The stock and the brands we support

Part 5

I’d like to start by thanking you if you’re still reading this. It’s much appreciated, especially as the story has taken a little longer to tell than I thought.

You could say the last few years of Moorgate’s time on Fitzwilliam Street was blighted and looking back on it now the blight was purely the substance abuse clinic. The move (forced on us) by the impending demolition of the store was really an extremely good kick up the backside and to be honest it was needed.

An exception to this was the addition of Doug McCarthey to our staff. Doug was a customer but when David Gillot left to pursue pastures new, Doug came to the interview and never really left. Well not until donkeys years later anyway.

Self doubt

Almost all of us fear change and change that is unknown is the worst kind. There were a million things that flashed through my mind when I contemplated moving our store (and “home” for 34 years of my working life) and most of them filled me with sadness and horror. I felt as if an era was coming to an end and I had no idea if we’d survive it. I did not know if the company would survive it. Looking back I realise that my concerns were foundless but these are the things that run through your mind in the early hours when you wake up and can’t go back to sleep.

None of us are immune to doubt, nor envisaging things going wrong. We’ve often found when times are hard then something else happens which makes them harder. Businesses either adapt to these changes or they die. But the adapting has to be in the right direction and a wrong move can be terminal. I don’t mean to bleat but people usually say to me that running a business must be marvellous and that I am lucky. I tell them that the harder I work the luckier I get and often that is lost on them.

Everything I have done (and continue to do) has been for this business. For my dad and for the staff and for the customers who have rewarded us with their loyalty. I’m not entirely selfless because I am doing something that (at its core) I love and it pays my mortgage. But loving something can make the hardest work seem joyous. And I really do love 90% of the job.

All the things I loved about the job I do still love. But there is a minefield of red tape, restrictions, complications, legislation, paperwork, attestation and other general mind-fuckery that makes any business venture at least part nightmare. This “other stuff” gives me hours and hours of nightmares and I can assure you that this side of things is increasing as our governments believe that they should interfere more and more in our businesses and our lives. And it gets in the way of all the things you want to do with your time and stops you interfacing with your customers.

But I digress…

We had to move and we were given a year to do so. This was very generous of our landlord. He also offered us some “key money” to smooth the transfer to a new store. We knew we wanted to be out of town because of our fears of the introduction of traffic limitation (ULEZ). So it made sense to look out of town and that’s where we started.

I looked at units on industrial estates in areas served well by roads. Most of these were ideal but when I went to view them (and speak to the local businesses) I found that the police response time was poor. In fact we heard from people who said the police may not respond at all. This convinced me that it could be expensive in more ways than one.

Eventually my dad suggested that he’d seen a vacant store on Woodseats. Woodseats is an area of Sheffield with its own vibrant shopping area. It is also situated on one of the busiests roads in and out of the city and not too far from Chesterfield and the M1. I arranged to have a viewing and was extremely taken by almost all aspects of the store and its location. I got a second and a third opinion and apart from a few changes that we would need to make internally, there were no negatives and a shedload of positives. And first amongst those was our own car parking.

Initially we looked at renting half of the property. This idea was dropped as soon as we met the individual who would possibly be renting the upstairs. He was very concerned about us playing music. So we negotiated with the landlord to take the entire building and it turns out that this was a good decision for many reasons, as well as not battling with someone who didn’t particularly like music.

For three months we worked on Chesterfield Road whilst our Fitzwilliam Street store kept things ticking over and kept looking after customers. This was mostly myself because I couldn’t spare anyone else. I did get some builders to move some walls around and then a company to improve the security and install shutters along the outside of the building. I also decorated it myself in an attempt to keep costs down. Dad helped and a few good friends tipped a hand when my need was great (as good friends do).

The store had been a photography studio previously and we actually built our main demo room in the area where the pictures were taken. So a studio became a listening room. This is NOT an acoustic room or a specially treated room. In fact it has mechano walls filled with rockwool and not a solid wall out of four. So when it was decorated and carpeted we had to hang curtains and a drape to tempt good sound out of it. But we’d grown used to doing this in lots of demo rooms down the years and also at customers' houses too.

We don’t hold with tricks and room treatments. Not because we don’t think they can work but because we feel our demo rooms need to be good enough for you to hear the difference between equipment and no better. Any more than that and we’ll get a better sound than you might at home and that can lead to disappointment. In our history we’ve found very few rooms in which we’ve not easily been able to make good sound. When that has occurred it has mostly been down to extreme minimalism (all glass and tiles/hardwood floor) or ceiling beams which can divide the room acoustically. Both these issues can be fixed fairly simply.

So the two demo rooms at Woodseats were one large and one small and both of them enabled us to demonstrate two pieces of equipment or two pairs of speakers and for the difference to be fairly clear. That is all we require of them other than being places where you can relax and enjoy listening.

As the Woodseats shop took shape I relaxed a little because this was the first time where I’d had a clear vision of what I wanted the store to look like. I wanted it to be light and airy and I wanted it to be a cross between an art gallery and an open plan loft. It was a male dominated space because we know our customer. We have some great female customers of course but they’re sadly in the minority. In short, I wanted a store for somebody like me.

We’ve spent too much time and energy wondering why everyone isn’t interested in music and hearing it reproduced well at home. Nothing ever worked. New customers are wonderful but old customers are the ones that tell new customers to come and see us. So we look after our customers as best we can and let everything else flow from this. These days we spend almost zero money on advertising and we’re not suffering as a result. Hi-Fi magazines sell so few copies that they’re more or less pointless as an advertising tool. Spending money in other ways has never worked. It took a lot of time and effort to learn this hard fact.

We’ve done promotions with car dealers and it has been worse than a waste of money. In fact it is a thinly veiled attempt to access our customer database and that’s not something we will ever share. In fact we don’t have a customer database as such. We used to and it became so complex and time consuming that we threw the towel in. Linn encouraged us to work with Jaguar in one of their showrooms. I can tell you a story about that but it lasted a week before we took it all out. Utter waste of time.

At Woodseats we had the opportunity to make the shop exactly how we wanted it and fill it with the brands we wanted to stock. We knew it would take time but I think I realised that the new store would be make or break time for us. The past few years had been so demoralising that this felt like the last fight to do something better and something new and get away from all the deadbeats on Fitzwilliam Street.

Eventually the store was complete. Or it was complete as I was realistically going to get it. We bought some furniture from Ikea and a load of new display racks that were (I thought) better than the heavy duty ones that my dad had designed for the old store. Those were heavy, hard to move and not suited to the new space where all the racking would be located on all the side walls. A charity offer to collect them and pay us. They collected them but never paid us.

We gave our customers notice and moved everything out of Fitzwilliam Street over three days and with the help of some very good friends and customers. They know who they are and I’ll be forever grateful to them. At that time I would have said it was the most exhausting time of my life but as ever life was about to teach me another lesson and I’ll come to that soon.

If you build it they will come!

We opened in February 2016 and we were delighted (and unbelievably) relieved that customers immediately came to see us. And what was even better is that they liked the store. Forty two years of experience doesn’t tell you that customers will come. It doesn’t calm the nerves and the sleepless nights that are born out of the insecurities we all have. Some of them hide them better than others I guess. I am pretty good at toughing it out but these things don’t come particularly easily. I’ve done training on speaking and presentation and all manner of skills which are mostly expensive common sense. Let me assure you that they might help but they don’t ease the anxiety. At best you get all your butterflies flying in the same direction.

We opened and they came and we were all happy and relieved as I can possibly tell you. Me in particular. Dad had retired at this stage but his hand was still guiding mine and he helped when he could but felt that streaming was the Devils work and felt out of his depth with it.

Mum continued in her role as company secretary and Paul Cooper and Doug McCarthey stayed on in sales. The commute was a lot less, the parking was fantastic and all of a sudden we weren’t having to be on guard against the saddest and most unpredictable members of society.

I’ve included more pictures because we took a lot more at this time. Thanks to Dave Brearley for sharing his pictures with me as well.

Business on Woodseats started well and remained well. We discovered a lot of customers who didn’t like driving into town and who didn’t like parking outside the substance abuse clinic. But Woodseats was different and closer to where they lived. We also started to see a lot more people from Derbyshire further south. Mainly because we were closer to the M1 and we were not located in the city centre.

We opened up with more or less the brands we have now but with a few subtle changes and a few losses and additions. Our range is a work in progress and will remain so whilst we remain in business because it underscores everything that we do.

Life was better. The commute was shorter. We didn’t have deadbeats watching us like silent, twitching sentinels. Idiots didn’t say “we know where you park your car”. And customers came.

Part 6 soon.

From enthusiasm and a love of music

Some customers from our Facebook group have enquired about our origins and it has recently been a time of reflection for me so I started to give thought and write some of it down. I hope it is interesting to you but of course if not....scroll on!

Moorgate Acoustics was started by Keith Hobson in 1981. My dad was an engineer by trade and his passion was music. He discovered that a decent system allowed him greater enjoyment of music.

Keith was an engineer by trade. But after twenty or so years grafting he wanted to try and do something that involved his passion. He answered an advert for a salesperson to sell 8-Track cassette players placed by a company called Diesel Electric in Sheffield.  He got the job and spent a few years on the road selling 8-Tracks. Diesel Electric then offered him the opportunity to manage a new hi-fi store they were opening on Barclay Precinct in Sheffield. Sound 70's was born.

Sound 70's was primarily a JVC centre but back then JVC was a very different beast to what it became. This was before stack and mini systems and home cinema and JVC had a good reputation for reasonably affordable hi-fi. Their JAS-11 integrated amplifier was the NAD 3020 of its time. They also made decent turntables and even some passable loudspeakers. 

Keith wanted to add products that could offer even better performance and took on loudspeaker brands Like Tangent, Tannoy, Allison and Acoustic Research. At this time Hi-Fi was a very high priority for most people and the High Street had Laskeys, which acted as a window to introduce people to better quality equipment. People out doing their weekly shop could see equipment which we would consider to be high fidelity. Brands like Mission, Quad and many others were "visible". Hi-fi is no longer visible on the High Street and has suffered as a result

There were some good years at Sound 70's but as time passed Diesel Electric decided to introduce in-car products. Keith felt this was a mistake and told them so. He felt he was somewhat at loggerheads with the owners as to how the business should be run and could not explore his ideas or add some of the better brands that he was interested in selling. As the 70's became the 80's, Diesel Electric wound the business up and made him redundant.

Keith thought long and hard about what he wanted to do and decided that he would do some research and look into opening his own Hi-Fi shop. This became a reality when Moorgate Acoustics opened its doors in 1981.

Moorgate opened in Rotherham at the foot of Ship Hill. He called it Moorgate Acoustics because it was close to Moorgate, the area where the solicitors offices were based. He would have preferred to open in Sheffield , however at the time suppliers were in the habit of only supplying one or two retailers in each city. Sheffield had four hi-fi shops and as a result Keith realised he would be unable to get the agencies he wanted for the products he hoped to sell and so Rotherham, a nearby satellite town was chosen.

Moorgate started with the better Japanese brands and a fairly wide range of loudspeakers, mostly from British manufacturers. Electronics from JVC, Sansui, Pioneer and Denon and loudspeakers from AR, Castle, Wharfedale, Mordaunt-Short and Celestion. There were some video recorders and some televisions too. The store also sold cassettes, cables of all kinds and styli. These items represented a huge part of the company's business.

Keith brought one member of staff with him from the Sound 70's days. His name was Robert Iwan.

The early 80's was the time of the comparator. This was a device that enabled a very wide range of equipment to be plugged in at once. Very quickly we could show people what a record player sounded like played through half a dozen amplifiers and through just as many speakers. This was before the time of single speaker demonstrations. Now we'd frown at the use of a comparator but back then it was considered the best way to choose a component.

Keith also found that many of the suppliers he particularly wanted to stock were unwilling to supply a new business. The business was untested and he wasn’t well known. This changed once the company had a few years trading under its belt. Business was steady and was growing in a sustainable and manageable manner. I should point out that my dad is a quiet man and not a typical salesman by any means. But his experiences as a customer, his time spent visiting other shops and hi-fi shows and the mistakes he'd seen made at Sound 70's gave him a lot of perspective and ideas. He was able to put these into practice and first amongst them was a customer-centric approach. He wanted customers to be happy with their purchase and he wanted them to come back when they were ready to purchase more equipment. He had been a hi-fi enthusiast first so he pinched the ideas of shops he liked and felt comfortable in and determined to do things differently than the shops he didn’t like.

A lot of hard work led to a bit of success and that drew the interest of the sort of brands that Keith wanted. Out went the video recorders and TV's and the small Bang & Olufsen range. Slowly the focus of the shop changed towards British and European products. Quad, Thorens, Logic, Roksan, Pink Triangle, Cambridge (before it became the Richer Sounds brand), Elite Townshend and others.

Moorgate was also invited to join Hi-Fi Markets. This was quite a big deal at the time because they handled a lot of brands including NAD and Dual. Around that time those two brands made up about 80% of decent starter audio systems. The Dual CS505, Nad 3020 amplifier and a pair of speakers was a fantastic introduction to high quality audio and on a relatively small budget. We used to be allocated 30 NAD 3020 amps a month and they'd tend to sell out around the middle of the third week of the month. That meant that likely 10 of the next delivery would be immediately sold.

I was just about entering the lower sixth form at school and my dad asked me to write to a number of brands who had remained elusive. I wrote to Linn, Rega, Naim Audio, Meridian, Nytech and Nakamichi. I think the only positive reply was Nakamichi at that point but we both hoped that in time this would change.

I also joined the company after the first year, working on Saturdays and sometimes filling in for staff holidays/illness. My job was to make tea, hoover and to run stock up and down the stairs as required. I had an extremely poor relationship with Robert and he would frequently box my ears or trip me up. We once had a scrap on the shop floor (fortunately there were no customers in the store at the time). We were at first worthy adversaries and ultimately good friends. He still calls in the store now and again. He introduced me to The Rolling Stones (I only knew the obvious hits) for which I will be forever grateful.

Moorgate becomes more established

At the foot of Ship Hill the market was starting to change. The first was the arrival of CDs. This was extremely significant for a number of reasons. The first was that it handed a lot of power and business back to the Japanese companies who were the first to adopt the technology and make affordable products. Prior to this the turntable was king as a source and almost all the best turntables were British, European or American. The Japanese had produced some decent models (Pioneer, Trio, Sansui etc) but most of these were thrashed to death by the Dual, which quickly became the only seriously affordable budget turntable to consider. CD shifted the balance back to the land of the rising sun.

The second thing of real note was the market impact of certain brands and some of their ideas about how their products should be sold. Linn, Rega and Naim Audio all promoted the philosophy of the importance of the front end, the importance of set up and the vital importance of good comparative demonstration. A kind of demonstration that was not served by a comparator but one that was only served by proper comparative demonstration in a demonstration room. Even though we were not selling these brands, they still had a real impact on the market. My dad was forward thinking and we wanted to ensure that Moorgate reflected changes that were taking place in the market.

Around this time (1986) we were approached by BADA, the British Audio Retailers Association. We were recommended to them by Doug Brady Hi-Fi in Warrington. Doug was something of a legend in specialist retail and must have had a good impression of us. In any event we talked with BADA, talked with some of their other retail members and decided that we really did want to up our game.

We were customer orientated and wanted to continue to provide an environment where people felt they could call in, have a coffee and catch up. We wanted to be welcoming and inclusive and were aware that many hi-fi shops were somewhat stuffy and exclusive.

We built our first demonstration room and even before it was opened to customers we could see a huge increase in performance from almost all products we listened to. This confirmed that we’d done the right thing. Most customers were on board with this the moment they sat down in a room that resembled their own.

Our budget systems really came alive and our better higher-end products started to really sound amazing. We also discovered and could understand that the comparator used to push the sales of products which made an "immediate impression" whereas the demonstration room would sell products which seduced rather than impressed. We saw that we had a very powerful demonstration tool that would help us sell and help our customers make better choices. We had far less returns too.

Statistically when a customer has a demonstration in a decent environment, they are far more likely to find a product they like and make a purchase. Our demo rooms were not designed to be "perfect" and we never utilised acousticians. As a matter of fact Keith thought that doing so would be dishonest. We've always maintained (and still do) that it isn't rocket science to get a good sound in the average room. And we've learned how to help if we don't get the result we expect. This is mostly experience and common sense.

The cost we invested in building that demo room was returned within months. Our customers were happier and differences between equipment were easier to hear. People would say they were surprised at how clear these differences were and pleased with themselves that their ears were good enough to show them what was best. It gave them confidence in their own ears. We’ve always championed that your ears are the only ones that matter. Be confident in your own abilities and hearing. Don't let anyone tell you they know better. Plenty will try and some manufacturers and retailers have made a career out of it.

The demo room became fundamental in helping us choose the brands we thought sounded best. Some still kept their distance because we were new and untested. Quad & Musical Fidelity were among the first (we were recommended by Doug Brady). Meridian and many others followed.

I'd like to return to CD for a moment. When we first started investigating CD players, none of us particularly liked them. We felt they didn't sound as good as a decent record player. They were "bright" and aggressive. Despite this they were massively popular; the format was sexy and high tech and the technology press went ape for it. People were seduced by the marketing and the promise of "perfect sound that will last forever". It really was an incredibly powerful marketing exercise that attracted the sort of people who didn't generally own  hi-fi and as such had little to compare it to. Few owned or had experienced a decent record player. Those that had were more skeptical and sometimes scathing.

In time, CDs came of age. Specialist companies used the Phillips players that were the best (at the time) to design and build their own players around. Cambridge, Mission and Meridian were probably the first but many more followed. They were modified Phillips machines but they showed that the technology could work. Even Linn, who placed adverts asking "Is this a lemon?" soon produced their own, so perhaps they answered their own question.

In any event it wasn’t too long before we could offer a CD player that was at least tolerable in audio terms. As a format it sold regardless of our dismay or delight in its performance. And for every great product there were plenty that were pretty average, good enough to satisfy folk who really weren't used to good quality sound. But it taught us again that our role was to be selective about what we stocked. Customers came to us for advice and we realised we would stand or fall by the caliber of that advice and the products we sold. So we wanted the best range rather than the biggest. Our range was good but it was a work in progress.

More to follow