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Turbosound Celebrates Audiopole's First Year
Turbosound is celebrating the results of Audiopole's first year as the company's exclusive French distributor. Audiopole has achieved high sales across several Turbosound product ranges, with the TXD series of loudspeakers proving particularly successful in the French market. One of the largest projects has involved Audiopole supplying 32 TXD systems to Brittany-based Sono West, as part of that company's contract to refurbish the public address system at a large football stadium in Rennes - the Parc des Sports de Rennes.
Located in Fontenay-sous-Bois, near Paris, Audiopole is a large, well-established organisation, with a comprehensive network of sales and marketing channels, covering the installation, touring, retail and broadcast markets. In addition to the popularity of the TXD designs, Audiopole has also achieved significant business with the larger-scale Turbosound QLight systems, as well as with the Impact series on smaller install projects.
Audiopoles's chairman, Bruno Bertrand, commented on his company's first-year experiences with the Turbosound brand: “We have had a busy and very successful first year. Our decision to take on Turbosound provided us with something of a challenge, as the brand was in effect new to the French market. Two key factors affected our decision: first was the fact that Turbosound maintains a high profile and a good image, although it had had only a limited presence in France, and the second was Philip Hart, Turbosound's chairman! Philip used to be my boss when I worked at Harman, so I knew Turbosound was in safe hands, and the company could only continue to improve its performance and market position. We gave ourselves a year to make an impact on the market, but after only three months our customers' reactions were already very good indeed. Our appointment as distributor coincided with Turbsound's launch of the TXD series, and we organised regional demonstrations to our dealers – these immediately resulted in sales, which have been followed by repeat orders. Almost 40% of our Turbosound business is now with the TXD loudspeakers.
“Turbosound's Impact series has also proved very popular with our network of installers, although this range had not been previously successful in France, while the QLight systems represent a further growth area and account for over 25% of the Turbosound market here, with the new TQ-DP digitally-powered Class D systems attracting considerable interest. As to the immediate future, we are very excited about Turbosound's new Aspect series, and anticipate this design being extremely successful in the touring and install sectors.”
Audiopole's Bruno Bertrand outlined the structure of the French market as comprising around 900 MI dealers, with approximately half of these retailing professional audio products. Some 400 installation and rental companies handle from small install projects to the largest audio-visual contracts, with around 10 companies specialising solely in touring. Among the larger touring companies is ON/OFF, based in Paris. Run by enthusiastic Turbosound devotees, the company maintains a considerable inventory of Turbosound systems, which are regularly deployed for smaller tours.
Based in Brittany, the Sono West group is among Audiopole's largest Turbosound clients, and the company includes a dedicated touring division, an installation department and a retail showroom. Sono West has around 60k of Turbosound systems, and is one of the biggest Turbosound users in France. Its installation department has just completed the refurbishment of the public address system at the 31,000-seat football stadium in Rennes – the Parc des Sports de Rennes - installing 32 TXD-121 loudspeakers. One side of the stadium was being totally rebuilt, and the TXD loudspeakers were installed to complement the existing Turbosound installation, which includes TCS systems, in other parts of the stadium. The project's overall objective was to ensure consistent quality and intelligibility for large-audience events. Sono West's customer was very satisfied with the previous Turbosound systems, hence the TXD products being included in the specification for the new installation, which brought the total number of Turbosound units deployed at the stadium to over 90 loudspeakers.
6th October 2004
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