll be alive as a business to service them throughout the thing. We're not gonna go anywhere because we're gonna go bust selling it. We can offer much better warranty support on it because it's, you know, got the money to do that. So even if we're let down by Bluesound, not they ever have been, but in that hypothetical situation where if you're let down by Sonos, but you don't want to let your client down, you've got to forfeit the bill. So have you seen, have you seen,
SPEAKER_02:so if we, have you seen sort of in the noughties, was a lot of your systems more physical media based?
SPEAKER_00:Physical media based? No, I'd say it went to iMerge, which was a CD ripping... That's a name I haven't heard in a while. Yeah, database thing, which would then appear at keypads in text form. Then... Unfortunately, Living Control went bust and they took CSE down with them because CSE had pretty much the entire inventory of Living Control stock in their warehouse. So when Living Control went down, CSE couldn't survive that. that they took too much money out of them. So they went down. I was then halfway through, well, I'd specified a massive job for me with one of my biggest clients at the time. I was like, oh my God, what do I do? So funnily enough, I phoned Mike Hanawyn at Sevenoaks and Andy Ford going, look, what do you guys do? I've been doing living control. They were like, no, we do URC. I was like, okay, that's interesting. So I phoned, I found out that was AWE. They'd just taken it on, literally just taken it
SPEAKER_02:on. You're going back to... oh blimey that's that's that's sort of about that yeah yeah i sort of like when i started in 2007 yeah i did a lot of stuff for sony and it wasn't it was probably 20 yeah it's probably about 2011 2012 that i started to explore more into the custom installation market
SPEAKER_00:so i was like i was really impressed with what URC Total Control offered even then. You know, they had things like iPod docks that came up to keypads. They had all this kind of stuff. Because that's kind of how it then evolved was iPods. So iPods came in and you were starting to store music on iPods and you were docking them. And then that would be available in multi-rooms and things like that. So you could listen to your iPod database. Yeah, because you could dock it in one room, couldn't you? Yeah, and go to a keypad and browse it from a keypad. Yeah, that kind of thing, yeah. So Opus was, to me, like the poor man's URC. That's it. I was looking at that. Yeah, yeah. And URC haven't failed to continue to evolve actually. They do amazing stuff now. Do you still do URC? Yeah, I still do it. Because again, being brutally honest, I see like C4 as the rot of the industry because they try to own the customer regardless of the dealer and they charge, kind of like force you into subscriptions, they force you into turnover targets that if you don't make, they pull your account and if they pull your account, they pull your software which pulls your support which basically means that once you've sold one C4 job You're committed to selling more because if you don't, you can't support that one that you've sold it to. So I'm not going to be that much of an asshole to my client and say that they got to buy something new. I made a mistake selling it. I would force myself. It's a catch-22. What do you do? Do you sell it to more people and put them in that boat? Do you stop selling it and stitch up the ones you sold it to? So I don't like that ethos where I totally agree with controlling the dealer base because what you need to do is ensure that all your dealers are going to offer that level of support to your client. But I do not believe in, like... cajoling or whatever the right word is your dealers into selling your product regardless of whether it's the best or right solution because they need to hit a target in order to maintain access to their laptop in order to maintain their clients so much as c4 may be a good or a bad product not that not arguing that at all they're just the wrong ethos to to match our ethos
SPEAKER_02:i think the thing is i've always i've always URC, I've always seen of not being derogatory in any way, a smaller company. It is, 100% smaller company. Where I think that you've only got a look at the media recently where a brand like Control 4 has been bought out and then bought out and then bought out or merged and merged and merged. So with the URC stuff, then were you using the name of their amps? Because I did URC. They did DMS amps. That was it. Because we did quite a few URC projects where we were using the remote controls and some of the early in-wall touchscreens with the app. And then we were using their DMS multi-channel systems, then introducing something like, I don't know, something like Denon HEOS.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah, absolutely. As a source, basically. And these days, Bluesound's like collared it because Bluesound is so two-way with URC.
SPEAKER_02:You're getting two-way feedback
SPEAKER_00:as well. So you can browse all your streaming services. You don't need to go outside of the URC app into the Bluesound app in order to do deep functions. You can do it all from URC. So it's brilliant. It's solved that problem because Sonos are closed down. Again, this is only backing up my argument for why Sonos are a bit evil. They don't let you into their API properly. So if you've got Sonos in any of your systems, you can't properly browse. You can only go to your favorites and playlists and things like that. So whereas Bluesound, you can browse. It's amazing. So that tied to now what is HDA, not DMS anymore. So they've got the high definition audio streaming amps and you've got things like the IOs which give you an input or an output so you can have a local system like this that has your high-end streaming but like then say you tap if you want your tap water yeah rather than your Perrier and just want to listen to what's on in the kitchen synchronized you just put an IO there tell it as an output from the system give it the data cable and you can use your URC centralized sources your blue sound or whatever and and spew it into all your systems perfectly synchronized
SPEAKER_02:so looking at the video element from Yeah,
SPEAKER_00:I would do Wirestorm, you know, HD over IP. So what do
SPEAKER_02:you find like, so like nowadays, obviously we've discussed a few cinema systems. Would you say that your, would you say that your business is sort of 50-50 between sort of two-channel hi-fi audio and then multi...
SPEAKER_00:No, no, we're pretty small. Because we're pretty small. It's kind of like an all or nothing really with us, you know, because one job, you're perfect, you know, as in like busy, you know, the team's all busy, everything's going well. Two jobs, you're like, oh, we're busy. It's all great. Three jobs, you start to panic a bit. It's like, yeah, this is great. You're
SPEAKER_02:working at 8pm on a Sunday night.
SPEAKER_00:So sort of reverse it. It doesn't take too much before like it's no jobs, you know, and then it's three jobs again and then it's two jobs and it's one job and then it's no jobs. So what we're doing does sort of blow in the wind a little bit. Like we had a run for years of just cinema room, cinema room, cinema room. And yeah, we did some, by the end of that role, we just did some unbelievable cinemas. I
SPEAKER_02:can remember, I think it was pre-COVID and I can remember my wife turning around to me and one morning I got up and it was almost like, you know, Same shit, different day, type of thing. And she looked at me, she went, you alright, honey? And I went, yeah, I'm good. I said, no, I'm just tired. She said, what are you up to? I said, oh, I'm back at such-and-such to build a cinema room. She said, so how many cinema rooms have you done this year? And I went, five, probably. I'm just finishing the fifth
SPEAKER_00:one. Yeah, that's about as many as you can get in a
SPEAKER_02:year. And she said to me, in a typical loving wife style, she went... A little while ago, you said to me, if you can get five jobs a year, you'll be happy as Larry. She said, you're just finishing your fifth. You don't look very happy today. I went, I'm happy, but
SPEAKER_00:I'm tired. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know. Just at the end of the summer, I was feeling exactly like that. Now it's been pretty quiet for a while. I think everybody's
SPEAKER_02:pretty quiet at the moment with the world as it is at the beginning of 2025. So where is Hidden Home Tech now? You were talking to me, you were talking to a client
SPEAKER_00:at the moment. Things have changed for us in the sense that i feel like i have learned i think honestly i thank youtube for this really oh yeah i have learned so much about some amazing aspects of the industry um i've also opened my eyes to all the things i've learned by osmosis over the years and i've suddenly realized that i'm an interior designer i'm a lighting designer i'm an acoustic designer i'm a network designer i'm like millions of things I didn't realise.
SPEAKER_02:Well, you go back to those URC days that we were talking about. If you turn around to me then and said, you know, let's have arguments, say it was 2015. If you said to me in 2015, in 2025, in the jobs that we do, even though we're doing majority audiovisual, you'll also be putting curtains and blinds in, you'll be doing lighting, control. I'll be like, I don't want to do that. But I think you're right. You just, it is... especially if you do a cinema, especially if you do a room like here where we've got a window behind us here, you naturally are in control of that, or you're naturally being asked to do
SPEAKER_00:that. Yeah, I mean, we go down as far as, you know, we're spying the carpets, the coffee tables, the sideboards, the everything. So you're full turnkey, basically. 100%, yeah. I mean, you know, I built that single-handed, that unit at the front there, you know, a bit of routing, a bit of, you know, knowing how to finish. Yeah, I love it. So for us, yeah, I'm like a shop fitter. I haven't quite classed myself as a joiner yet, but I'm close. do
SPEAKER_02:you unnecessarily buy tools just because you don't need them? I've always wanted a biscuit jointer. I haven't bought myself a biscuit. But then I think it was Tom. You want a Domino, don't you? A fast tool Domino. I think it was Tom from Seymour. I bumped into him at a senior event once and we got chatting about tools. And I said, I've always wanted a Domino. And he's like, but I don't need one. He went, yes, you do. You build backing boxes for speakers. If you're doing an in-ceiling speaker, which you don't sound believe into a bedroom, I went, yeah. He said, how'd you do it at the moment? I said, just glue and screw. Maybe a little bit of routering. And he said, no, no, no, you need a domino, a Festool domino. Luckily, I still haven't. Because every time I look at it, I'm like, I don't need it. Don't need it.
SPEAKER_00:Again, though, I'm damn close. Because there's one or two little finishing details in rooms. I don't know where you've got the end of maybe a brought out board where you've hidden the speaker behind some fabric with some acoustic treatment. You've got a light channel or something behind. And you just want to finish that end piece perfectly. And actually, what you're doing is sort nail gunning gluing, it would be nice if that was Domino'd. Or where you're doing MDF backers for the fabric track systems and things like that. I know you use Cinema Build Systems. We tend to build it ourselves. A little bit, yeah. It's like a third party track. Just to make sure they're absolutely millimeter perfect so when the track runs over it, there's absolutely no fluctuation in the fabric paneling and things. We
SPEAKER_02:take our stuff to another level, yeah. I think from our conversation we've had off camera was like, I think I'm the same. almost like you spend so much time deliberating and concentrating. I've removed fabric from sections before because I've just looked at it and gone, I'm not happy with that. Or there's a tiny mark in the middle and you're like, I can't get it off. Fabric's off. Do a new
SPEAKER_00:one. For me, the biggest one is I can't go over how houses aren't built millimetre perfect. You put a laser up and you find that there's an inch difference across like a five meter room or something between the height that and the height this. And you're like, I've got to lay a level ceiling on this now. So do I go parallel to the wonky ceiling and have this? And then the window gap is different. do I square up the windows but then the depth of the light tray I'm creating on the coffer is going to have to give? What do I do? How do I split these differences? And the funniest thing is... It's like cursing the Georgian builders. Well, the
SPEAKER_02:funniest thing is that I can always remember my dad turning around to me and saying, son, don't do your own fencing when me and my wife bought our first house. Why? He said, because every time you sit in this garden and have a beer, you'll notice all the mess-ups you make. And it's almost like, Obviously, we're all attention to detail and we'll never do anything and leave a client's project in something how we wouldn't do it. But I think sometimes you fuss over the smallest of details.
SPEAKER_00:You say that, but I am a firm believer, especially with the level of work we've been doing recently, which is like, you know, quarter of a million pound cinema rooms and stuff like that. You do it how you would want it to be. How I think people should expect it to be done. Now, there's a difference, isn't there, between the personality that demands it's done. That's not the case. But there should be a... there should be some pride in the work. And I do take a very F1 approach. Have you ever had to rip a room out? In what sense
SPEAKER_02:the scenario I had I always say and I think I think a lot of us are the same Is that you put a bit of yourself into every room and a few years ago? I was on holiday and we had massive floods in the UK and I come back to a cinema room that I'd built and I had to rip the whole thing out now I could it wasn't really flooded It was the room next door flooded by I had to take all this room apart because that's tank it and and it was gutting Just chopping this room into sections. I mean, it's gone back. You would have never have known it. But it was a realisation to me that... Did you have to redo it
SPEAKER_00:or did you rescue the bits? No,
SPEAKER_02:because the room wasn't really... there wasn't really anything wrong with the room. The insurance company sort of said, oh, there's damp in that corner, so they wanted the whole room included as part of the tanking for the room next door actually flooded. So because it was a room with a room, it was a frame inside the room, we had to chop the CLS into basically chunks of wall sections to take them out. Thankfully, my Fez tool, multi-tool, did a lot of the heavy action, but then literally put it there as a jigsaw. You go in and now, you would have never believed it was ripped out. But there was that small part of me that was like... It's heartbreaking. It was heartbreaking. I got paid to put it back in as well.
SPEAKER_00:We did a lovely job in town. It was amazing. Most of the money on this amazing ceiling that was all fabric. You would never have known. We couldn't acoustically treat the walls. So the only trick we had was the front wall and the ceiling. So I didn't want to build it out of solid materials. I wanted to build it out of fabric. And then... the sort of developers, they're like redoing a bit of the extra house and the guy was, the client wanted an induction hob and that needed a really hefty cable from the fuse box, which happened to be in the basement in the next room out from the cinema room, effectively through the cinema ceiling and into the next room. And they were like, oh, we don't think it all lines up above. So if we take the floors up, we're not sure we can get access. Can you get the fabric down? And I'm like... can get the fabric done i just i was thinking of all the knock-on consequences like the odd bit of fabric where because it can't have track you've maybe like staple gunned it somewhere like upholstered a bit of board or something you're like that's gonna particularly rip the fabric yeah i always say fabric's a little bit like wallpaper you want to get it all at the same time yeah so i was just i was just like you it's just like i didn't want to leave it in anything but the perfect state i was like does the client is the client aware that This may have quite a bit of work involved. Fortunately, I got a phone call. I was due to turn up, I think it was last Monday or something like that at lunchtime. I had a meeting in the morning. I was like, I'll be there straight after. And before I finished the meeting, I had a missed call. Phoned them and they were like, we've done it from above. And I was like, yes, thank God for that. Because, yeah, like I said, I don't leave a job like that without every... everything being perfect it's different you know some jobs are very price orientated and there isn't the money in the job to be fastidious about everything the client simply wants the stuff they don't they can't have the so tell us about identities tell us about
SPEAKER_02:a current job i mean you were speaking to a client earlier when i was setting up yeah um you were sort of saying about two different
SPEAKER_00:yeah that's an interesting one because in a dream world we'd have wisdom but i i he could easily afford it i'm sure but um doesn't want to justify it doesn't want to dedicate that amount of money to that so it's then trying to build a system that does what wisdom does and you never can can you like build what they want for less when they don't want to spend less do
SPEAKER_02:you generally take the client to see like you're you're not a million miles away from where wisdom is
SPEAKER_00:yeah so i i was sort of prepared for this question because i knew it was going to come so i was like do you have a showroom well In my dream world, I have this shop that's kind of like maybe like a Macintosh concept store at the front. And it's all like New York, like penthouse thing, red brick. black, that kind of thing. It's a man crash, limited edition vinyls, coffee machine, things like that. People come down, they listen to these like statement.
SPEAKER_02:My wife would say that's a place that I'm building for myself,
SPEAKER_00:not necessarily for my clients. So, but that would be the shop front, you know, with one or two amazing hi-fis in, again, well, nice acoustically treated, but in really subtle kind of ways that add to the decor and add to the atmosphere and subtract. Then you go through the back door and you go into hidden home. And that's where you'd have all the sim into my rooms and things like that. But I've done the maths. You need like two million pounds or something like that to-
SPEAKER_02:I mean, I'm a big fan of showrooms. I mean, I haven't got mine at the moment because I moved across the road into a bigger unit fundamentally and I've not got around to building it. I'm a big fan of showrooms. I am, but there's a cost. But there's a cost. Also, the fact is that, you know, even if you look at a high street shop, so say like one of your big sheds or one of your high street shops, it's the turnover. I mean, a friend of both of ours Owen you know he's upgrading his cinema and it's only a few years old so you say about that lovely Macintosh stuff what a lot of especially independents you know people don't realise is that the independents quite often have to buy the kit move on the kit before they can replace the kit but the manufacturer keeps on you know projectors two three years time Epsom or Sony or JVC two three months time of projectors not quite phone territory yet
SPEAKER_00:but it is that case of the It certainly is with TVs or something like that. By the time you specified it, it's changed.
SPEAKER_02:Even I've just updated my TV at home, and I knew that the LG G9 was coming out, but I still thought, actually, I could pick up the G4, because it was a little bit cheaper, even if you're in the trade. But I am sitting and now looking at the G5 going, I want to change it.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so my feeling on the showrooms is, if I added, what I can say is our showroom, We're based in about four or five different locations. We've got probably seven or eight different cinemas. We've got a total of probably about five million pounds worth of stuff on show. We've got rooms from about 40,000, 50,000 pounds fully installed up to about 800,000 pounds fully installed. They just happen to be at my distributors. And I think that's the way I see it. They're constantly updated. They're constantly recalibrated. But you have got this place. But I do have this place. This is something different because this is a unicorn. and this doesn't exist on the high street you go to a hi-fi shop i guarantee if you come here you'll have a different experience one the coffee's better yeah it's coffee is nice yeah and you had that you had the easy one i would have done you a better one um yeah like the you just don't get a room that's designed like this from the ground up the acoustics you don't get a system that's tailored and tweaked you sort of get box shifting perhaps is a better way of doing it saying it yeah I just think what this room sounds like I was saying I think I'm being pessimistic if I was to say I don't reckon there's a retail premises that has a sound like this probably in a hundred mile radius, I'd be surprised. Yeah,
SPEAKER_02:and I think the thing about this place with you, my old showroom, Owen's showroom, and the other HCA members, I think what the client likes to see is regardless of whether you're doing a hi-fi system or a cinema system, you bring a client, especially into your own home, there is something nice about that for the client. And I know with us, we take clients quite often to distributors, even when we had the show cinema. Because, you know, you're not going to have the same speaker brand in every room. And it's very subjective sometimes. I mean, we touched on it earlier, which was like, you can spec the ultimate system, which we'll get onto, where you can spec the ultimate system. But actually, client might not like the sound of that system. They might want something a little bit different. But I think where, for me, where our showroom was that, it was that sort of like... So that final nail, not in the coffin, that final nail of saying, look, this is what I did. Yes. So I could do this for you.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, 100%. And I think that what I actually do use this room for is for local, slightly smaller jobs where lighting design's a thing. And what I show them is how even in a small room like this, you can easily, easily have about 12 or 13 circuits of lighting, curtains and blinds. And if that was dimmers on the wall, how do you achieve this? Whereas I can, without even explaining whether the lights are and all the controls are. You can set this for TV. You can set this for music. You can set this for a movie. or you can just have it on or you can have it off at the touch of a button. I don't yank my curtains, there's virtually no fingerprints, apart from when the kids like to climb down the hall. You know, I don't pull on that because it's motorized. I've got a privacy blind that every time you turn the lights on comes down. It's just that, it's that demonstration. I use it to demonstrate lighting design and how you can access the lighting design because if you've got lots of channels of lighting or lots of independent lights, you can access those presets and the moods and things like that. that just touch of a button, you don't need to dial in millions of things. And when you leave, you don't need to remember which ones of those millions are on and off. And, you know, so I use it for that and I use it for acoustic design in the sense that most people who have got a music system have it in a bog standard room. when they come here they realize there's a sort of fundamental difference in the presentation like you were talking about the soundstage precision and things like that you just can't achieve that without acoustics um the linear bass you know two little small speakers in here i mean
SPEAKER_02:that's yeah i mean that was phenomenal the fact that yeah when you said to me there's no sub
SPEAKER_00:yeah no subs no dsp no tuning that is all natural just coming out of there so system selection with room treatment i think that's fundamental and i think it's way overlooked even even now i know it's sort of becoming like a talked about thing, but I think it's so massively understood by the people selling it and the people even the manufacturers selling it you know it's like when you get like a dodgy salesman that doesn't car salesman that doesn't know his cars just selling you the brands they have they just sort of sell you what it says on paper like i won't mention the name when i was in the training for the acoustic stuff and they're telling me an inch treatment treats 100 hertz the person telling me that i had no idea that it didn't or couldn't or if it did if it did it technically it does but it is like by a billionth of a millionth of a decibel so where do
SPEAKER_02:you so where do you see so what's it yeah so 25 at the moment so where do you see sort of 2020 2030 2035
SPEAKER_00:yeah so to summarize all that what we've discovered recently is interior design has a bigger impact on how much you enjoy what's why you're in that room. So whether it's TV, music, film, whatever, the mood, the atmosphere, the design, the lighting, the furniture, the colour schemes, all those things impact everything as much as the technical performance of that room. It's part of the technical performance of that room and it is not yet documented properly that that's part of the technical performance. But if your mind and emotions as a human being in that space are not right, then you're not going to watch it. It's like an animal at the zoo, you know, like a caged animal. It's just not right. You need to be comfortable. You need to want to be in that space regardless of the kit and the technology and the function of the room. So we design from getting the acoustics right, the interior design right, the lighting right, and then the kit right.
SPEAKER_02:So you're similar in respect, you're full turnkey. So if a client said to you, I've got an eight by five concrete basement, you know, it's yours to do with what you want.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, exactly. We can literally hand them back a finished to the last degree room. Then the other element is we've also sort of gone from where we just got to in the conversation about the multi-room thing, where it's generally, it's like a similar performance envelope in every room. It might have a different function. You might have an AV amp or something in one room and you might have a cinema room as well that is, you know, perhaps up a notch or two. But the kitchen's the same as the master bedroom, same as the lounge, same as this. It's like, you know, a pair of ceiling speakers or something like it or a soundbar under the telly with ceiling speakers augmenting it and maybe a stash sub. But effectively, it's the same thing. It's certainly the same source. It's the same this, it's the same that. So what I've realized is if you've got, you know, those jobs are often two, three hundred thousand pounds for the whole London mansion. I'd be inclined to say, well, actually, you might want to spend 70 grand on a hi-fi in the living room with 20 grand's worth of acoustic treatment, have some blue sound with a pair of speakers in the kitchen or perhaps a bit better in the kitchen, actually, because that's primarily used an awful lot. But certainly in the guest en suite, you just want cheap, get you going, has a function, does its job. Even then, maybe even you don't even have it. Maybe even we write that off, controversial as it seems, maybe we don't even put anything but the cables into the en-suites. And we take all that budget and we focus it because I don't believe that a hi-fi stops getting better until you're into the millions. I mean that, genuinely. The Macintosh Sonus Faber Supremacy system I had at Munich Hi-Fi is about a million pounds. It was by far and away the best system and it filled like a ballroom. It was unreal. Yeah, I was immediately... It's one of the ones I've not been
SPEAKER_02:to. There's a few that I've not been to like that which I really, really want
SPEAKER_00:to go to. It was just unreal. believable. Now, again, until you can afford to do that in every room, I believe in compromising the lesser required rooms in order to get somewhere closer to that in the areas you're actually going to use. And I'm starting to notice it in clients' houses. I've made that mistake over the years. They're sat in their living rooms all the time, not even using the cinema room that's down in the basement, because actually the living room is a comfortable, more ergonomic environment because it's close to the rest of the house. It's easy to communicate to that room and stuff like that. And they're sat in there using like a total control DMS AV amp. I'm like, hang on a minute, they've got Datasat and whatever else down in the basement, like some mega cinema, and they're not using it because up there's that. So what I should have done is put like a Griffin, a Mac, and a pair of Sonos Farbers or something up there. So it's this hybrid system of TV augmentation, but amazing music.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, sorry, we had a couple of technical difficulties then, so sorry about the crude, potentially crude splice. But, so yeah.
SPEAKER_00:So as I was mentioning, I've made these mistakes where, you know, perhaps I should have introduced the high-end hi-fi into the living environment so that they had something to augment the TV, but they also had this other choice and function that would get used all the time, you know, when there's nothing on the telly, stick some music on, and they get this amazing experience all the time. And again, maybe a bit more attention on the acoustics because I can do it where you don't notice, you know, had I not told you about this front wall, yes, you might think it's a bit unusual, but effectively, We've got ways these days of hiding it in a way that actually only looks better than it does when you don't do it. Fabric finishes are incredible.
SPEAKER_02:So if we touch on the Munich high end bit, you went on just a minute ago. Let's say stay single-roomed. If size was no object, money was no object, and don't worry, it's a safe zone. Any manufacturer and distributor was not harmed in this comment and won't come at you. If money was no object, size was no object, what would you
SPEAKER_00:opt for? What would I do? I would find a way to have something like that Sonos Faber Suprema system, which is these huge towers with, like, Separate they're integral to the speaker, but they're totally separate boxes subwoofers. They look like speakers So you can place the middle and ties where they sound best, you know away from the back wall in the room And you can put the subs where they start the way they sound best and then they've got passive Crossovers and stuff like that. Oh, sorry active crossovers, I guess in the passive subwoofer system To time compensate and things like that for where they are so you have these mega speakers. Huge stack of Macintosh, although I'd love to find a way to get the Griffin power amps in there. Source? Yeah, I'd put that around. Well, it's got to be K-Scape or something for movies, hasn't it? There's no other real way of doing it. Then for sound, I think, yeah, I'd be at the top end of the Inuous tree, a Grim Audio, something like that. And then what? Rune. So that'd be Rune for music, with Tidal and Cobuzz and all my stored catalog that I built up over my years that sort of directs the Rune algorithm to finding more and more stuff that's right up my street
SPEAKER_02:but i can also see
SPEAKER_00:in the corner we have
SPEAKER_02:a
SPEAKER_00:very small stack of vinyl yeah
SPEAKER_02:i enjoy that macintosh yeah
SPEAKER_00:yeah macintosh mt2 um some people obviously i need to be able to demonstrate it to some degree but also i like to buy one or two albums that are meaningful to me because my cd collection is now in boxes up in there because i can fundamentally i can listen to my cds in cd format through the streamed through the server there's something a little bit there's still having the having like the ownership and seeing it there and stuff that reminds you triggers you to listen to it
SPEAKER_02:i think it's a bit like if you look at video a few people often say to me about how project projection is going to die because you know of micro led screens we we got involved in a project last year i think it was that had a micro LED screen because it was for an ex-footballer or his old house. And everybody I said, it's so impressive to look at, but it's just too bright. And I know that's changed. And I think for me personally, there's something nice about a projector and a projector screen. And I think with vinyl, I'm certainly seeing, even me, people asking for vinyl in
SPEAKER_00:projects. I... About the physical process, yes. And I think you put it on and you listen through the album way more easily without that twitchy, I should skip to the next track thing. Yeah. So I think there's that. But in terms of actual quality now, I think that streaming, even streaming, and I know I'm going to get shot down for this, but it's true. I challenge someone to come here and do a blind test on it. Streaming is so good now that it has all the qualities of the vinyl. And this isn't just streaming, actually, I should say, like digital channel conversion and the whole chain of handling digital signals is so good. So good. There's everything digital has with none of the downsides, you know, none of of keeping it clean. Because if you don't keep your vinyl clean, it does sound awful. And the exploratory, the
SPEAKER_02:fact of that you can, I mean, you played that single to me, I will go home and put that on my system. So to wrap things up... How's it best for people to get in contact with you? Follow
SPEAKER_00:me.
SPEAKER_02:I
SPEAKER_00:love talking to people. I love giving out free advice. I love trying to communicate. You're going to regret that when this goes up on YouTube. No, I'm not. I really do love giving out the free advice because I think that's the fundamental starting point for how I run my business. My dad said to me that, you know, if you want to make a quick buck, have people over. If you want to be in business in 20 years, be honest. I'm honest to a fault. It really does negatively affect my financial situation. can't help it. I just want everyone to be happy and to get along.
SPEAKER_02:I think you just want to be happy. I think the same as I get. When a client comes back to you and says how much they've enjoyed that space, it's really nice from a non-monetary point of view, from just the fact that it puts spring in your step.
SPEAKER_00:And I think I've come to realise, A, I know and always have known, but I've really come to solidify it recently. Music and hi-fi is a massive passion for me, but I've also realised that so is lighting design, so is interior design. So is cinema and so is... how you achieve that so through the acoustics and things like that it is a genuine passion of mine now and I'm coming to terms with that and accepting that and now I realise that I can just pass that on and that's what I want people to do like get in touch with me and just chat so web address is hiddenhome.tech T-E-C-H don't worry about giving your mobile number out because they can find that
SPEAKER_02:on your website you've also got a podcast yeah
SPEAKER_00:we do so we're Hidden Home Technology on YouTube link in the description and all that lot. Yeah, so you'll see like a handful of project videos. You'll see a handful of product reviews. And I'm starting to do some slightly more blog-based stuff where I chat about little jobs I'm on, but I always forget when I'm on site or the client's there or there's somebody in the room and it's awkward. But I do, I'm starting to try and do that because I want people to get to know me and realise that actually they shouldn't be at all worried about phoning me and asking and talking because I'm that person that they now, you know, through proxy of watching me know me
SPEAKER_02:I think that's and I think yeah I think that you know coming here again I'll get to know you myself a bit better you know I think that when you look at a lot of people in our industry the HCA members you know that I know people that I know just from going for events I think everybody is a lot of people the same you know it's just like it's that personal touch it's a lot of heart on the sleeve yes yeah
SPEAKER_00:and again it's sort of why I mean you were going to ask the question or maybe you did and maybe I just missed the answer but Why am I still in the industry? It's because, yes, there's a few oddbods, especially in the dealer game. There's some strange dealers out there who are not great. But in terms of the actual manufacturer's distribution network and support going upwards from the dealers. It's a family. It's a family. It's so nice.
SPEAKER_02:We've got an event tomorrow, one of the Cedia Roadshows, which is why I'm up in Bristol Bath. And the majority of people we see there tomorrow will be friends. Yeah. You know, not... you would happily go out for a beer with them. And they're in the same industry. I mean, I've got some people around me where I am in East Sussex, you know, technically they're competitors, but, you know, we happily work
SPEAKER_00:together. Yeah, yeah, 100%. Yeah, the trust levels are just unbelievable. Going upwards, again, Tuesday night, I'm out with Mal from AWA, Technical Support for URC, because he's a friend. The amount that he's helped me and helped clients through helping me, it's just ridiculous. So, yeah, every time he's about, I'm desperate to go meet him. It's the same with everyone, Owen. Yeah. You know, CinemaWorks, he's a really old friend now. You know, he was a rep in the hi-fi industry when I was starting. So, yeah, just like, just know all these people forever. And that, if I don't have that, then I don't deal with them really. And I'm not saying it's like boys club. I'm talking about if I don't have a relationship with somebody where they won't tell me the crap products in their catalog as a distributor or as a manufacturer, I don't trust them and I won't deal with them. I need to be on that level where people say, you have this model or this model and don't bother with that one. one because that's how it's impossible otherwise to know what I think a lot a lot of
SPEAKER_02:brands like that they you know they will get you through to those I mean I'm off to one brand out in Amsterdam in a few in a month or so where they've got like a few dealers out there to get feedback on their new product so but awesome right let's wrap it up there thank you very much
SPEAKER_00:for coming I'm glad to
SPEAKER_02:yeah and thank you for being a guinea pig on what actually is the first of these sessions now and we'll hopefully do another one in a
SPEAKER_00:year I'd love to be part of any of them. Yeah, I've actually realised I can talk constantly. Yeah,
SPEAKER_02:again, for something that was going to be 20 minutes long, I don't know how long this has gone on for. Yeah, go watch my ones on YouTube, they're exactly the same. Awesome, mate. Thanks, man. Cheers, buddy. Catch you later.
SPEAKER_03:Cheers, mate.