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| The company |
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| "How the Market was won" |
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To get an overview of the dawning of the professional audio market and an insight into the boom in dance clubs experienced in Italy in the early seventies, we decided to interview the President of the Sound Corporation group, Gianni Toschi. His comments also illustrate how the company organization was created and became established over the years, as well as how its customer target evolved.
“I went from building guitar speakers from kits shipped to me from the United States, to making my own, first in the garage of my house and then in the proper workshop I set up, also in Reggio Emilia. I was beginning to make a name for myself in the business when a few daring individuals first decided to build very large night clubs to hold hundreds of people and had to think up everything from scratch. They had made huge investments and were loathe to run any risks on account of the quality of the music. I was given responsibility for the technical side of things: I had to make sure that sound delivery was good right across those purpose-built halls.
The very first night club to be opened outside the small circle of summer venues on the Adriatic Riviera and the Versilia seaside resorts was the Embassy in Reggio Emilia in 1968 with Daniele Piombi. It was a very fashionable night club hosting major international artists. Then the Jumbo (in Fidenza) and the Caravel (in Mantua) threw themselves into the fray on a much bigger scale in 1971 and 1972 respectively, with huge halls that, even back, then could hold as many as 1,500 people. By that stage the ice was broken and other entrepreneurs had begun to smell a business opportunity. After I had designed the sound reinforcement systems of those particular night clubs by assembling the component parts, I was asked to do all the others.
In the early seventies it was the turn of the Shilling in Modena, with live music, and then of the Snoopy, also in Modena. There then followed an unstoppable crescendo, always in the area straddling the two provinces that became the “cradle of the great disco music temples”, as they eventually came to be called. I can't fail to mention the Picchio Rosso in Formigine and the Mac2 which opened not very far from Modena in '75, followed by the Marabù in Reggio Emilia and the Kiwi, opened in Castelfranco Emilia in '76.
The professional audio market opened up in the eighties with the installation of the first large-scale, high-power and high-performance sound reinforcement systems, using the first modular amplifiers with interchangeable units.
Once we got to the nineties we started seeing digital equipment and smaller, high-performance loudspeakers. Since the turn of the century large discotheques have increasingly lost momentum as a result of natural changes in lifestyle and, recently, due to the economic situation which is imposing constraints on proprietors as well as patrons. Hence the demand for meeting places where the music is less deafening, the atmosphere is more relaxing and opening hours are less restrictive. Accordingly, the Peecker Sound target has shifted toward smaller, multi-purpose venues such as wine bars, music pubs, lounge clubs and singing cafés”.
Today the Peecker Sound figures are as follows:
• over 2,000 sound reinforcement installations worldwide;
• over 6,000 loudspeaker systems produced annually (figures for 2009);
• over 2,000 amplifiers/processors produced annually (figures for 2009);
• a 2,000 m2 production plant;
• a 160 m2 R&D laboratory with 5 researchers;
• 3 international patents;
• a defectiveness rate of speakers (number of defective items/total number of items produced) below 2%;
• a defectiveness rate of control electronics below 5%;
•customer support within 24 hours throughout Italy and within 72 hours in Europe;
• an annual Promotion & Marketing budget of 50,000 Euro. |
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