Interview: Glenn Rogers

Aside from anything else it was a chance to welcome them back under an audio umbrella - this time D&M Holdings - and debate the obvious synergies that could be foreseen under the new ownership, with a powerful quadrumvirate of Calrec, Denon, Marantz and Allen & Heath in the same fold.

But before the Allen & Heath team had touched back down at Gatwick a week later the announcement had been made that D&M Holdings Inc. and Bain Capital Partners LLC had entered into an agreement, under which the latter would tender an offer for all the D&M Holdings shares. D&M Holdings’ Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Eric C. Evans delivered the mantra that the deal represented “the best overall value for shareholders” and was “in the best interests of the company.” It had been just two months since the Allen & Heath acquisition.

And so began the latest chapter for a company which celebrates its 40th anniversary next year.

Spare a thought for Glenn Rogers - who has managed to steer the once rather staid Allen & Heath Brenell broadcast company (so named after it took over tape deck company Brenell Engineering at the height of the 8-track boom) into the vibrant, multi-market company of today, while spearheading a series of cleverly-timed VC investments and MBO’s. The last six months he says - while due diligence was taking place, the takeover was in process and ‘mum’ was the corporate watchword - were among the most wearying of his life.

But perhaps I’m sounding unnecessarily jaundiced as a result of my one and only experience of being agglomerated. After 35 years of sniffing printers ink and Cow Gum on galley proofs as a maverick publisher, I sold two titles into the corporate sector never to hear them being referred to as magazines ever again. Thereafter they were subjugated to mere ‘products’. The romance was over - we had been commoditized.

The same fate is unlikely to befall A&H although Glenn Rogers may understand that concept, since he too experienced a formative background in publishing - as 50% of the successful Electronics & Music Maker (E&MM) team during the early part of the 1980’s.

His writing career had run in parallel with his studies. Glenn Rogers graduated in Electronics at Bangor University electronics but was building his own equipment - amplifiers and DJ equipment - in the 1970’s, while still at school. He then served his apprenticeship at Marconi’s but after graduating he joined Allen & Heath in 1983.

It would have been a cultural shift from the days when he was commuting between the company’s two resources - in Cornwall (to where Allen & Heath had moved production in 1981) and Brighton, where they were hitched to Maldwyn Bowden’s turnkey broadcast providers, MBI. With R&D and management in one location and production in another he recalls regular 4am starts to make one of the UK’s most implausible journeys just about achievable.

The origins of Allen & Heath are well documented. How Andy Bereza took an off-the-shelf company from the Batiste family to set up Allen & Heath in 1969 is now part of industry folklore, as is the way in which he and co-conspirators, Ivor Taylor and Andrew Stirling, built a custom quadraphonic mixing console [MOD1]  for Pink Floyd - used by their sound engineer, Alan Parsons.

Carey Davies remembers it as the trailblazing era. “I saw the desk with those quad pan pots, when I first joined the company and it was like a rat’s nest. But in those days it was about creating solutions with a true pioneering spirit rather than worrying about reliability.”

In recent years Allen & Heath have represented great shareholder value, which is why Close Brothers Growth Capital, with whom Allen & Heath’s management team had only recently signed a secondary management buyout in 2006 (following the departure of 3i), readily accepted the offer from D&M Holdings. Previously, it had been 3i who had backed the original buy-out from Harman Industries in 2001.

Since taking the major step of introducing the GL3 live sound-mixing desk in 1992, following the collapse of the small recording industry, Allen & Heath have seldom looked back. This was to be their tectonic shift. The GL3 was the first mixer to offer Allen & Heath’s Dual Functionality concept - the ability to configure the console for front-of-house, monitoring or combined roles - and became the forerunner of the Mix Wizard and the later GL series.

As with the 1991-92 recession, Allen & Heath have ridden through subsequent economic pandemics with equal disdain by having the prescience and ambition to anticipate and enter new markets - building up a massive global DJ community with their Xone range against the then more fashionable brands, with the Xone:464 and Xone:62.

For this they can thank Xonemeister, Andy Rigby-Jones, for making light of the 1999 recession, and marking a further change of direction at a time when guitar sales and live music were falling away.

Of the Xone initiative, Glenn remembers, “We were already respected for producing a good quality live sound product in the middle market but we wanted to make a product that was different and could never be clipped. We got lucky with the sweep filters - it fitted the techno music and allowed DJ’s to do beat mixing and take different bits of tracks - for instance the bottom end of one track into the top end of another. It managed to get us into places like Gatecrasher, Fabric and Ministry of Sound.”

The Xone series reached its zenith this month with the launch of the latest 4D DJ Controller which received its debut at the Sound Recording Technology Show, at London’s ExCeL.

Evolved from the revolutionary Xone:3D, the Xone:4D has an enhanced feature set, combining a fully-featured, high specification professional analogue DJ mixer with 105 MIDI controls - and as important, a new high-end 96 kHz/24bit 20-channel USB 2.0 soundcard.%u2028%u2028
With the well-received ZED and iLive joining the Xone:4D, the new generation of products that has been riding out of Penryn this past year or so could not be better placed to neutralise the latest recession (should it become that).

In fact the ZED-R16 is Allen & Heath’s first true recording mixer for over a decade, with 18 FireWire I/O which can also be used as a versatile live front of house mixer.%u2028%u2028 The best performing preamp in Allen & Heath’s entire range is packaged with a high quality analogue to Firewire interface and the most extensive EQ on any mixer at this price, with the project led by Allen & Heath’s analogue guru, Mike Griffin.

Carey Davies, a veteran of 30 years, believes Allen & Heath’s success has been all about delivering application-specific and technologically-driven product groups for the working engineer - and the Internet forums have helped them reinforce this.

The grouping has been important because of their evolutionary nature, believes Carey. “For instance the DR128 - our first digital product - developed into the iDR for the installation market, and that in turn led to the iLive. If we get onto a good thing we will sustain it; the GL4 and GL3000, all started from a base with the GL2 and GL3.”

In fact Allen & Heath have followed a simple formula of building ranges designed to provide customer solutions. And it is this, more than anything, that has seen their turnover grow from around £1m in 1990 to a projected £18m this year (had they gone a full 12 months).

SO HOW will life change now the company is surrounded by fellow audio heads? Did it feel like turning the clock back to the Harman Pro days? Glenn Rogers reports that the initial surprise at the D&M takeover was quickly assuaged since the industry had already entered a period of prolific corporate change.

“People tended to roll it all into one, and as a logical fit it wasn’t difficult to perceive that it made sense. Without the Calrec takeover [which took place in August 2007] it might have seemed a bit more left field.”

From a base in broadcast and consumer electronics D&M had been looking to expand their business further into pro. “It was a model that I don’t think is untypical ... because Harman had also tried it. D&M had an enviable position in the consumer world with Denon, as well as the pro AV receiver market and with the Denon DJ product, while Marantz do well with their broadcast recorder; but there was more opportunity to expand pro than consumer.”

For Allen & Heath this is also a logical fit. They had become aware of D&M while looking for vehicles to compete with Pioneer. The Calrec deal had almost gone unnoticed down in deepest Cornwall but with D&M clearly on the acquisition trail, when they asked Calrec for possible targets, Allen & Heath found themselves high on the list.

“I received a call from D&M’s match making team - but my first response was that we had only just finished the last of our buy-outs, and so we were lukewarm,” remembers Glenn. “But as part of our venture capital requirement we have to discuss this with our investors - and things moved from there.”

In so doing, the five-year cycle had been broken. “3i had left after five years and Close Bros were set for a further five. When D&M came along after 18 months we hadn’t really achieved what we’d set out to do. We had been in the corporate structure at Harman and we debated whether we really wanted to go back to that ... although having said that the time spent with Harman represented ten good years for the brand.” The advantage, he believes, is that D&M will be more focused on promoting individual brands rather than the corporate ID - which is the Harman method. There is little risk of brand dilution.

The other element that tipped the decision was that Glenn and his management team could see the benefit of weathering variable economic conditions within a larger corporate structure, especially with the recent run of consolidations.

In any event, Allen & Heath had produced a good year’s figures and Close Bros were happy to rubber stamp the deal. “It was a rate of return they hadn’t anticipated - otherwise they would have been quite happy to wait [the full term].

The immediate future will see Allen & Heath’s digital networking tools becoming increasingly integrated now that they have products such as the iDR DSP control systems.

What interests them is the speed with which digital is gaining momentum - and inside Allen & Heath the digital responsibility has fallen largely to Rob Clark and Anthony Jackson since the company entered the market with the DR128 mix processor. To date they haven’t taken on the big digital live sound producers - but they already have the capability of a separate Mix Rack with the iLive architecture, and know they call on Calrec’s experience with digital desks.

“We are trying to make our systems more application friendly. We had a great reaction at the ABTT Show [to the iLive universe, with iDR rack processing] from people who have grown up with analogue desks and they see it’s not hard to use - we hope with the design of our product we have got it right.”

Carey explains, “On iLive you can design the mixer to suit your application which is a flexibility we’ve never had before - the ability to customise it to meet your application, and that will be the basis of our future generation of product.

“We have chosen EtherSound as our point of connection but we have to address all different systems which is why we have to develop option cards.

“We have USB2.0 soundcard for the 4D for multichannel sound, FireWire for the ZED-R16 and EtherSound for the iLive - so we keep abreast of the technologies that are right for each customer.”

And they hope that as the credit crunch impacts, that these new generation products will insulate them from any fall-out. “We’ve deliberately built in flexibility over a wide-ranging portfolio. The key is to keep new products flowing.”

Longer term you can expect to see some vigorous technology sharing among the four R&D-led companies. “D&M are looking at areas such as Blu-ray and we have the advantage of working alongside people like Calrec.”

There is certainly a positive mood in the camp during the immediate post-acquisition period.  “D&M Holdings still have an acquisitive temperament - they have a passion for developing further yet,” says the Allen & Heath MD. “This will give us the option to spread our wings though not to the detriment of the core business or of Allen & Heath.”

Potentially capital will be made available although traditionally Allen & Heath have not been what Glenn Rogers describes as “a particularly capital hungry organisation.”

However, one suspects that life moves at a different pace down in Cornwall - and certainly Glenn has the opportunity to unwind among the horse-riding community. “It’s a healthy and stimulating way to get the stress out of the system,” he says.

Despite being based in one of the remotest parts of the UK, Glenn Rogers’ travel schedule may even get easier now that Bristol Airport has opened a route to Newark, New Jersey (via Continental)  - close to D&M Holdings’ base.

But presently he is busy dealing with post-acquisition and compliance issues - like the fact they can no longer conduct trade in certain restricted export markets. “Most of the post-acquisition period has to do with familiarisation - there is some corporate governance and a few consequential adjustments - but mostly it’s corporate reporting.”

But for all his optimism the A&H man sees a corporate landscape that is becoming increasingly competitive. A new world order has been created in which Sound Control and Cadac no longer have a presence, in which there have been the recent Martin Audio/LOUD Technologies, Turbosound/Proel, MC2/XTA pacts - and aborted Gibson/TC attempt. “Every sector is trying to find a more secure way.”

It has certainly been a strange adventure for Allen & Heath this past 40 years -from Pink Floyd, broadcast and recording in its early history, to live sound, installation, DJ and digital networking in recent times.

Glenn Rogers says, “I have just had a ball getting this far. But this is the third time I have been around that takeover loop and I don’t intend to do it again.

“There are a lot of things in life you learn and some things you try and avoid. But we’ve been lucky - we’ve had great vision and we’ve found people that have helped us achieve that vision.”