Dealer Spotlight: Coup de Foudre Audio Video
Earlier this year I was in Montreal for the Salon Son & Image (SSI) show. While I was there I had the opportunity to meet with a few of high-end audio store owners and audiophiles not in the audio industry. One of the dealers I visited was Coup de Foudre Audio Video, just a few blocks from the hotel in which the SSI show was held.
The store has the usual show room floor and dedicated demonstration suites (three of the latter), but what makes Coup de Foudre possibly unique—and especially interesting to a gear head like me—is that the store is also home to a well-equipped multitrack recording studio owned by much-in-demand audio engineer (and Coup de Foudre co-owner) Graeme Humfrey! Packed with a large mixing console, 24-track 2” tape decks, and loads of ancillary processors, the studio was like an Aladdin’s cave for me.
Jennifer and Graeme are two of the most laid back and unassuming high-end store owners I can think of. There’s not a trace of the snobbery that in some stores can sometimes make potential clients of entry-level gear feel unworthy. (People who know me know that I appreciate a great deal of informality; these guys are right up my alley!) But don’t let their appearance and easy-going nature fool you: these guys are serious about providing the best high-end audio experience for their customers, and they know their stuff.
After listening to some music in one of their dedicated audio rooms and a tour of their impressive facility, I sat down for a chat with Coup de Foudre’s co-owner and store manager, Jennifer Cytrynbaum.
What’s your background? Tell us a bit about yourself.
My background is not actually from the world of music, although I am a musician and guitar player. I’m a self-taught, punk rock, power chord player, and I’m a fan of music and have been for ever. My industry history is not technical by any means or from the world of hi-fi at all. I started in this business back in 1995, working at the Audio Centre. I started there as a receptionist and at the time Graeme was the high-end manager. The Audio Centre on Sherbrook Street was one of the longest-standing, most respected shops in town, and at that time he had just received Wilson [Audio] and he had a high-end room of which he often kept the door locked. There was a volume of calls for the high-end department and I kept having to run from the reception to Graeme’s room to knock on the door and handle his clients while he was demoing. One night he was having a private event for Wilson speakers, and we were alone in the store. It was closing time, I was closing for cash, and he was preparing for this evening demo. There was a 300 pound pair of speakers that needed to be moved and he came out and said, “Would you help me move these speakers?”. He looked at me sort of sarcastically because I was a receptionist, and I helped him move these 300 pound pair of speakers without breaking a sweat. I think that was his “She’s not a wimp” moment, and was the first part of our relationship.
The second part of the relationship was him allowing me into the high-end room. He would say things like, “This room is not for little girls,” and would close the door in my face. But because I was handling all of his important clients, I stepped in to the role of the assistant to the high-end. When Audio Centre left Sherbrook Street and expanded into Cavendish, where they had a much larger floor space, I parlayed myself into the position of assistant to the high-end in the true sense of the word, where I was not only negotiating with Graeme’s clients, but I was also dealing with the high-end suppliers at that point, helping to bring gear in, and making sure that gear was sent in a timely fashion to his clients, and following up with birthday gifts and little stuffed teddy bears to keep them placated between waits for gear. So I’ve been a part of this business for a while.
Where did you get your love of hi-fi?
My brothers! When I was a kid, I had two older brothers who were really heavily into vinyl and they had hundreds of albums. I’m five or six years younger than them, so I would sneak in and listen to the 1960s and 1970s rock music. They had guitars, they were fanatic listeners, and they would test me on my knowledge of the albums. So they might show me an album cover and I needed to know who the artist was. They might play a piece of a song and insist that I know who the band was, and these would give me privileges, to be able to sit in the room and listen to them. I remember them locking themselves in the basement, listening to Steely Dan when that album came out, for about three weeks straight, analysing every section of the tunes. Tons of Jimmy Hendrix and The Doors, so in the 1970s, coming up in this I had an appreciation for not just the music of the time, but also the gear. I was not allowed to touch the arm on the turntable, so this is a bit of a vengeance here, where now I have my crazy sound systems where, if my brother comes in, I say to him, “You can’t touch that!”, the way he used to say to me when I was a kid, and now I have my own vinyl shop where I can pick the albums that are things I’ve been fond of my whole life, in 180 g or 200 g. Even now, with my love of punk rock, I think I’ve got a 200 g Ramones album, Buzzcocks, and it says right across the album somewhere in here in these racks, “Do not touch, do not open”. They’re my personal albums, so I guess I’ve always been a fan of the music and the gear.
Revenge is best served cold when it comes to brothers, right?
[Laughs] Yes it is!
So how did you start Coup de Foudre?
When Graeme left Audio Centre he went back to recording and I managed a music school for a couple of years. I was the headmistress of a private music school running 300 students, dozens of teachers. We were off in our own corners doing our own thing, and at some point we got a call from a shop in New York and Graeme was going to be picked out to work in a store in Manhattan. We began the process of negotiations for that, which fell apart at the eleventh hour due to an immigration issue. I’m an American citizen and I was in the deal. The two of us would go, he was going to work in Manhattan, we were looking for a place in Brooklyn, and the idea folded. When we left the Audio Centre business we sort of thought, “OK, we’ve kind of burned our interest in being a part of the commercial world of hi-fi,” which was becoming corrupt. There were a lot of big box stores, the politics weren’t great, and we had a real specialised interest in what we were doing. That high-end room and the high-end department was its own entity, and it didn’t really fit into the world of what was happening in the Montreal hi-fi scene. Things had become stagnant, we were frustrated...
When the deal fell through in New York, Graeme and I sort of looked at each other and said, “Well, why don’t we just do this for ourselves?”, and within 72 hours we put in a couple of phone calls to old associates in the US and in Canada, and the Vegas show [CES] was coming up. We decided maybe a week before that show that we were going to Vegas and that we were going to open up our own store. We had no appointments booked with any of our suppliers, we had no advance warning to anybody that we were going to be there, and through the chain of our network of connections, within about five days we were booked solid with all the top brands in the country. We were booked in to see Avalon, DeVore, and a bunch of other brands. We made a list of 20 of the brands we wanted to see, it’s still in a notebook that I have now, and we just walked through the show and checked every one of them off. We had a store in theory before we had a physical location, and our first hi-fi show. People were caught completely off guard that we were back in the business, so when we walked into Las Vegas, all heads turned. They said, “Holy shit, Graeme is back. Jennifer and Graeme as a team, Graeme being the musician, the talent, the engineer, the ears, the industry sales guy, paired with Jennifer’s business sense, this is gonna be a major wave in Montreal. Things are going to happen now that haven’t happened in the past.” So there was a lot of ripple effect in there. We did the hi-fi show here in town before having a store! We confirmed with our suppliers that we were going to do the first show without a showroom. Avalon Acoustics sent us a pair of Eidolon Diamonds in the dead of winter. It was just prior to spring, there was a snow storm, Graeme and I drove in our car to pick up the speakers at the airport, we brought them into the house to break them in and invited friends to come and listen. We broke them in in our living room. Nordost were sending us cables, there was all kinds of support prior to getting to the show, and the day of the show the room was empty except for the speakers and a few little things that we had, and all of our suppliers showed with gear. Within about two hours the room was stocked! I’ve got pictures of that first show, we had a banner in the window, we had no address, our logo wasn’t even complete, and all of our suppliers came and showed us massive support, everybody showed up.
Isn’t it amazing when people do that and help you out?
Oh yeah! It was absurd; in this building the second floor was our listening room while the construction was going on. We had clients come in, listen, and purchase loudspeakers from us before we ever had a showroom! So yeah, it was pretty good. Magic.
How important is it for you to have a great relationship with the manufacturers of the products you represent?
It’s absolutely imperative. In fact, it’s not just the relationships with the manufacturers, but the understanding of the entire production and distribution process, because if I’m here representing a product to my client who has a relationship with me, I need to be able to back it 100% with my own loyalty to the brand, and if there’s something wrong with the distribution chain where there is some corruption or there is some engineer that’s been fired from the production line or there is a change in the distribution process where my geography is not protected, or the product is some way in flux, then I can’t adequately represent the product to my client and so because Graeme knows the history of the industry so well and he’s been in it for so long, before we ever start a relationship with a manufacturer we are aware of the designers behind the product, who is shipping it, who else in North America has the product so that the brand has proper representation world wide, so that everyone stands in the same position when comes to the representation of the product because anything that someone else does with a product that I have on my floor ultimately effects how my clients feel about their purchase. In the high-end, it is absolutely necessary to understand who is behind the product that you’re representing and not just the distributors but the manufacturers themselves, and even the designers behind the product.
From a political standpoint, there are issues that we have personally about how manufacturers represent their product at a certain price. So, if a product is mass manufactured and the philosophy of the company is to make more profits than it is to make great music, then I am uninterested in participating in a business relationship with them. The priority has to be the music above all else, or the film in the case of a video product, and that no expense is spared in the design and construction of a high quality product that I can back. Even from the entry-level products that I carry that may have a retail value of $1,000, I need to know that I can call a telephone number and have a human being respond to my requests about a small home theatre amplifier because whoever is coming in to this store is spending their hard-earned money on my word that the product is worth something, so it needs to have either intrinsic value in terms of the construction of the item, component parts, or quality of construction or quality of design. If not, then I’m a liar, and my $1,000 product represents my $100,000 product. I cannot have those two items inside my store and not have a relationship between them either by quality or by philosophy. And so the smaller products still need to reflect that overall idea that the music comes first and that a small DAC inside of a small CD player needs to be a good DAC, and that the chassis cannot just contain a circuit board with a bunch of chips. It needs to contain component parts that have value, and have value over time so that when you leave here, the thing that you just bought maintains its value over time either by pleasure because you enjoy it so much over a period of years, or because in the marketplace it is respected as an item that contains some sort of quality of design or construction. That is hugely important to me.
Do you sell used gear in addition to new, and if so, roughly what percentage of your business comes from buyers of used gear?
In the hi-fi world that we’re in, a lot of people are in an evolution of systems, so even if you’re a college kid that’s buying your first system and you come in looking for a serious piece of hi-fi because you’re a fan, I know that in ten years that client will be developing into a home, into a wife, into a family, and if they remain in this geography and they are my client, I want to be able to cater to them through their whole musical evolution. They’ll go from a CD player or little music server to a basic turntable to a bigger turntable to a bigger pair of speakers to a... So a large portion of our business is in the trade in, trade up, used business. It’s important to us that clients feel that they can have a relationship with us that spans their whole desire in the world of music, and yeah, we do a lot of that.
I guess not many people come in and say “I’ve not got a system, here’s a $500,000 cheque”. They usually tend to work their way up the audio ladder as they become more interested.
Yeah, I would say about 30%. Oftentimes people will be ten years into their old system, and the value of it after ten years, while sentimental, is not necessarily marketable. So they have that great amp that they’ve loved for ever but I can’t take it back on trade-in towards something new, or they’re just ready to pass it along to their son, or it’s going into the basement or into the country house, or somewhere else, and they want a brand new system from scratch that’s based on something different to what they’ve been doing in the past.
How has the global economic slowdown affected your business? Are more people buying used gear than before?
Noooo. I think that the people that have... Look, Montreal is niche market, and the products that we sell are considered luxury goods, despite the fact that we have some items that are entry level and in a restricted budget range. In the last 18 months, I’ve noticed that the people who have been spending on systems under the $5,000 mark have stopped spending on those systems, and the people that are in that protected range, those that have disposable income and that have always had disposable income continue to spend in the $10,000 and above category. So although it has slowed down considerably, like most people between 20% and 30%, we’re seeing an increase in those clients in upwards of $10,000 range, and they’re still buying big turntables, big amplifiers. They’re investing in quality pieces that they know will last them a lifetime.
What are the benefits of buying from Coup de Foudre?
Having a team as dedicated as we do here in this store, with the type of history that we have both from a sound engineering standpoint with the studio, with the musicians, with qualified consultants that we have here, that would probably be the largest benefit. It’s having a relationship with people you trust, understand what it is that we do, and help to satisfy your desires. That’s our single most important goal. Aside from the fact that we have the world’s finest brands, we are probably one of the top five in North America that’s able to offer Wilson Audio, Avalon Acoustics, Shindo and Spectral and VTL in the same store, and have qualified the people to be able to help you experience that precious music or film I think is probably the greatest benefit that we have, and we show it to everybody. If you’re coming in to buy a $300 system, we’ll still play you a $300,000 system to say, “This is why we do this. This is the ultimate experience of being there for the moment of the creation of this sound experience, of transporting you to that day when Miles Davis and his band recorded that sound you get shivers as if you’re in the best seat on the house.”
So what are some of the brands that you represent?
In the entry-level we do Cambridge, Arcam, JM Labs (the Focal series). Moving up from there we have VTL, Audio Physics, DeVore, Leben, Shindo, Clearaudio, Benz, Brinkmann in turntables. We do Wilson and Avalon in the high-end loudspeakers, Transparent cables, Cardas cables, Audiotorium 23 cables to go with the Shindo stuff. We are fans of the Nordost power cables, we do MIT to go with the Spectral. Actually, Spectral is our most recent addition, and in Canada we are the only Spectral dealer, and according to Rick Fryer, who is an extremely devoted engineer, we will be the only ones in Canada. It’s been years since he’s been in this marketplace, and certainly one of the most exclusive brands on the planet. Because he is an engineer and lover of music more than anything else, he gets to pick and choose where he puts his product, and how many pieces he builds in any given year, and so we are immensely flattered to be able to offer them.
How would you describe your average customer, and roughly what proportion of your customers are new (as opposed to repeat) business?
I would say that it’s about 50/50. The returning clients are serious buyers. They are in a portion of our business which is the stabilising factor and continuing growth for them, to satisfy their needs, and the new client coming in is someone who’s heard from someone else that we are serious at what we do and that we can be counted on to take care of their needs, including a pipeline that is from designers and architects, and general contractors who work closely in people’s homes and when people are trusting you in their home to develop a sound experience for their living you need to have a certain amount of confidence. So it’s important that word of mouth referrals and the associates—other people in industries that deal in people’s homes—are able to say with some confidence, “Coup de Foudre will be able to help you realise your dream, your project.” Even in a small sense, like speakers mounted in your kitchen ceiling, so that when you’re preparing your dinner you can enjoy your music. That’s wonderful for us.
Roughly what proportion of your clients have analogue sources, and how has that trend changed over the past few years?
We have a serious split in our clientele right now. I would say that a good 30% of our clients are listening to analogue sources, and the other portion who are moving away from CD and the whole frustrating experience of that medium are now moving towards media servers. Computers with mass storage, external drives, silent chassis, networking systems, wifi, transportable systems that make it easy for them to listen to a volume of music at an instant touch. So it’s a split, but I think that oftentimes you’ll have both in the same listening experience. You’ll have the people that understand that they want their volume of music with it be in FLAC, AAC, or MP3, or whatever compressed format it is to be stored on hard drive to be able to access it anywhere, anytime, is wonderful. But to have a serious listening experience you need to have your turntable. So while they’re cooking their dinner they’ll be listening to a playlist, and when they sit down with their cognac at the end of the meal, they want to hear their turntable. They want to sit down and drop the stylus and listen to an entire side of an album, rather than the schizophrenic experience of “next track, next track, next track”, and they can truly relax at that point, and really listen to the music. That’s another experience altogether, and usually we recommend the two in conjunction. We will say to people, “If you have your albums, hang on to them. Don’t sell that collection that belongs to your brother, cousin, uncle, grandmother. Keep those albums because there will be a time when you are ready to sit down and listen to and appreciate music in this way, and when you are, we’ll be here to help you with the first used turntable at $600 where you can listen to those scratchy 1980s albums that you’ve managed to hold on to, and build yourself up to the point where every garage sale you pass you’re pulling over to the side of the road to pick up that new piece of vinyl or hunting through the ’Net for that 180 g pressing, Japanese pressing David Bowie, whatever it is you want to sit down and listen to, because there is no way to compare those two experiences”.
We’ve listened to the top CD player, next to a similar price point turntable, and because of the way sound is, which is an organic wave form, your brain automatically responds to the naturalness, the micro frequencies and harmonics that exist in an analogue source, that impact emotionally and psychologically in a completely different way. There is no disputing that fact, so even the best digital sources—and we’re listening to EMM Labs, you know, Ed Meitner’s XDS1, one of the top CD players on the planet at this moment—and it still cannot reproduce that thing which is an analogue sound wave, which your body feels, which your emotions respond to in ways that are so subtle that it slays the digital domain. Unfortunately, it is what it is, and even in our studio, where we have a very sophisticated digital suite for mixing tunes, we take the digital, transfer it to tape in order to accomplish the type of dimension and weight and interest in the sound before we put it back into digital to send it off to the mastering suite. And it is a massive difference, right from the types of transformers that are used in the analogue outboard part of the musical process, anybody who knows anything about music in general or the production of sound knows that you cannot accomplish in zeros and ones, or squared off digital music, what a sound wave does. It’s just physically impossible.
Very eloquently put! I think for our readers, you’re preaching to the choir, but it needs to be said. You host several after-hours events every year. What impact do they have on your business, especially from new customers?
Oh man, we do all kinds of things! I’ve even shown wedding photographs in our theatre, at a private party of 20 people after a wedding party because they wanted to see them on a projector. I host studios that want to listen to their master tapes for the first time and need a high-res system to detect defects in their master recordings. I host movie parties; on Halloween I have friends in here for a Scary Movie marathon, and we have popcorn and my socks are tucked into the chair at the end of the night. We host events with manufactures, parties of every type: video launches, album launches, and so on. How these things affect my client base in general: having the kind of space that I can receive people in great numbers and offer a venue of this type is great. Not all stores have this, but the grassroots, hands on, face to face, casual, social contact with clients—even if it is around a tube amp, or around a musical event—is vastly important to the type of confidence and comfort that I feel in my marketplace. People come to us to hear the latest, newest, most interesting. They share their experiences with us, and that affects a lot of things. As far as am I concerned, that’s the finest way to market in your neighbourhood.
How do you decide whether to take on a new line?
We listen, above all else. People send us stuff all the time, they want to be in the store and there are good brands out there that are recognised, that are a license to print money, and we have refused some of those because they just don’t sound or look right. Aside from the listening process, by group agreement, we all listed, we all share our opinions about the system. It’s not a hierarchy here where if Graeme says “It’s good” we all say “Yes, Graeme, it’s good”. If someone in the team says it’s not good and here’s why, we have an open discussion and we listen to other people’s opinions about what we should be listening to on the team. But basically, if it doesn’t sound right, we can’t have it. If it doesn’t look right we can’t sell it because we cannot lie. We’re sort of built that way, and honesty is a good strength but may be shooting us in the foot from a business perspective.
What’s the best demo session you can remember? And the worst?
There’s no specific individual demo that I can cite, but some of my favourite demos usually involve someone who is discovering sound for the first time where after 30 minutes of an explanation of what 5.1 is, or what two channel stereo really is all about, when I start up the system, whatever the system is, and the speakers begin to image and they say, “It’s sounds like the singer is right there”, and they point between the speakers, and they’ll say things like, “Is it just that pair playing in the room?”, it gives me a true sense of joy that what I am doing is somehow correct. Or the ability for a good film demo to completely evaporate the separation between the viewer and the picture and sound in front of them, and their defences are down and they’re invited into that experience, it is grand: one of the grandest experiences.
Shitty demos for me are usually based on a technical failure, something that is missing, a cable that isn’t there, a power cord that isn’t right. One component, and because we are so exacting in the way we set up a demo, when we’re scrambling to put together a demo and the rooms are full and there’re people trying to get in to listen and you can’t find that interconnect that you know you have to have in this system in order to make it sound how you want. Because we don’t set up crappy demos with crappy anything, my heart starts to pump and I feel like I’m going to fail, like I will not be able to present the thing the way it should be presented and the panic sets in. The gear is always good, I know I can execute a good sound, but if there is even a minor missing detail in the set up of a system before I play it for a client, it’s disturbing to me. Or we’re looking for a piece of demo material in our thousands of discs, and I know this client really loves this one artist and flipping though drawers looking for that piece so I can give them what it is they want hear, and I can’t find it, those are the things that stop me from being able to execute. But in terms of us properly demoing a system, we usually nail it. The gear speaks for itself, we just need to be there to plug it in.
As a specialist audio dealer, you presumably have access to pretty much whatever gear you want. What’s currently in your home system?
[Laughs] That’s good! I’m not sure I should be mentioning all these brands, but I have a pair of ProAc Tablettes on a Maestro tube amp in the kitchen. I have DeVore Gibbon 8s in my living room with my Unison S2 tube amplifier. I have a custom Clearaudio turntable that was designed by Danny Lebreck here with a bamboo platter that was built from scratch for me with individual component parts of my choosing. And I have Era Sat 3 with a Sub 8 along with an Arcam Solo 2.1 theatre system with a Runco plasma television in my third room. I have a smaller Runco LCD as well, Tivoli radios, Canto, lots of little things, I have Shure extreme high-end headphones, I have a pair of Grado GS-1000s, I mean I have tons of gear and often times I’ll switch stuff out, “OK I’m going to listen to this now, or I’m going to listen to that now”, but basically I’m tube analogue. Sometimes I’ll plug in my iPod, sometimes I’ll listen to digital files... That’s pretty much it.
Presumably you’ve become friends with many of your clients over the years?
[Laughs] You know what, as a retailer, I don’t really have time to maintain relationships that could be considered friendships in the true sense of the word. Friends spend time hanging out and doing things, but I suppose that my greatest friends are within this business because it’s where I spend most of my time.
What’s next for Coup de Foudre?
I guess in the month of July we’ll be having another event in the store around the jazz festival, so at that time I’ll be bringing in new Avalon speakers and doing the official launch of Spectral within Canada. That will be an event that I look forward to. Graeme’s working on a bunch of mixing for some very great local Quebec producers, so there will be more work coming out of the studio, and I would like to evolve that part of our business into the world wide web and be able to offer high resolution recordings for purchase so that people can hear what we’re doing in here, so I guess more of the same. More of the same!
Contact Information
Coup de Foudre Audio Video
1110 Bleury Road
Montreal
QC H2Z 1N4
(514) 788-5066
www.cdfaudio.com