Audio Advice’s new Wilmington, North Carolina, experience center will have an impact throughout the company’s other five locations, covering the Carolinas, St. Louis, Nashville, and Las Vegas. The space, acquired from Audio Labs a few years back, is the blueprint for future showroom updates that will eventually roll out to each location.
So, no pressure.
“This is the model for what we’re going to be doing going forward in other spaces,” says Gerry Pizzi, general manager at Audio Advice Wilmington. “We’re in the middle of building Nashville now, and it is modeled similarly after this space except here we’ve got a beach feel because of our location and they’ll have more of a ‘whiskey lounge’ look. Conceptually, though, it’s still the same thing — kitchen, living room, dining room, and good-better-best scenario, from audio to lighting.
“Lighting is going to take our industry to the next level based not just on job size but also on the impactful feeling of what lighting can do to a space, so that’s where the emphasis is here. When you first come into the space, we’ve got entry-level warm-dim lighting at the bar area. Then we step up a little bit into the kitchen, which has DMF tunable white lights at a mid-price point. And then in the living room we step up to Ketra. This allows the client to see the difference and the value of good lighting versus great lighting.”
On the audio front, Audio Advice Wilmington’s listening rooms may look typical, but the arrangement of speakers is anything but.
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“With our previous stores — and like most other dealers — you go into a speaker room and show them a bunch of towers and demo the ones based on what the client is looking to spend: Here’s our $20,000 towers; here’s our $5000 towers… That’s a difficult position to put a brand in where you are saying, ‘I would love to support you, but you’re going to be mixed in with everybody else.’
“What we did here was basically create eight kiosks in the two dedicated listening rooms. So, we have a Paradigm space, a Bowers & Wilkins space, a Sonus faber space, and so on. That allowed us to get more buy-in from the brands because we’re showing mutual support at that point. That’s worked very well here and will be featured in the new locations.”
Taking the Tour
Prospective clients are greeted by the bar area once they walk through the front door. There is not a ton of visible tech, but it does feature LED lighting in the shelves and around the LG OLED TV, as well as traditional warm-dim up in the ceiling. Throughout the space, fixtures are from DMF with lighting control through Lutron.
Opposite the bar is the living room, with a Sony 85-inch BRAVIA television as the centerpiece. Surrounding the TV are a host of bookshelf speakers and two towers, all of which are integrated with the TV as well as the whole-house system.
At the rear of the space is a kitchen area and a wall that separates the outdoor area (which is actually indoors) from the rest of the open-space room. That room features a collection of Coastal Source gear, including Razor speakers, 10.0 Bollards, and a hardscape subwoofer. Also on hand is a Samsung Terrace TV and a Shade Innovations KAOS outdoor shade that can be lowered over the entrance to the room.
There is also a conference room that is not always a conference room. “When we do events, the table comes out and a couch goes in,” says Pizzi. “This is primarily a 7.1-channel Bowers & Wilkins room. We’ve got B&W 703s, a good center channel, and then a Marantz AV20 receiver and AMP 20 power amp in a Salamander cabinet with a commercial 75-inch TV above it.”
Off to the side of the main room are the two listening rooms. The first, which has the high-end system, includes speakers from Sonus faber, Focal, and Bowers & Wilkins, with AudioQuest cabling and power provided by McIntosh and Hegel amplifiers. Music is streamed through a HiFi Rose 151.
“This is definitely a fun room,” says Pizzi. “We did four DMF lights and Ventric channel lighting up in the ceiling, and then WAC Lighting tape around the baseboards to give the room a little bit of glow.”
Right next door to that is the mid-level listening room, which features Paradigm, JBL, Revel, and Wharfedale. The lighting mirrors the high-level room, but both may be getting an upgrade soon. “Eventually,” says Pizzi, “we’ll be adding more center tape and color-changing lighting in these rooms.”
That leaves Audio Advice’s two home theaters left on the tour. The first one is a “real-world” one, according to Pizzi. It features Paradigm Elite playback, including three LCR speakers behind the acoustically transparent screen from Stewart Filmscreen, which is opposite a Sony BRAVIA Projector 8. It is a 7.2.4 Dolby Atmos theater powered by Anthem AVM 70, MCA 525, and MDX-amplifiers.
Next door to that room is a long hallway that ends in an inviting blue glow that, as you get closer, you will recognize as a JBL Synthesis rack that is made to be shown off. “The rack was going to be in the back of the room,” Pizzi explains, “then we decided rather than put a picture in the hallway, we’d front the rack here. So, we cut a hole in the wall, put some LEDs around it, and now we show it off. That happened post-construction…so that was fun.”
This is a 9.4.4 JBL Synthesis theater with in-wall subwoofers and a JVC NZ 900 projector. Audio and video processing is performed by a madVR Envy and the latest JBL Synthesis amplifiers. Acoustic Innovations did the wall paneling and the starry ceiling, with LED lighting by Audio Advice.
“There are eight columns in the theater, and each one of them has a 300-watt power supply and a three-channel DMX controller,” explains Pizzi. “Each one of those panels is technically two zones of LED tape, so we can go through the whole color spectrum. It was labor intensive to say the least, but the wow factor is amazing. You can change those columns to be any color.
“Everything came out great, and we’re in South Carolina installing this same theater in somebody’s house this week. He just went up upstream a little bit on the projector and the subwoofer.”
Until recently, that would have been the end of the tour, but Audio Advice just added one more area. “The last room is our golf simulator, which is pretty awesome,” says Pizzi. “We’re in a testing phase now, but I’d say we’re like 95% done. We went with the Foresight system using an Epson QL 3000 projector with a short-throw lens. We use the Foresight Falcon analytics and reader, which costs around $16,000.”
Sharing the Space
The showroom has been open for a few months, and it has been drawing in clients and the design-build trade as intended. The team holds monthly events there — such as Hi-Fi Happy Hour, Swing Into Summer, and Music Matters — and work with their vendor partners to bring in some added product expertise.
“Our ‘Swing Into Summer’ event will be a long-drive competition, and we will have three brand representatives here; reps from Sonus faber, Paradigm, and JBL will be here,” says Pizzi. “Visitors can spend 10 minutes in one section, 10 minutes in another, and 10 minutes in another and get to speak to somebody that makes the product, knows all about the product, and is enthusiastic about it. It works out great for attendees and offers another way to deepen our partnership with our vendors.”
The store also welcomes walk-ins, and Pizzi is ready for them. “We meet and greet everybody at the door with a handshake, smile, and a short pre-written script,” he says. “We are very low-key; we do not push here. If a customer wants to come in and spend two hours listening to our $200,000 stack, I will bring that man a beer and ask him every 30 minutes if he’s okay. We don’t want to feel like we’re a big-box store. Being that we now have multiple locations, that’s something we have to overcome — we are not the Raleigh Superstore anymore. We are now a nationwide company, so you’ve got to break down that local barrier, and the best way to do that is just be kind and listen.”
For more information, visit www.audioadvice.com.
