What is value?

One should ask this question, especially in these troubled times.

Value is certainly not just the lowest price. Marketing by the big chain stores has tried to make it that. A chair is just a chair, so get the lowest priced one you can get? There is a lot more to it than that. Many of our parents bought carefully. They searched for quality. A chair needed to be comfortable and remain comfortable, had to last, and had to be repairable. Some of us may still have some of this sturdy furniture.

The Sound Environment has this sense of value and we think this is the time to reaffirm what value really is. We reject the throw away economy.

Buy a DVD player for $99. Its performance won’t be very good. It won’t last very long and it won’t be repairable. Is that value? We don’t think so.

Some product may be held up as being a great value because it has lots of features or because it boasts the latest technology but if those features and technology are not well executed or are things that are hard to use or that you might never use then they are of little value.

We endeavor, in every product category to offer lasting value. For us, a certain minimum level of performance that is sustained, combined with usability, dependability, reparability and warranty are very important. Build quality and sustained performance are often ignored and are hard to assess. It is a criterion we use in selecting product. On very high performance product, such as Wilson and Boulder, we try to visit the factories. With these very expensive products part of what you pay for is that sustained performance, performance which will not deteriorate over time.

A retailer that will stand behind what they sell is increasingly critical as well. In our nearly 40 years of doing business we have always stood behind our clients and made things right for them.

We have, over the years become somewhat conservative when it comes to new technology, not leaping for the latest “breakthrough”. We investigate the companies we chose to represent as much as their individual products. You can have confidence that the products and systems we offer represent value in that critical sense. Based on this sensibility and research we confidently offer an NAD DVD player for $399 or an Esoteric for $9500, knowing that each in its own way represents value.

Rapidly advancing technology that is marketed before being fully developed is an increasing problem for our industry. That approach by some of the major manufacturers decreases the value of the problematic products they rush to market.