It's not quite accurate to say that John Heinz, founder and owner of Atlantic City's Concert Quality Sound, was born into the business, but he sure got an early start. His father worked on the tech end at the Hughes Television Network, which was in part a forerunner to ESPN, and also one of the first companies to get into closed-circuit telecasts – it was working those sorts of gigs at Atlantic City's Boardwalk Hall that led to the Heinz family relocating there from New York, and it's where young John got his first exposure to the world of sound.
Starting Young
"When I was a young kid – seven, eight years old – my dad would sometimes take me to work with him at night and I'd get to play [while he was doing sound for a telecast]. One night he said, ‘Okay, we have a job for you,' and it was working this little 6-channel Altec microphone mixer with rotary knobs. He said, ‘Just watch the meter, and if it goes into the red, turn the master [dial] down a little bit.' That was my job, and it had such an impression on me that pretty much from that point forward, I got the audio bug and was hooked on it. My dad also had a great collection of technical magazines that talked about electronics and circuits and TV and sound. I would read those, and by the time I'm 13 and 14, I'm going to wood shop in high school and the teacher says, ‘What do you want to build – a dog house, a bird house?' I said, ‘I want to build a speaker cabinet from plans I got in this book from Radio Shack!'" he says with a laugh.
"So, I was building stuff, salvaging old stereos, cannibalizing them and turning them into amplifiers," Heinz continues. "I didn't have direction with it – it was fun – and eventually I came up with this idea of DJing high school dances, so I put together some gear to do that [in the early 1980s]. In high school, I also had friends who were forming bands, and that became the next thing for me – because they needed a sound system. The first job I ever did, I had a Radio Shack microphone my grandmother bought me, and I'd plug it into a tape deck's head amp to preamp the microphone, and then ran that into my 50-watt JC Penny amplifier and my home-built speakers from the Radio Shack plans. From there it just kept evolving."
To say the least. After reading about the complex sound system Showco had put together for the 1983 Genesis tour, and then actually experiencing the massive but clear system that Bruce Springsteen used for a show at Veteran's Stadium in Philadelphia in 1984, Heinz decided that a life in sound was for him. "I thought, I have all these casinos in my back yard in Atlantic City, I've got to be able to get a job doing sound there.'"
Multi-Tasking
Easier said than done. It was difficult breaking into that world, but he did manage to get a job with a local television station in the engineering department, maintaining tape decks and the transmitter, setting up cameras and working as a bench technician. After working that job for a while, he took the leap and started his own business – or, more accurately, two businesses. He opened an electronics repair shop called VCRs Plus which specialized in work on VCRs and camcorders, and then his night job was working music gigs as Concert Quality Sound – the business got its formal start in 1991, making this year its 20th anniversary. He admits that in the early years, it was a bit of struggle – his operation wasn't big enough to get casino work, "so I was doing a lot of bar bands up in Philly on weekends." By 1997, his shop had closed – VCRs had become so inexpensive to buy that no one bothered to repair them when they malfunctioned – and Heinz temporarily "put the sound company on the shelf" while he took a lead audio technician position doing maintenance, repairs and sound mixing at the Showboat casino. After a while, he missed working for himself, so he re-dedicated himself to CQS and moved into a shared warehouse space with the Earl Girls lighting company. Though never officially affiliated, they have both benefited from their proximity, and occasionally they find themselves working the same gigs.
Paying the Bills
Heinz grew the company's inventory slowly, "sticking to the formula of re-investing capital – going out, doing jobs, taking the proceeds after you've paid the bills and then buying more gear, more gear, more gear. I wasn't comfortable getting into a lot of financing," he says.
Once the business had been around for a while and the equipment was at a certain level, lucrative casino work started falling its way, and to this day that remains a vital part of what has developed into a very successful mid-level regional sound company. In fact, CQS's close relationship with giants such as Harrah's and Caesars Entertainment has allowed them to land work for those casinos' expansions into Pennsylvania, too. CQS does ample corporate and convention work, and non-casino music events of every size, indoors and out, from festivals to college events to concerts at the beach. Along the way, they've worked gigs for such acts as LL Cool J, Los Lobos, the Oak Ridge Boys, Spyro Gyra, Leon Russell, Clarence Clemons, Gin Blossoms and dozens of others, but they also put as much care and energy into events with no "names." Concert Quality Sound sidelines include a thriving repair business (they are a Yamaha-authorized repair outfit, for example), some equipment sales and a growing involvement with video production.
A Growing Inventory
Heinz's audio equipment purchases have been influenced both by his deep electronics background and his savvy understanding of his market's needs. "A lot of times what I do as an owner is the equivalent of a stock market analyst, where it's not just about the greatest product that came out on the market but being able to take into consideration how that product was developed, the people who were involved in developing that product or programming it, the country of origin where it was manufactured. It's important to me to know how something was built, what the potential flaws could be, particularly in speaker systems, when you commit to one manufacturer's product – is that a good fit for my market? To be honest, I was a little hesitant about JBL, because we already had another company in the area that had gone VerTec, and I was wary that if I went that route we'd be clobbering each other over price. But I came to the decision that, because we do so much in casinos, and the type of acts that come through, the scale of what we do, and what we've seen on so many riders, the VerTec 88 ended up being the right box for us. It's a product that's really appealing to a lot of people across the board, and it works in so many different kinds of situations.
A 10-Year View
"From a business standpoint," he adds, "I have to look at the 10-year picture: Is this company on the front edge? Is the manufacturer going to be in business in 10 years? Because once you start putting that amount of money into something, you want to know that you're going to get it back somehow. At this point, I have the ability to buy just about anything, but people are not necessarily willing to pay for it. So we've tried to keep a level head of making picks that have a very broad appeal and as much acceptance as possible."
Indeed, the CQS audio inventory list is peppered with many popular favorites, including the aforementioned JBL VerTec VT4888s and other JBLs from the VRX, SRX, PRX and JRX lines. CQS also offers a full range of digital and analog consoles, including the Avid VENUE SC48, Yamaha M7CL, LS9, PM3000, PM4000 and Allen & Heath GL series, among others. The company also offers Crown and QSC power amps and a broad range of top mics by AKG, Shure, Sennheiser and others. Rack gear choices include equipment from Yamaha, Lexicon, Klark-Teknik, Eventide and TC Electronic.
Still, Heinz notes that it's not just about equipment. "None of this would be possible without the efforts of my dedicated staff of seven along with the talents of the hard-working men and women of the local stagehands union."
Whatever the approach in terms of equipment and structuring the business, it seems to be working for Concert Quality Sound. It's still a growing enterprise, but Heinz is in no rush to suddenly start competing with the top-tier sound companies. "We're not one of the big boys, I know that," he says with a laugh. "But it took them 40 years to get where they're at. So we'll see what happens."
