PS Audio Revises Marketing to a Direct Sales Only Model

Prices drop? Never. Profit up...maybe. Who will sell the product? TACT Audio died because of that strategy. Their room control system remains the most elaborate ever made but Boz (Radomir Bozevic) assumed that everyone was as bright as he was. His stuff was built to the highest standard and it was complex stuff that nobody had ever seen before. If he engaged a dealer network the price would have gone up at least 30% so high he felt it would never sell.
So he marketed direct. It worked for a while because his units were so special back then there was a huge buzz in the market. They were so special that most of the buyers had trouble using the units and Tact was swamped with phone calls. Trying to explain how DSPs work over the phone to someone who flunked out of math was not easy. There was a growing crowd of very unhappy campers and it spelled the end of TACT audio. If Boz had a trained dealer network that could have handled the customers locally things may have turned out different. A shame because their system remains the best If you know how to use it. 
Back to PS audio. There is absolutely nothing special about PS audio. There is nothing in their line up that remotely attracts my eye. How will people be driven to buy their stuff if they are not exposed to it somewhere. In my opinion Parasound makes better products and has a strong dealer network. Can PS audio compete with them marketing direct. I certainly would not bet on it.

My dealer just informed me that I have 2 weeks left for him to order new products from PSA. I’m a little bummed, since I was saving for a BHK250. However, I cannot pay the $7900 retail price. The dealer discount was significant. I’ll probably have to seek out a used one or just look elsewhere. I really love my BHK Pre amp. Oh well...at least I got an excellent preamp.

aberyclark, save money and be happy, very happy. Get a Parasound Halo A21+ designed by John Curl. It is faster, quieter and has a much higher damping factor than the BHK 250. 1100! 

I know that everybody says "Brick & Mortar Stores are Dead / Yesterday’s way of shopping"

However - when it comes to spending several thousand dollars (or, at least a grand and a half and UP), call me crazy, but I WANT to touch, feel, and in this case HEAR something BEFORE I buy it.

For a Boutique product like high(ish)-End Audio - (which caters to a small, select group of consumers): it would be difficult to operate "Factory Showrooms" where you can look and listen, but still have to order on-line, except for places where lots of people have lots of disposable income or a huge thruput of visitors. (LA Area, NYC, Vegas, Scottsdale, maybe Chicago...) This leaves most of us in fly-over-country with nearly no way to get our hands on something like this, other than buy it and return it if we don’t like it.

I only put so much faith in on-line reviews - experience tells me that they can be biased and/or altered.

For companies that choose to go "Direct-ONLY" = then, they should expect to have GENEROUS return / "home audition" policies.

If they reduce their MSRP on-line a bit because they do not need to leave as much room for dealer mark-up, then maybe it would be a GOOD thing. (But we’ll just have to wait-and-see, no?)

the next problem we encounter is that most dealers these days are merely a sales desk for a one off order, for an inquisitive customer.

things are so close and tight, that no one really stocks anything anymore.

Gone are the days when you could see the delivery truck showing up at the audio shop and watch 10-20-50 pieces from a given audio company be delivered to the shop and shuffled into the stock room of the shop.

Or where you walk into the shop and see the main listening area floor covered with stacks of new gear boxes, 10x of a given integrated amp, 6 boxes of a given tuner or CD player, 10x turntables, etc.

Changing times, tighter finances, internet markets, and so on, all killed it off. We saw the first signs of it when the market was still in good shape, with all the cross territory sales of one given sales location, until the companies involved shut that particular dealer down.

the buyers and the marketing/sales methods have put themselves in the drivers seat,and killed off the very product companies they wish to buy from. That aspect combined with the commercial/monetary/financial scenario we are now facing globally.

I’m just rambling, and this is not a perfect explanation by a long shot. But the real scenario heads off in similar directions to what I speak on. And we will all see it differently.

the point is, a distributor is supposed to stock large amounts of a product from a given company, and be the elastic delivery source point of singles or multiples of a given product, for a given dealer. that is what they are paid for.


Note that Daniel of Plurison and Audio Plus, probably the most successful large high end audio distribution company on the planet, just sold his company off to other interests.

The audio distribution model is dead. Internet killed the audio star.

Direct sales is all that remains, essentially, re potential for success and future existence. The other models are just hanging on, and have not yet got the memo....

One last point, the buyers are certainly not innocent in this demise of the model. Their position is essentially contradictory. They want the company to be around to give them what they want when they want .,.at the same time they want the product for as low a price as possible, and even free, if it can be arranged, or forced.

People would and do pay if they can and have the cash for it, but the economy is being tanked by gamesmanship at the federal financial level by inside players..and those players seem to be insistent on a slow choke-hold into a death spiral that moves slow enough that people don’t see it for what it is. the tick-tick-tick of slow elimination of the prior us middle class, as they used to be called, when they existed. Exhausted and used up via proxy war. Apparently... purposely so. A two-fer, by the hidden players, as that’s how they roll. (they don't want any veterans coming back, veterans talk too much..)

Now even the bigger players (in audio) are feeling the water rising to overcome them, re the distribution of the higher end components with better (more financially comfortable) markets..now signing that even it.... has exhausted itself.

Whatever the final end game is, whether it is a slow motion thing or a fast moment, it is getting close. Definitely closer than it is further.