I first met Karl Winkler on a trip to Spain to check out the facilities for speaker maker D.A.S. Karl worked for Sennheiser US, which had recently started distributing D.A.S. product in the States, and Karl was in charge of marketing that brand. On that trip, we spent four days being wined and dined (back in the days when I still wined…), watching nightly fireworks displays and touring the huge temporary statues around Valencia in a celebration known as Fallas.
How is a statue temporary, you may be asking? They are temporary because, regardless of size – and they range from maybe six feet to 60 feet tall – on the last day of the event, they burn all of these pieces of art in a giant cleansing bonfire ritual that dates back hundreds of years. It is an amazing event. You should really put it on your Bucket List. During our four days there, we spent maybe five hours at the factory and the rest of the time partying.
Right after NAMM, I got a call from Karl who has, for the past at least half-dozen years, headed up the marketing for Lectrosonics, inviting me to come out to see what was up in Albuquerque. This time, I took the hour-and-a-half flight from Vegas on a Sunday night, stayed at a nice but not impressive Hilton Gardens (basic cable TV only), where I dined on half of the sandwich I bought in the Vegas airport, spent like six hours at the shop, had a chile relleno for lunch and was back in Vegas in time for Glee on Monday night.
The funny thing is that it is hard to say which trip I enjoyed more.
I have written dozens of times about the power of passion, and how it can make all the difference in anything from a tour to a company. Here is a corollary to that theory. Motivation matters. I can – as I am sure almost everyone reading this can – tell in a heartbeat if a product or service has its roots in marketing or in just making something cool. The marketing stuff means that a bunch of MBA types got together and did focus group sessions and tried to figure out something that people would buy and then set about to make it. This brought us stuff like the Zune music player, the Olive Garden and the Backstreet Boys.
The "make cool stuff" approach is harder, but way more fun. It means going with your gut, really knowing your customers to the point of knowing what they want before they know they want it and taking a lot of risk. This approach has brought us the iPod, Spago and Frank Zappa.
Back to Karl. There will be plenty of time to talk about gear. We have some Lectrosonics stuff coming out for reviews soon. But as cool as some of the products are, that is not what ended up impressing me. And I was very impressed. To start with, Jonathan Patterson, the guy who picked me up at the airport, was not a hired driver. He is a graphic artist who started at the company a few months ago, and he took at least a couple of hours out of a Sunday evening to haul my butt from the airport to the hotel 30 minutes away, and neither was close to his residence. Next, Karl picked me up in the morning and we headed to the shop. These guys make everything they sell, including milling the boxes the stuff is housed in. Impressive. But more impressive was the fact that at about six years on the job, Karl is the "new guy," and everywhere we went, from the factory floor to the service department to the engineering space to the admin area, everyone greeted him by name, and he did the same in reply. That's not something you can fake for the magazine guy who is touring the place.
I spent a good amount of time talking with Karl as well as company president Larry Fisher and sales VP Gordon Moore and walked away with the impression after talking with each of them that this is an organization that not only allows, but encourages, creative thinking throughout its ranks. Engineers have come up with ideas in the shower that have turned into some of the best wireless gear out there. The marketing is not slick. In fact, the sell line "Made In the USA By a Bunch of Fanatics" came about as the result of an inside joke that had something to do with a poster and a pig. I'm not totally clear on it. Even the sales folks know enough about audio that – to quote Moore – if they were out on a show with a client and the FOH engineer dropped dead, any of them could probably belly up to the console and finish the show.
For a long time, it was rare to see gear with a Lectrosonic badge on it outside of the broadcast and film worlds. It was, not to put too fine a point on it, just way more expensive than other lesser but usable wireless options. And they are really pushing right now, because they have some very cool stuff, and the wireless world has been so upended in the past year that solutions that work are starting to be more attractive even if they are pricey. But this is not focus group stuff. The root of everything there is someone with an idea and people with the willingness and will to just try it because it sounds like it would be really cool.
In a world that is increasingly corporate and not a lot of fun (yes, even in our audio corner of the world), it was a breath of fresh air, boosted my faith in the future of live audio, and the chile relleno was really good. Thanks for having me, guys.
