Interview

OC: Just how did you get to the point of where you are today with Ultralink? What is your background?

DB: Oh gosh, how does somebody get in this crazy business. I’m a psychologist, I was teaching psychology. I was an audiophile and couldn’t afford on an instructor’s salary the gear that I wanted to own to listen to music on at home, so I took a part time job to make the money to buy the gear to and to buy it at accommodation sale pricing as an industry member. I found the next year that I was having more fun with my part-time job than my fulltime job so I reversed the roles and got psych part-time and sold hi-fi full time year after that it eliminated the academic part of my career completely. I got in the iPod business. I’ve been with dealers and manufactures for the last oh, 37 years— way too long.

OC: So I figure that you are the communications company that Ultralink uses?

JN: Exactly. We are the Ultralink advertising and Public relations firm.

OC: How long have you been working with those folks?
JN: I believe it’s been about 5 or 6 years now. My company, Noyd Communications, we’ve been in the consumer electronics and computer technology marketing field since 1986. Currently, our clients include: Viseo, Thanyal Projectors, Microtech, SRS labs, Shurwood Audio, Ultrlink/XLO.

OC: Our mission is not just the audiophile community but it’s also bringing in people who may not have been educated in this subject in the past into that consumer base.

DB: Well, ya know, my history has always been in high-end specialty audio. And, the idea that once you get above the cheap, garbage that comes in the box, the throw away cables, the idea that almost any real branded cable is that they’re alike and that they’re good enough is pretty pervasive. And, I know that because I subscribed to it ‘til I found out what this company was about and joined it. And, the reason that idea is fairly pervasive is because mostly it’s pretty true. Most cables manufacturers don’t make their own cables in fact, very, very few do. Most cable brands, and I use the word brands as opposed to manufacturers because they do no manufacturing, they’re basically branding distributors, they manage a brand that happens to be a cable, they buy it from one of the two or three or four large, giga-mile manufacturers of cable in China and then they say, “Alright, we’ll take your coax cable model 102 and we want a purple jacket instead of the green one and we want you to silkscreen our name on it, we want this shape connector on it and we’re going to put our name on the product.” Well, it’s like it’s exactly under the skin the same cable that 50 other people sell. There is no differentiation at all and most importantly, it’s not a cable engineered for a specific application within a modern system. When I got started in the business it was pretty easy to hook up a system; you threw a pair of speakers, on some milk crates and ran some lamp chord to an amplifier and a couple of RCA cables and that was it. You were dealing with analog audio. The signals that we were dealing with were very similar to each other. These days, we’re dealing with radically different kinds of signals; audio, video, analog, digital, high bandwidth, low bandwidth, high power, low power, they live in radically different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, so the shielding to protect the integrity of that signal within the cable and to keep the signal from that cable from radiating into nearby cables, the shielding is application specific to the cable to the length of the cable to its application within the system to the kind of signal it carries within the system. It just makes no sense to conceive that one generic recipe of cable construction and all of the variables involved in that could do a good job, an optimal job in all of these very, very radically different kinds of signals. I mean, it just isn’t even intuitive. We have the engineering. We have the science and have put together what we call a “signal delivery system” and it’s where each cable in the system is optimized in for the kind of signal it’s going to carry within that system. And, we use all of the various methods at our disposal to do that. The conductor metallurgy, the purity of the conductor, the way those conductors are assembled. The dielectric that is around it, the geometry of the cable itself, the jacketing, the connectors, the tooling, all of those things.

JN: So just a little more background about Ultralink. Ultralink is headquartered in Toronto, Canada, and they are among the top leaders in manufacturer of high performance audio and video cables for home theaters and interconnects. And, they also have a line of power products as well, power conditioning products. In Canada, their actually the number two brand of home theater or high end audio, interconnects and cable or signal delivery systems. They’re number one in Canada even ahead of Monster Cable, which is number one in the United States. So, recently when they brought on Don Bouchard it was really to help develop the marketing of the actually company to bring the marketing and sales up to the level of the exposure that they have in Canada. And, part of what he has been able to do is be able to bring products to market, which really are, again, differentiating for this high end home theater and audio marketplace as well.

DB: The fact of the matter is, that all of these various kinds of signals- the thing is within a cable everything makes a difference. All of the variables affect the cable’s ability to transmit a signal and unlike all of the other elements in the system, the cable is pervasive it’s everywhere within a system it connects every component to every other. It’s a widely distributed single component within the system- it’s not an accessory, it’s not a thrown in, add-on. Essentially, it really is like the circulatory system of your body; feeding and nourishing all of the various organs that then have to work together to function together to keep you alive. And, they all affect each other, they’re dynamic and interacting. The thing is that almost all of the other cable companies that are out there, if you look at their promotional material they base their science on the stuff that came out of Bell labs, which is a telephone company. A telephone company is interested in passing low resolution signals over great distances. Nothing in our business has anything to do with that. We’re interested in passing very high resolution signals over very short distances. And, it’s a different world in that. So, I think our engineers know more about signal performance in short distances cable than anyone in the world. With that knowledge, even if everyone else knew what we knew and paid attention to those details they couldn’t do anything about it because they’re not the factory, they don’t make their own cables.

OC: But, there are a lot of companies out there, obviously not to the volumes that you guys are selling, but a lot of kind of homegrown cable companies where you know it’s one or two guys still making cables in their garage.

DB: No, they’re not making cables. They are buying bulk generic cable and just putting their name on it.

OC: So, you said they brought on Don basically to build the exposure basically to grow the US market as big as Canada. Is that right?

JN: Mmhmm. They basically have has annual increases, substantial double digit increases since that time. And, they’ve also have gone into the digital area.

DB: So, the homegrown companies that you’re referring to, literally you can become one. You can go online with a credit card and in two weeks have samples of a wire, have a full line of products. You go on to the websites to these Chinese manufacturers and you pull from their generic cable and you pick a connector and they silkscreen your name on that connector and you’re business. And, that’s what most of these garage operations are. And, I don’t mean that, certainly that’s what the garage operations are, but most of the big brand names that you know of are that too, they’re just bigger. They don’t make cable. We buy copper. We buy raw dial electric. We assemble our products from scratch and engineer it differently. We’ll use different dial electric materials for slightly different results and different applications because at the end of the day, the cable’s job is to do nothing. Any affect that the cable has on a signal, beyond simple transmission of it, is bad. The cable’s job is just to get out of the way and the fact of the matter is, cables don’t like to get out of the way, they like to have an affect on the signal. They basically are filtered per foot; the longer the cable, the more that filter process is in place. So, it’s difficult o engineer and manufacture a cable that doesn’t have an affect on the signal and as a result all of the cable engineering, from people who actually do it, boils down to, “how do we do the least harm.” And anybody who tells you otherwise in cables I misleading you. You cannot improve a signal. You can only compromise just a little bit. In modern systems where frequently you’re going through five or six components before you get to the final display or loudspeaker or whatever in the system you’re talking about the depth of a thousand cuts because if each little transition takes its own little cut, has its own little compromise at the end of day, you leave a lot of the potential performance of each of those other components in the system, you leave them in the box. And, I don’t think customers want that. Our methodology is that the cable ought to be an early consideration, not a final one. That you ought to design in the signal delivery system as infrastructure within your system and then let it become the strong foundation on which all of the other system design rests because another thing that’s important is most of these are going into people’s system, a lot of them are going in the walls, they’re going from room to room with distributors audio and video and whole house control and such; what part of the system that goes in today is still there ten years from now? A home is a lengthy purchase. You’re going to buy that house and it’s going to stay with you for a long time. But, when you put that system in and you’re done with it tomorrow and turn it on for the first time and start digging it, ten years from now, what part of that system is still there? Only the wires and cables. It’s the part of the system that has the longest life within the system too. And yet, for most people it’s something they would rather down play its importance, its consideration in the budget process and do it last.

OC: Right. So how do you start to change that consumer mentality? What are some of your ideas or some of the things that you have implemented to try to change consumer’s thought process?

DB: The fact is that if someone is buying a home entertainment system good enough, isn’t. And, we’ve actually used that as an advertisement campaign- good enough, isn’t- because good enough represents mediocrity, it represents compromise. And, the musicians, the artists, the producers they’re out there trying to get the best sound, the best image, the best experience possible in a consumer’s home. And, if the components out there are filtering out that process, that’s not what the consumer wants. The fact of the matter is that cables do make the difference they make a huge difference. We have rewired the test labs at four different applications, and I mean completely, not just provided a cable or two, I mean gone in from the ac power chords to the wall to the final HDMI cable to the display or speaker cable to a loudspeaker, and everything in between has been either an Ultralink or an XLO product, our two companies that we manufacture and sell with a similar philosophy. And, the editors, the technical editors, the people who do these reviews have said, “this is staggering. We’re seeing differences that we didn’t’ know existed because now you’re not seeing something filtered by this series of hopefully complimentary filters of the cable system that they had in place, which was a mix and match hodgepodge of three or four or ten different manufacturer’s cables. Our product is a thoughtfully designed, well integrated signal delivery system where every cable application specific to the kind of signal it carries does the least amount of harm possible. And, that truly reveals the difference in components. It truly reveals the performance potential of each component within the system leaving none of it in the box. And, only if you do that does the cable system take on much importance, which is why it is an uphill battle because a lot of people they’ll swap out one brand, brand A for brand B, and they won’t see a lot of difference. Or, they’ll see a lot of difference. Well, in theory, if you’ve done you’re job right in the signal delivery system you shouldn’t be able to improve the performance by swapping out a single cable. If you do, you did it wrong in the first place. You had something in there that was a choke point that was limiting the performance of a system. We try to make absolutely certain that the choke points are not the infrastructure, they’re not the cables. So, that when you upgrade to an HDTV DVD player you’re going to see that benefit. It does make a difference. It’s all important. Good enough isn’t particularly with cables because it limits the enjoyment across the board.

OC: Something that we usually talk to manufacturers about is what sets them apart from their competitors. I think for you guys, it is that you truly manufacture your products in house.

DB: Well, and we know the variables. We know the science, we know the engineering and can do something about it. Without that one two punch, if we were just the smartest cable guys around but still bought it from the same factory as everybody else does, it just affects our marketing it doesn’t affect our product.

OC: I think most of all I really like your approach of this integrated system and not just a one off cable to connect one thing to another, but rather, really explaining to the consumer that it’s a system that’s made up of many parts and not just a single cable. But, if you had to say something that your customers would say that’s negative or needs to be improved, where would you say that would be?

DB: Well, we’re not widely distributed. The customer has to look a little bit to find our products. We’re not in every grocery store and gas station on the street like some brands are. We deal through independent specialists, custom installers and integrators and that’s it. We’re not available at a million online websites because we think that if somebody is going to make an informed and intelligent decision about buying a signal delivery system, they’re going to need a little help. And, we try to keep the specialists [and] our dealers involved in that process. So, what we’re fighting is wiring cable as a commodity so our distribution channels parallel that. We’re specialists. We’re different than the other guys. We have to sell to the people who can take our product to the market and represent those differences as well; demonstrate that difference, have a plasma display and show that when you change the AC cable from the black one that came in the box, to ours you get a much better picture. That’s something a lot of people have never experienced because they’re under the basic philosophy that a wire is a wire.

OC: So, I want to go back to something that you said about not selling your products online.

DB: We do sell online, but we’re not in every discount, online shop that’s out there. We’re not in all the eBay stores, we’re not everywhere because again, we’re specialists. The internet is a place that is better suited to some things than others. One thing that the internet is not particularly well suited for is for qualitative evaluations of audio and video products. It’s a place where you can source it but it’s not a place where you can experience it. It’s not a place where you’re going to get a lot of dynamic interactions on design. That requires dialogue and specialist input that’s why our marketing philosophy is tailored towards people who are able to provide that.

OC: Would there ever be an opportunity to provide that over the internet?

DB: You know, others have tried that model and I don’t know how successful they have been; none of them are still around that I know of. They’ve tried to take a brick and mortar application and take it to internet and get you a real sales person that has hands on experience with the gear; I don’t k now if anyone has had success with that. It’d be wonderful if it could happen, but it’s like when they show the HD display on TV they can’t do the split screen, so this is what a regular display is, and this what our brand new brand X ultra vision such and such does because I’m looking at it as a thirteen inch display in my motor home while I’m driving down the road. So, I don’t know. I love the internet, I patronize it as much as possible. We are out there, with specialists, with people who go the extra mile, with people who sell value not only price, who provide service not only price. And we pretty rigidly maintain that.

OC: In thinking about how you’re going to grow in the future. What are some of your thoughts on both the cable industry developing products as well as for Ultralink; how are you going to overcome that one disadvantage that you mentioned of not being as easy to find as some other companies?

DB: Well, of course we’re trying to evangelize this cable is commodity concept as being dead wrong. We’re trying to evangelize the cables, make a difference, and make a huge difference worthy of consideration early and often within the system design, and then worthy of a fairly significant budget contribution. All of our empirical evidence bears that out. All of our customer experience bears that out. Nobody has ever called us up and said, “’Ya know I put your cables in and I couldn’t [hear] a difference.” We offer a lifetime warranty [and] we do things differently that makes a difference to consumers. What we’re doing is we’re tailoring our corporate growth objective to reality. I don’t want to be a 100 billion dollar company three years from now. I can’t grow at that rate. I can’t continue to be where I am at that rate. I think self-knowledge is the best knowledge. We know what we are, we know what we do. We are not Belkin, we are not Monster cable, we are going after something different. We’re going after the specialists in the market who want the very best and who want to offer that to their customers and we want the customers who want the very best for their systems. And, not necessarily the most expensive because we offer very entry level cables [at inexpensive prices]; we have HDMI cables that start at twenty and twenty-five bucks. And they’re not stupidly priced to get into Ultralink or XLO. We also make some extremely expensive cables that many would say are stupidly priced. That’s the same argument that somebody says, “My Toyota, Selica, will get me to Austin, Texas, just as efficiently as your Ferrari will.” But, the ride is different. The experience is totally different. Diminishing returns certainly sets in with cables. You can move half way our line and get a fairly high percentage of what our most expensive products offer. But, if you want to get every bit of performance of the products that you have, you have to match the signal delivery system to those products. That’s why we offer a range of products in both Ultralink and XLO. Up to seven different series of products [offer] the same solution so that you can balance the cable. So that you can cable the system appropriately to the performance level and the investment level of the other components in the system. So that you are not under-cabling and therefore, causing the cable to be the chokepoint so you don’t enjoy the return on investment in the other components, but so that you’re not also spending a stupid amount of money on cable to hook up components that don’t have the resolution at all and that you’ll never ask it to perform to the level that cable can. So, it lets you seek a level of balance and frankly, our rule is thumb is that the wire cable system ought to be roughly equal in price as the starting point to the most expensive component in a system, in a balanced system. So, if you’ve got a $30,000 system and the most expensive component is a $5,000 display and you’re pretty serious about your video, you ought to be spending about five grand on the wire and cable to hook that system up.

OC: So, in thinking about the biggest innovation is going to be in the next two to five years in the industry, what do you see coming down the pipeline? What do you expect to see?

DB: The whole integration of audio, vide, control distribution audio and video data media center and computers, in the living room, that’s certainly the tipping point to change the industry. As far as, how that impacts us, we are going to have to continue to come up with more innovative design utilize the science we know to get longer throw distances and more reliable signal transmission, data speed, broader bandwidth, better shielding and use all of the variables that are our disposal to get that. Knowledge of the science makes that difference.

JN: Don, one of the other thins that’s happening in the business now too is the transition to digital solutions for video and for audio. Can you talk a little bit about this? How you would address that for Ultralink?

DB: We’ve addressed that primarily in the science and the design and the metallurgy and our HDMI cables and our digital cables. We will be introducing expedia HDMI overcat 5 solutions to make it easier to throw HDMI signals longer distances and pull lighter through the walls. We’re introducing active cable components in all of our HDMI cables that all length about six meters. And, and, and, and— we’re not raising prices. This is at the same price we sold that length of cable for six months ago. And, that cable performed at that length fine. We got word from the ATC that every HDMI cable that Ultralink/XLO has ever made passes today 1.3B certification.

JN: What’s this specification of 1.3 B that makes it so important?

DB: Well, basically you’re talking about bandwidth talking about the ability to pass high speed signals accurately at the length at which you make them. There’s people out there that are selling 50 and 75 foot HDMI cables that will work at 4ADI or 4ADB and may even work sometimes at 10ADI or 720B. Years ago when we first designed our HDMI cable, we knew that there were going to be advancing standards even though we didn’t know what they were exactly. Not only are our current products are compliant to the standard, but every product we ever made is compliant to the latest standards that was just published two weeks ago. We haven’t had to modify our products for the new standard because we took the path years ago when we designed our first HDMI cable. We knew that they were going to require greater signal strength, longer distances, greater bandwidth, better shielding [and] better conductor metallurgy; we built that into every product we’ve ever made.

JN: How can [customers] find an installer or a retailer in their area that can help them?

DB: They can contact us by email, through the website, tell us where they are and we will direct them to the nearest dealer or custom installer or online guy if they want to just upgrade a single cable— we can do that, and we’re happy to that’s why we exist. And, we’re doing our best everyday to get out there and make it easier for customers to have experience with our products [and] make an informed decision. We’re confident that when they have that experience, they’ll buy our products.