OBITUARY

Josef Riediger, the founder and owner of hi-fi distribution companies Kedcorp and Advance Audio, and of the retail store Audio Connection has died, aged 70.

Josef Riediger, the owner and founder of two of Australia’s best-known and most famous distributors of audio equipment, and founder and owner of one of Sydney’s top hi-fi retail stores, died on September 29, just six days short of his seventy-first birthday.

Born in Manholtz, Germany, Riediger’s family migrated to Australia in 1969 with so little money that they decided to walk from Mascot to Sydney rather than pay for a bus ticket… though it would have been eight tickets, as he arrived with his mother and six brothers.

Despite language barriers and cultural differences, Riediger landed a job with with Shell Oil, then based in the Sydney suburb of Silverwater, but accepted a position in the Northern Territory. It was there that Riediger found his passion for music and for the equipment that reproduced it.

After returning to Sydney with his first wife, Josephine, and their children Danny, Katie and Chris, Riediger started a business buying and selling hi-fi equipment, most of which he obtained second-hand or at auction. The business became so successful that the family home could no longer house his inventory of equipment, so he sub-let the top floor of a two-story building in Bankstown from a close friend, Rudy Hollander—who ran his own hi-fi and electronics business on the ground floor—and opened its door to the public. At Josephine’s suggestion, he called his new venture The Audio Connection.

“The Audio Connection was legendary among Sydney’s audio community, and not unlike an audio club,” recalls Edgar Kramer.

“On any given weekend, of which I attended many, the store would be teeming with social activity, music listening and audio camaraderie. There you could sample some of the best high-end audio brands and share and discover musical gems. You were also embraced by Josef, who often generously treated large groups of audio guys and gals to dinner at his favourite Chinese restaurant in Bankstown.”

Riediger’s musical tastes were eclectic, to say the least. By way of example, in an interview for this magazine more than two decades ago, his three desert island disc choices were the soundtrack California Dreaming, Ry Cooder’s Jazz and Le Cid, by Jules Massenet.

Thanks to Josef’s business acumen, his prodigious memory and his encyclopaedic knowledge of music and audio equipment, The Audio Connection became so wellknown that famous audio manufacturers started calling him to ask if he would represent their brands in Australia. Keen to expand his business, but at the same time recognising the commercial imperative to keep retail and distribution businesses at arm’s length, Riediger and his new partner, Maggie Leow, created two new corporate entities: Kedcorp and Advance Audio Australia.

The concept was that Leow, herself an experienced businesswoman and a keen audiophile, would run Advance Audio and import ‘mainstream’ audio products, while Riediger would run Kedcorp and deal exclusively in high-end audio. The two then appointed the first of several managers to run retail operations at The Audio Connection (now re-badged as ‘Audio Connection’).

Once Kedcorp had been established Riediger started approaching high-end manufacturers whose products he admired, offering to distribute their components in Australia.

One of these was famous Danish manufacturer Gryphon. Like most people who encountered Riediger, Gryphon’s founder and owner, Flemming E. Rassmussen, was immediately captivated by Riediger’s chutzpah and the two became good friends. Other famous manufacturers in Riediger’s thrall included Audio Research, Avalon Acoustics, Burmester, Classe, Clearaudio, Jadis, Mark Levinson, Linn, Martin Logan, MBL, Metronome, Nagra, Pass Labs, Pathos, and Wilson Audio.

The rapidly-expanding brand portfolios at both Advance Audio and Kedcorp saw Riediger and Leow searching for larger premises, which they eventually found in the inner Sydney suburb of Leichhardt, a premises which remains the current location not only for these two companies, but also for Audio Connection. The two also added additional importing/distribution companies Dali Distribution (Australia) and HDMatrix to the family’s portfolio (Josef and Maggie were married in 2014).

Riediger was renowned within the audio industry for his prodigious work ethic, a famous example of which occurred in 2002 when Riediger had a heart attack and was rushed to hospital for a heart bypass operation. Just three days after surgery, and against medical advice, he checked himself out of hospital, jumped into a taxi and went straight to his office. “We weren’t really expecting Joe to recuperate at home,” said Philip Powell, who was Audio Connection’s marketing manager at that time, “but it was a bit of a shock to see him on the doorstep, stark naked except for slippers and a blue hospital gown!”

Riediger’s punishing work schedule was not slowed in the slightest by further heart attacks, transient ischaemic events and the onset of diabetes, but these various medical emergencies did, however, give him and Maggie cause to consider the future of their companies.

The result of their deliberations was that they promoted Maggie’s nephew, Nigel Ng, who’d started working part-time for them while he was a university student and, following his graduation, had worked full-time in multiple senior management roles across all of the family’s companies, to the position of General Manager of Kedcorp.

A minor fall in October saw Riediger booked in for a routine scan to check for fractures, but the CT instead revealed the presence of a particularly aggressive Stage IV cancer and a subsequent diagnosis of a life expectancy of just four weeks. It’s a measure of the man that despite this diagnosis and his increasing physical frailty, Riediger still insisted on working every day and on going into his office as often as he could, as well as taking the time to contact and personally farewell his many friends in the industry.