CARLTON AUDIO VISUAL

Anyone living in Melbourne, even if they know absolutely nothing about hi-fi, will be familiar with Carlton Audio Visual… and there’s a very good reason why!

Anyone living in Melbourne, even if they know absolutely nothing at all about hi-fi, will be familiar with Carlton Audio Visual, if only because of the store’s iconic logo—the head of Michelangelo’s famous David, originally carved back in 1504 and appropriated for marketing purposes almost five hundred years later by the two founders and owners of Carlton Audio Visual, Rab Turner and Paul Eliopoulus.

‘We didn’t have much money to advertise that we were open for business,’ says Rab, ‘so we had to come up with an idea of generating maximum advertising impact in the smallest space at the lowest possible cost, so we came up with the idea of the head. It was an on-page attractant in our print advertising and it’s been so successful for us that we continue to use it on all our advertising, as well as on our website and on our face book page… and of course it’s also on the front of the building. Continuity and repetition are important parts of advertising.’

Indeed Carlton Audio Visual is such an iconic hi-fi store in Melbourne that it’s difficult to credit that it’s only been around since

1991, when Rab Turner and Paul Eliopoulos quit their day jobs to open a small store in a tiny building in Lygon Street that no-one else wanted. ‘No-one else may have wanted it, says Rab, ‘but it certainly had two things we wanted: It was close to the city and the rent was low, which meant we could put more of our money into stock.’ Look around Carlton Audio more than a quarter of a century later and it’s immediately obvious that the two are still putting more of their money into stock. Not only is every room absolutely jam-packed with equipment, it’s also equipment that most audio buffs would kill to own. At the time of my visit the usually-displayed pair of Monitor Audio Platinum PL500Mk2s weren’t there, having been sold on the previous weekend, but the PS Audio BHK Mono 300 power amplifiers used to drive them were still there.

‘We probably have too much money invested in stock, but we all have our passions,’ smiles Rab. ‘But in addition to having lots of stock, we have an extraordinary stock depth, because we’re not just a high-end store, we’re also a mid-fi store as well as an ‘affordable hi-fi’ store. Our philosophy is that if you’re in the business of running a hi-fi store properly, then your stock is your equity in the business. You have to put your money where your mouth is so that you’re always able to demonstrate the components your clients want to hear, whether that’s a four-hundred dollar turntable or a pair of Monitor Audio Platinums.’

If you’ve poked your head into Carlton Audio and walked out because you thought the store was confined to two small listening rooms, a small office and a service area, you need to know that Carlton Audio has expanded quite a bit since 1991, so not only are there are two additional listening rooms on the first floor, and even more listening rooms in two buildings located a couple of doors down Lygon Street but also, just around the corner, there’s yet another building that’s home to Carlton Audio Visual’s architectural audio install team. This building has a high-end home-theatre room kitted out with Sony’s top-line projectors (one of which was the only one in Australia at the time of writing) along with Krix’s topof-the-line home theatre system. ‘But wait!’ as the man in the Demtel TV ad used to say, ‘there’s more!’ Just across the road from the architectural division is another building with even more listening rooms packed with gear and, just around the block, Carlton Audio’s most recent acquisition, a beautiful old terrace house that’s home to a pair of mighty Sonus faber Aida 2s… as well as a glittering array of electronics to do them justice. Since it’s obviously impossible for two people to run an operation that’s spread over multiple floors, nearly half-a-dozen different buildings and is open seven days a week (from 10am to 6pm from Monday to Saturday, and from 1pm to 6pm on Sunday), Paul and Rab don’t work alone at Carlton Audio.

Also on the team are Rab’s wife Angela, and his daughter Reidun (pictured above with the store’s guard dog). Rab and Angela’s son, Magnus, also works part-time... though when he’s not working part-time at Carlton, he also works part-time at Quantum Audio in Tasmania. Paul’s son also works at Carlton, along with Martin Liedtke and Troy Merritt. Rounding out the team is Nick Familiari, son of famous hi-fi writer and reviewer Peter Familiari, proving that the passion for audio runs in the genes!

But despite his heart-on-shoulder passion for music and the equipment used to reproduce it, owning a hi-fi store was initially not part of Rab’s chosen career path.

That path was agriscience, where he started out as a Field Researcher at England’s University of Canterbury involved in sequencing the solanum tuberosum genome.

‘It’s not quite as exotic as it sounds,’ Rab laughs. ‘Basically, I was growing potatoes.’ After moving to Australia in 1983 for reasons which he says ‘seemed like a good idea at the time’, Rab started work for Melbourne University at its Mount Derrimut Field Research Facility where, in his words, he was: ‘growing more potatoes.’ But whilst at he was working at Mt Derrimut, Rab also started working part-time at Northern Electronics. Then came his epiphany. ‘One day I realised that it was the hi-fi business that I really enjoyed the most, and that was it,’ he says.

It only takes a quick look around Carlton Audio Visual to see that although Rab and Paul are obviously very happy to pour all their money into their stock, they’re a bit more miserly about pouring money into the store’s décor, which in less politically correct times I might have attributed to Rab’s Scottish heritage (Rab is the Scottish form of Rob). When I mentioned this to Rab he told me: ‘Paul and I have watched as some other hi-fi stores in the city invested in new shop fit-outs costing at least a half-a-million dollars and wondered to ourselves—“How do you get your money back?” He thinks it’s to fuel the way he says those stores sell. ‘The model in Australia is to take a brand…or a product… and sell the shite out of it,’ he says.

‘It’s the Trumpian fashion of purveyance, but allied to that product for better or for worse. It’s a simple selling solution, but customers aren’t simple—and they don’t want to be forced into accepting a simple solution.’

So who are Carlton Audio Visual’s customers? ‘Our raison d’être is to be as different as possible from other stores,’ says Rab. ‘For better or for worse we want to appeal to a different audience, but in the main we think we appeal to people for whom diversity itself appeals, so they can make their own decisions about what each piece of kit has to offer.’

This philosophy has meant that you won’t find some highly popular and highly bankable brands at Carlton Audio Visual, with Bose and Yamaha being two notable omissions. ‘If you’re going to be clear-cut about your identity, you have to be clear-cut,’ says Rab. ‘Some of our competitors have such an elemental hunger for a sale that if a customer asks for a brand they don’t have, they’ll buy one in from another store just to make the sale, whereas we carry what we carry and if someone wants something we don’t have, we’ll invite them to go elsewhere. I have friends in Melbourne who do sell Bose, for example, so I’d recommend they take their business to one of them.’ After having been told by Rab that he didn’t stock Yamaha, I was later surprised to find a pair of Yamaha NS5000s in one of his demonstration rooms. ‘Yamaha’s rep had been after me to stock Yamaha for years,’ says Rab, ‘so I told him that the Yamaha NS1000s were one of my favourite speakers, and if Yamaha started building them again, I’d stock them, so when they started building the NS5000s, which are an even-better speaker, I was given the Victorian exclusive for the model. It’s the only Yamaha product we sell.’

One constant at Carlton Audio Visual is that as well as offering the broadest range of brands possible (‘from Klipsch to Sonus faber’ quips Rab), it also doesn’t chop and change them without good reason. ‘Denon and Mission were our main brands when we started,’ he says, ‘and we still sell Denon, but after Mission (UK) was taken over by IAG (China) it wasn’t the same Mission as before so we decided that Monitor Audio speakers would be a good replacement, because they are great speakers and they offer global parity pricing. We’re currently the number one retailer of Monitor Audio in Australia… as we are also for Cyrus and Rega.’ Another constant is Rab and Paul’s philosophy that personal relationships are the most important part of any business, and that includes not only their customers, but also their suppliers. However, although they have established long-term relationships with all their suppliers they don’t let this influence what they stock in the store. ‘A specialist business should not simply purvey what they’re told to purvey,’ says Rab, ‘just as we’re not in the business of unambiguously promoting what we personally like. Customers have to make their own decisions and their purchasing cycles can be extreme. For example, whereas a typical Bose client may have made one store visit and a couple of phone calls to check prices and availability over a week or so, some of our clients take literally years to make a purchase, so we’ve always found that the best way to interact with clients is to treat them as individuals. And to that end we always attempt to accommodate any requests that are made in order to find the right product for them. It’s one of the reasons we stock such a wide variety of eclectic products—it gives us a palette of options from which to try and make a perfect match.’

Although Carlton Audio Visual encourages in-store auditions, like most hi-fi stores these days it has a website that enables online purchases. However, that website (www. carltonaudiovisual.com.au) is, according to one industry expert I interviewed, ‘the best audio retail website in Australia… fresh, dynamic, constantly updated and consistently quirky.’ In addition to the main website, Carlton Audio Visual runs another website called ‘Fanatic’s Choice’ (fanaticschoice. com.au) which explains how the store puts together its systems and features recent systems it has created for its customers, with full explanations of why particular components were selected for inclusion in those systems.

While he embraces the internet, Rab admits it does have its problems. ‘We recognise that some customers have no intention of buying from us,’ he says. ‘We have had situations where we’ve done an in-home demonstration only to have the customer use the internet to buy the product we demonstrated to them from overseas, rather than from us. Some people feel so entitled as consumers that there’s a disconnect between the trials and tribulations of purveyors, however most of our customers are kind to us, and we form a reciprocal relationship.’

If the sightless eyes of David are the face of Carlton Audio Visual, and its slogan—Fanatics Choice—is a fair description of the customers who shop there, it seems only fair to also describe all those who work at Carlton Audio Visual as themselves being fanatical about music, and Rab is only too happy to explain why. ‘Music is a vital part of our human condition,’ he says. ‘Without music there’s a good argument that the human race would not have acquired language, so if you don’t make time for music, you’ve lost something basic to your humanity. The more you watch TV, the less interesting it becomes, whereas the more you listen to music, the more interesting it becomes.’ But there’s even more to Rab’s philosophy about music. ‘People should not only listen to music,’ he says, ‘they should also make their own music … even if they do it badly.’