HiFi store owner appreciates TestHiFi – now customers will better understand HiFi

Vienna, on a sunny afternoon in June, we entered the store “Raum-Akustik” of Georg Wölfl in the 8th district. In the first second you recognize, this store is unique. Georg opened it in 1977 and you get the feeling of all that history. For sure not by the interior, it is quite modern, but rather because of the incredible variety of products. Here you find the real, true HiFi experts. Being independent from any brand or big electronic companies, Georg and his team consult their customers only based on their experience and honest opinion.

We kindly asked Georg, if we could test some of his equipment, as we wanted to perform some final testing for our new TestHiFi – test algorithms.

The typical smiling you get

And there it was, this typical smiling that you get from any expert when explaining that you have a system to test sound, respectively HiFi capability.

However, since Georg and David have been friends over decades, Georg led us to his show room and allowed us to test some of his systems. He kindly connected diverse loudspeakers to a class-d amplifier, all of which were of a high standard, while listening and watching what we are going to do. We tested the measurement algorithms even before we completed the app development. Therefore we connected my Macbook to the amplifier via cable. After leveling we immediately tested and got our first result, it was green. Ok, this was not a big surprise, considering the equipment of this high standard. After testing several of “Raum-Akustik’s” equipment, David and I were really happy to see the TestHiFi algorithms functioning in real life.

Georg, after watching our tests and understanding there is something real going on, asked: “So, are all of my systems green?” “Yes”, we explained. “TestHiFi aims to differ the bad sound from the good sound in three grades: red, amber and green. All the equipment you allowed us to test, was of course high-end material and as such HiFi, i.e. green.”

Let’s test some not high-end equipment

“Ah, ok, I can do different as well!” Georg said, providing us with a Bluetooth speaker. We immediately tested and it was amber. Another one, expected to be a better Bluetooth speaker, was put to test. Even before we looked at the rating and even before the test was completed, David mentioned that he heard lots of distortions. And the test result was red. We all thought “Hang on, this one should clearly be better than the one before.”. It turned out that the battery was nearly empty and in this low power condition, the Bluetooth speaker had lots of harmonic distortions. We could even hear them while testing.

Now customers will understand better what HiFi means

Now Georg was impressed. For 40 years customers have been coming into his store and he has never had something to demonstrate, why to value and buy a rather good audio system over a simple “Bluetooth speaker” (with this we mean smaller, flexible, super digitized, newly designed, single-body systems). Although those “Bluetooth speakers” play music and are loud enough. Now, with TestHiFi he can test and compare the systems and share the more detailed results with the customers. This helps the customers to understand, why they will enjoy the higher graded system more and longer. Especially as the customers could not easily identify such differences in a typical, short and busy situation at a store, so far.

40 years after the opening of his store, Georg is now looking forward to this new opportunity and is convinced, that more customers will better understand, why he recommends a higher graded system to them.

Thank you, Georg, we appreciate your support during our testing and development of TestHiFi.

Please visit Raum Akustik at www.raum-akustik.at.