The LUXE Lounge

“You can’t fake goosebumps...”

Believing that demonstration is absolutely key to an understanding of what hi-fi and home cinema can bring to a home, WestCoast Hi-Fi Midland recently embarked on creating what they hoped would be the ultimate hi-fi lounge. As a first step, proprietor and self-confessed music lover Scott Stay ventured over East to catch up with a few colleagues to see how they were setting up their larger two-channel speaker rooms.

“Most of the guys I visited are stung by huge rents,” he told Sound+Image. “They have very limited space as well as multiple locations — not ideal for auditioning the large format speakers the high-end market is looking for. They make it work through great service and know-how, but they all agreed that one massive room would be very welcome. Luckily for us our Midland store had a very generous space available that could potentially become a haven for these larger audiophile systems. So the idea was to create a high-end hi-fi system at each end of the lounge, so customers can easily compare between hi-fi offerings in total privacy from the front of the store.” That was the idea: so where did he start? “The essential step was finding a really good sound engineer that spends his days in customers’ homes, perfecting acoustics,” says Scott.

Enter Andrew Poole, who has been the go-to audio and visual pro-calibrator in Western Australia for more than a decade. Scott started by sending Andrew his concept for the LUXE Lounge with the basic room dimensions — although well aware that Andrew’s calculations would most likely change these.

“Andrew put all of his years of knowledge and state-of-the-art software into ensuring that every customer can get to hear exactly what our highend speakers are actually capable of” says Scott. “And it worked. I have never had so many clients tell me they have goosebumps after auditioning a system. And you can’t fake goosebumps.”