Brandon and Brian: Welcome to episode three of the DayZ Integration Advantage podcast with our honored guest, Kaplan from Leon Speakers. So happy to have you.
Noah: Hey, so good to be here, gents.
Brandon and Brian: And we got Brandon here, head of sales in the Boston location and a good friend, Bert Herrero, our constant co-host. Our Nick is offsite today. So we're joined by a new face who'll be here once in a while with us. And here we go. Let's Leon, man.
Bert Herrero: Awesome. Let's do it.
Brandon and Brian: How about a little brief introduction though about yourself and the company. It's some storied history there and I'm sure you've told them million times, but they're going to be listeners that may have not of Leon.
Noah: ⁓ every is new. That's how it all starts. Right. But yeah, I'm Noah Kaplan, the founder and president of Leon ⁓ and We are literally going into our 30th year of business next year. So year 29 right now, we started this company in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I was a musician and an art student. So we started the company when we are in our early 20s. And it really started as a group. It didn't start as like a formal company. It started a group of musicians and artists and designers and engineers that we all met. We kind of formed this concept that we named Leon. not knowing really it would be a company for the next 30 years. It's been an incredible run and it still honestly feels like that same first era. know, the studio has gotten bigger, the collaborators have gotten so incredible and a lot of the team I've been working with for over 20 years. So we grew up together and we still stick to the same vision, which is all about kind of exploring the intersection between art and audio. I've always been such a huge music fan. It kept me going as an artist, exploring music and writing music. That's always been such a part of our entire collaborative team. ⁓ moving it more into like how design and technology work together kind of came a little bit later. And more recently right now, we're still very vision driven. We're very studio driven. And our new vision is all about awakening creativity. So you'll see lots of eyes around me. They're a part of like how we're trying to see sound differently. Yeah, yeah. Thanks for having me on the show.
Brandon and Brian: Love it. Cool stuff. ⁓ you're one of our favorites, buddy. ⁓ you know, this is a podcast, too, that speaks to our trade partners, but, you know, this is going to blow.
Noah: Thank you.
Brandon and Brian: appeal to wider audience as well. Anybody interested in technology and your products really just they bridge the gap, right? The designers love them, the clients love them and ⁓ the architects need to know about them if we haven't had the chance to get in front of them. So we're trying to hit a wider audience with this stuff as well. So, mean, our friend Bert right there, he's down in Florida right now and he's got some Leon stuff behind him.
Noah: Because you know, right now our go-to mantra is all about leaving nothing if I'm finished. So Bert, them what you got behind you.
Bert Herrero: but quiet. Yeah, so what we've got back here is a 85 inch bravia with a studio frame around it and it's running the artwork that was provided by Leon on the app and it's sensational. I mean, what a difference between something like this and you know, the competing product in the market, right?
Noah: Thank you so much, man. All right, first of all, so good. Appreciate you doing all that and appreciate everything you do. One thing I love about our industry and what I love about Daisy is that I feel like we're in like a hyper creative industry.
Brandon and Brian: True.
Noah: It takes a really specific person to be able to manage the scale of technology that we're dealing with and like, especially in a luxury home. And not only do you have to make it work perfectly, but everybody really does care about like the design vision and how it looks. And so I finally... feel like we're getting to the time when the A &D community is realizing that technology is really going to be part of the American landscape of interior design. It's 2026 y'all, right? So, but behind you, what's so cool is I had always imagined that these TVs should be more of artistic expressions of your personality than just, you know, a black rectangle on the wall, right? From the first time I saw flat screen TV, I started designing products around it because I realized that it's going to change entertainment. It inherently would change entertainment because it was pushing these TVs into the living spaces. Places like the living room, the bedroom, the media room. ⁓ It was a clunky process, y'all, and we know this. know, putting one of those early TVs, which I know we all played with, that weighed 200 pounds and had a giant silver frame and stuck like eight inches off the wall and had lots of cords and no art on it. Very different times now. ⁓
Brandon and Brian: They were all bezel.
Noah: The ability to not only display artwork around a house through these is, I think, incredibly important, but also how do we want to finish these pieces? How do we want to frame them? How do we want to choose art? ⁓ And I think that gives interior designers a lot to play with.
Bert Herrero: I agree with that wholeheartedly. think we are in a very creative industry and that brings on lot of ability from a lot of different angles with what we do. And I think that leads right into a really good question that we've got planned here, which was audio integration. Why should it be considered as part of the early design process? And share some examples of what early planning ⁓ led to in results of projects. And of course, No, I think that all of us in the industry are on the same page as to why we should be there early. But I think that this is really going to speak more to our design partners who are out there that want to have a better understanding or should have a better understanding of the type of role that we play in home, not just from a technology perspective, but from a design perspective, right? From an aesthetic point of view. Artistic, I should say.
Noah: Absolutely. And you know, we could all take a second to think about the evolution of the industry. You know, when I was traveling 20 years ago, I mostly was visiting really incredible stereo shops. You so one of my first campaigns was all about, it was about a flat screen TV and it said, this is not a stereo, right? This is something that's going on your wall. This is decor. Right, so to me, we all know how many steps it takes to just imagine starting a project from, you know, a client interaction meeting with an architect, their group of contractors, designers. When can we have that conversation? And I think what we're talking about is really, when do we start the lifestyle conversation? Right, so. Instead of going in with a lot of gadgetry or things that kind of might be off putting to an architecture designer, I think now that we're working with shades and with lighting and with switches and with choosing art and working with digital art and frames and technology, we could all agree that sound is an incredible, incredibly important part of interior design. Like I would say a hundred percent of designers. I would say they love sound. Probably before they'd say they'd love light, right? Sound has always been like music, entertainment has always been like a core reflection of like how a house feels, right? So I like to really get in there early. And I know we don't always get to talk to the homeowners, especially in the luxury market. In the commercial market, it's really different and I've learned a lot from the commercial market where it is very, it's very early. That's where it is all discussed because it has to be operated by the buildings. So like I've learned a lot from the commercial side, especially from our big commercial companies where they're designing, you know, 200 rooms, 300 rooms, spaces, connected spaces, entertainment spaces where the architect and the designers are working on it. We'll create a design vision for each space. We're thinking about how it's going to be used. And then we'll design into that spec. In luxury space, it's kind of every house is different, right? And you have an interior designer who might have their opinion and the architects have their opinion. And then we're trying to integrate all this complex technology. But we all know the first thing coming into the house, like probably the most important thing to build on. What would you say it is? It's like starts with power is the power is clean power coming in. Right. I was just talking to Joe from Rosewater, Rosewater about like how to create clean power. was just with him yesterday. ⁓ Joe Piccarelli and like, ⁓ thinking about like, wow, even the first stage is still about technology and design and having the architects understand that the next stage network. Like we're trying to run everything on a digital bed. Right. And so networks, these are things that aren't that fun to talk about necessarily. And so we don't talk about network. always talk about like wifi. Let's get, make sure you get great wifi in here. Cool. We don't need to know the details, just like you don't need to know the details of HVAC, but everybody knows every house needs electricity, which is the veins of the house. Right.
Brandon and Brian: Mm-hmm.
Noah: We all need HVAC, know, the heart and lungs of the house. And technology is kind of the consciousness, how the house works. So I think there's a lot of education that we have to provide there. And I've realized over the years, it's, we're really just trying to provide that education at this point and not talk about gadgetry too soon. So like one of my favorite questions is, where do you like to spend time with the family? Let's talk about client. Let's talk about their needs. When can we interject what's possible? I have a story about this. There's one person I've worked with for literally over two decades and he always starts his whole kind of, I would call it a pitch, but it's a little deeper than that. His first thing is always like, tell me about what you do in the morning. And that could be a scary question. Like, what do you mean? Well, how often do you come to this house? because you know there's usually three to six houses. When are you here? ⁓ How often are you here? When does family show up? Where do you entertain? ⁓ And I watched him do this where he literally by the time you're only up for a half hour, he's already figuring out, you know, when your shades come up, when your lighting goes on, you know, what it feels like when that happens. Your coffee machines are activated. You know, we're talking about where's the sound like, okay, cool. I like to listen to I like to listen to really, I like to listen to lot of music, like actually right away in the labs, you know, let's go like in the morning where we go next to the kitchen. cool. How does that sound? By the time we get to the media rooms where you know you're going to be you know like let's face it if you're if you're in the states the research shows that you will watch like over 30 hours of screens a week between all the fans you know a lot of time who watches Netflix here?
Brandon and Brian: Allah.
Noah: What do you watch? What do you guys watch? This is one of my favorite questions. Yeah, Bert, what do you like to watch? What's your mainstays?
Bert Herrero: Man, I'm tough with TV because I don't watch a lot of it, but when I do watch it, it's got to be something with guns and action-packed, things blowing up. I mean, that's my life.
Noah: There you go. Yeah, movies. That's entertainment. like that. That tells me a lot right there, right? What do we want to do? You need a full scale media room to activate your soul. How about you guys? What do you like? What do you guys like? What are you guys into?
Brandon and Brian: We do family night on Fridays, we limit screen time for the kids. So we try to make it a family thing. So if we're not doing the Switch 2 in the media room, then we're doing a movie. So ⁓ it's usually a family movie, animated movie, but ⁓ we gotta have good entertainment space for when we do use it. ⁓ It's gonna be enjoyable. Because without good audio, man, I'm taking right out of something.
Noah: It's right. Like the video is important, but you know, the, audio is like the impactful part of it. The thing that activates you, you know, ⁓
Brandon and Brian: Personally, it's more important. That's a lot of what we have to get around to people is, know, come in there and they're just like, ⁓ yeah, I just need a TV on the wall. It's like, okay, like you said, qualifying questions. What are you watching? Because if, you know, we have a lot of complaints, I like to watch baseball every night.
Noah: Yeah. Where you at?
Brandon and Brian: And you have a lot of complaints. Well, ⁓ when the crowd's noisy, I can't hear what the announcers are saying. I can't differentiate into that sound. it's like, OK, well, yeah, you don't have a dedicated speaker. Have those voices come at you like you should. So let's work on that. answering those questions and finding out what they're liking is just a huge, huge way to start the conversation.
Noah: ⁓ Yeah, it's lifestyle. You guys are right there with me. And for me, studying what's coming out of a television is as critical as like, what are we listening to? Right? So the reason when we started formulating like the early science of Lien, we created a more of like a psychoacoustic thought that we call direct source audio, which means like for the history, I studied the entire history of how television was created. And even on the first television, which was created and launched at the World Fair, this is 1939, even that first TV had a full-scale integrated speaker on it. And that's because the way that you record TV or movies is much different than how you record stereo. And what I realized quickly was that... through watching how people use their televisions, I realized we kind of get really strategic about like what we're delivering on that TV because some people watch sports, movies, TV, sitcoms, all that kind of thing. And then they switch over to movies, which are all like highly incredibly detailed processed kind of soundscapes. Me as a designer, I started seeing in New York, like when it all started, there was just putting so many speakers around a TV that were gargantuan. But what frequency comes out of a TV? 80 % of it is dialogue, very small scale, know, the small scale like of dialogue driven sound comes out of a TV. And then all the details, all the stuff, all the feeling comes out of like the satellite. And then, you know, you add the subwoofer, it's just like theater. So I always imagined these TVs to be just street living space theaters, right? It's not. Leon doesn't create soundbars. that when we started designing the first speakers for TVs, there was no such word as soundbar. This is in the mid 90s and when I realized that 80 % of the signal came out of the center channel, I focused really clearly and closely on what was coming out of the center channel and that's why we still use the finest drivers on earth to reproduce these vocal sounds.
Brandon and Brian: Right.
Noah: When it comes to surrounds or to like how you watch a show, sometimes like it could be stereo sum to mono or mono sum to stereo. Like how it comes out for like how they're recorded the show from what era. Cause what's also cool is like who would have ever known you could watch TV from at any time from any era. And like our kids could be watching stuff that we grew up on. They do it right? It's sick. They know it. It's like, and then we'd get to like watch shows like at this level.
Brandon and Brian: And they do, right?
Noah: and how good the shows are now. Like, it's incredible.
Brandon and Brian: instead of on a 19 inch TV with the speakers like we did when we were kids. ⁓
Noah: Yeah. Black and white night. Yeah, exactly. Like we got it. Like we were lucky to like get like tune it in with the antennas. My parents wouldn't even go.
Bert Herrero: You guys, you guys, you guys realize that you're all talking about tuning with antennas and the only one here that's old enough to remember changing tubes on TVs is right here. So, but let's ⁓ let's date myself just a little bit.
Noah: The dog. I get very, I get very into this because it's such a bizarre thing that happened. You know, like thinking about like now we're plugging in 115 inch TV and it's supposed to go in a living room. know, it's
Brandon and Brian: I'm from India, right? Think of your own wall.
Bert Herrero: So a a couple true stories. So first off, my very first business, I was 18 years old and I was the antenna doctor was the name of my business. I actually found a business card stuffed in one of my old books that I happened to have moved a few, like I've got to find it just to share it one day because it's no BS, right? But it was like my first.
Noah: What? I'm hoping to note on that, I'm a little note to myself about the antenna doctor.
Bert Herrero: It was my first business at the age of 18, which was a lot of moons ago. So, but another cool thing is, is, and going back to the audio experience, you know, one of my, one of my mentors, and I'm going to date myself here. So one of my mentors, put me in front of the television and muted the audio and asked me to watch something. And okay. He was done watching. And so he changed a channel or moved on to a different movie or something. And he. pulled the S video off of the television, because that's the dating, okay, it was S video. And he pulled the S video off, so I had no video, but I had all the audio dialogue, and I was able to sit there for 10 minutes. And when we finished, he said, what was the first movie about? Like, I have no idea, I couldn't hear it. And then he moved on to the second movie, he goes, what was the second movie about? And I basically told him the whole storyline for the 10 minutes that I listened to it, right? So the point is that while the video is super important because the video kind of gives you that first feedback, right? The audio is what gives you the interpretation, right? Of what is playing, right? And so that's how important the audio side is. I've used that example for many, many years with people that are more into the video and the audio really wasn't a thing to them. I explain them, right? Just give them that little scenario and they start to recognize the experience that they're missing by not having the audio portion really consume them, right? So.
Noah: I, yeah.
Brandon and Brian: So I have a lot of arguments with a friend of mine who's a big movie watcher and this or that, but he doesn't like a lot of the things that I like. And I'm like, how is this possible? This movie was great. This TV show was great. And he travels a lot. Finds out all he does is he pirates movies and watches them on his laptop in his hotel room. And that's the experience he's getting. was like, oh, so you're missing all the sound design that went into making this. All the fidelity. That needs to be there to fully enjoy this. And you're just getting, you're getting a quarter of the experience you should be.
Bert Herrero: Right?
Brandon and Brian: and that's why you're having the attitude that you are. So it's a big difference when there's no sound.
Noah: That is really important what you guys are talking about. Sometimes, I was very lucky at a young age to work on a lot of film sets. I did storyboards for film, I worked behind the set. I learned from a lot of my friends who are filmmakers, so I got to see what that looks like. Like you guys are talking about, I would say film, TV, these are some of the highest art forms possible. Like the amount of coordination and effort they put into creating these kind of experiences is, it's the height of technology. Right, when it goes into tell those stories. So I totally agree with you. It's really, you don't need to do it. But if you do, you know, it just changes how you can appreciate art. And so now like where we're going, is, is cool as like, we want to appreciate art through an artistic expression of not only what was created, but through the hardware, a light like with the same like kind of analogy with music rather with playing music, right? Like we, like with Leah and I always talk about, we're trying to make you the finest guitar possible, but how are we, what kind of amplifier are we going to use? You know, how are we going to dial in this system? How far can we push it? ⁓ And the fun part is like, I think we can all work together to rebuild this experience because a lot of the experiences become commoditized. And I have talked with a lot of you guys, know that, like, how do we talk to a world that feels so commoditized and give them something special, right? So especially in luxury home, which is kind of where we work, luxury home, and then. really big corporations, people mistake that they can hear something like physically with what they're hearing and it's the same thing you can imagine with a car, right? Like you can get to where you want to go with any car. You can get to where you want to go with bicycle. You get to where you want to go with rollerblades. It's fine. But when it comes to the things that people want in their homes where everything is bespoke, They've considered every single detail of the house from the switchers to the shades. What do you want this experience to feel like? And how quickly can we show you that difference? Right? So like, as you know, like if you just listen to the TVs right now, the speakers fire at the wall out of the box. The frames that come with the TVs are made of plastic. Arguably like they're becoming too thin the TV. Right? Like what artwork in a luxury home is three eighths of an inch thick? It's weird. So, you know, like adding a little bit of materiality to that entire experience and then adding like the proper sound to fit that space. ⁓ You can only, I guess, do it by showing people. And I think that's, you know, building the trust one person at a time. and building that story somehow and like, want to work on this. I want to work on this as an industry and I want to work on this. Like, how do we get this story out to people through media, right? Like we're already there watching it. How do we tell the story? like, Hey, this is how Daisy sets it up. This is what we want to give you. This is what Leon's about. The experience, you know, and also like, was it made? Where does it come from?
Brandon and Brian: the experience.
Noah: Like what in a luxury home is going to be made out of plastic or come out of a factory that comes from nowhere where you don't know the makers? You know, Leon, we like every last thing, the last thing we do at every Leon is add our makers mark because we still handcraft every single product every single day you order. you.
Brandon and Brian: There's so much to be said for that. So much
Bert Herrero: think, you know, I'm sorry, go ahead, Brenda.
Brandon and Brian: I was just saying, I mean, I'm in homes all the time and we try to bring up Leon in a conversation all the time. Because the majority of the people are talking about the more retail based competition that's out there and what they have to offer, unaware that there are other options out
Noah: Thank you.
Brandon and Brian: And the car analogy was great. ⁓ I was in a networking group full of people and I had to give presentations once a quarter or whatever. And that was always my example, is who here drives a car every day? Answered all those questions. Okay, who here watches TV every day? Everybody can shut up. was like, so why can you justify? spending $400 on an 85 inch TV and just be okay with it when there's something out there that really doesn't cost that much when you look on an everyday usage and you're getting a much better experience. I was like, how many of you guys rolled down your windows? No, you have automatic windows, right? How many people have a Parola? No, you all have SUVs and trucks and everything else is like, there are other options, but you chose luxury on certain items, why not on something else you use every day? It's the same thing with speakers, with everything that we do in our industry, it's just education, right?
Noah: ⁓ That is so important. And some of you said just also rang a bell, which is like. I wouldn't want somebody to just do like even on any level, like even if you think about something you don't think like HVAC, like even someone like, like I don't want just the entry level thing that you see at a big box store, right? That's not fun for me. Even if I can't afford something, I want to know what I got to earn for. Right. ⁓ I obviously am an enthusiast of many things and like, you know, I'm someone who will save up for art. You know, it's something that I want to get and like, but What you said about, you know, the thinking about what we're creating in the luxury landscape is, is hyper important. Cause even when I go to some shows, I still feel like what we have to work on is like, how do we connect to what a luxury kind of transaction feels like and make it less transactional, right? A luxury conversation is about desire, What's going to feed or feel right for this kind of home? So like when we're building Leons and creating what we call the materiality for the products, we're only thinking about what is right for a luxury home. That starts with the drivers and the design, what's coming out, how natural is it, how listenable is it, what does it feel like? We want it to feel like something that you'd expect in a luxury home. just like you'd see in the kitchen. And so like the new materials we're working on right now, they're all completely sustainable materials. We're using Italian laminates or American kiln dried hardwoods. We're working with the best companies in the world on the components. And those are things that like, just like any automotive company would be talking about. You know, any luxury company, that's what you would come to expect. And that is really the most important thing. Like how do we put the right samples? You know, that's let the designers feel it, touch it, understand that this is what it's going to be made of. No, this is going to be bespoke handmade for you. Right. And we all know this is what the expectation is. So we started doing design shows a couple of years ago, like full exhibiting, like we will be exhibiting at ICFF next week in New York city. and which is a huge, it's called the Industrial Contemporary Furniture Fair. And we're exhibiting a brand new collection, which was a huge collaboration at the World Trade Center to show people, like the first thing people want is options. So when you go to a big box store, if you're thinking in retail, like what on earth would even go in a luxury home from a retail location? that you would see, you know, the field stone, the floor treatments, the window treatments, the sofas, these are things that will take it's all handmade. And so like that is why sometimes I. like, I'm always trying to let people know, like we take care of every detail, like if you take a Leon apart, every single part of the entire product is thought out. And you could come and watch it being made.
Brandon and Brian: So I'll hand it.
Noah: ⁓ And you don't pay an ultra premium for this. you said, you know, like if I told you, can build you a custom handmade home theater and install it in your home. What would you expect to pay?
Brandon and Brian: We know the costs on this stuff. So a little bias.
Noah: Yeah. Well, when you know about it, right? Like, so a theater could cost you a million. It's, it's, could, if you're talking about theater, it could be a million dollar thing. When you're talking about media room, how much is a media room theater cost? Well, holy cow. We got to design it for you. We're going to have 10 meetings about it. We're going to choose all the hardware. We're going to design what it looks like.
Bert Herrero: We're not answering.
Noah: We're going to choose the frames, the art, the sound, the amplifiers, the wiring, how it works, how it turns on, all digital handshakes have to happen, everything. ⁓ So we said we can design that and build you a literal custom theater for $12,000. Does that sound like a lot? Yeah. And that's not at all. That's a handmade Leon complete system, two subwoofers, completely bespoke. ⁓ you know, left center, right speaker, the frame surround sounds amplifiers, you know, so me like, show me something else, right? What else can I get? Like I like, have all Mac amps on everything on every speaker I have. So, know, obviously I'm obsessed with power, not that kind of power, not gross power amplification power. I want, I love the thought of just like,
Brandon and Brian: Yeah
Noah: that the whole single chain, how it feels, is all coming from people who care about it. So that starts with the artists or the producers or the creatives that made the content and goes all through the way, that single path. What are we really doing to make it cool, make it right?
Brandon and Brian: It's such a cool lens to look at it through, do know? Yeah, you know, it's the. In the fact that this stuff is made in-house in US, you know, there's it is right in Michigan. It's like it's it's it's right there. You know, it's like we can, know, ⁓ can go see it, right? We can go to a concert at your ⁓ it's just there's so much to be said for that that's lost on so many people when we've dumbed down.
Noah: Thank you. Yeah, every day.
Brandon and Brian: audio with soundbars and with Bluetooth speakers and the lazy way of sort of slinging a solution rather than designing and thoughtful integration of a solution. it's just you guys have tackled that though, too, instead of an ugly soundbar being under a TV, have a tone case. I mean, I'm like, you guys have so many.
Noah: Ugh. Right. I wanted to be right so bad that we will take other people's like off the shelf stuff and customize case works to make it look like it belongs in a fine house, you know?
Brandon and Brian: And it transforms it. does not one client ever complains once they get their tone case installed. Totally worth it.
Noah: Right, because then it's like the more expensive than the speaker.
Brandon and Brian: The important thing you said there was options, right? I mean, we go in there and majority of the time, I'd say 85 % time, you have one person that's going home and the other person is stalemating. Like their walls are up, I don't need this, it's not gonna look good, I don't want anything else in my room. Okay, well, what kind of experience do you want? Again, that's the question to get it. Well, I want great sound, but I don't want anything in my room. Like, well, you just did a whole remodel with no infrastructure put in, so you can't do anything invisible. You can't do any of this. So what options are you left with? Okay. A sound bar. Well, sound bars are ugly. Okay. Well, I have a beautiful case here that we can at least hide that for you and make it a little better experience for you. So having that option just avoids the no, because you never want to get into that no territory. So that's fantastic.
Noah: Yeah. I love, right, that's so true. That's why like leading with like the finish, the frame, like to us, like we started saying like, how do you want to frame your TV? And people are like, what do you mean? You're like, ⁓ yeah, you don't just have to have it look like out of the box anymore, right? That was cool 15 years ago, but these things are ubiquitous now. They're inexpensive. You know, so like who would have ever thought you get a ⁓ hundred inch TV for less than, like, what is it?
Brandon and Brian: Mm-hmm.
Noah: a of grand, five grand, 10 grand. It's nuts, it's cheap. And so like, it really, the conversations change dramatically. And I think we all like, we are all, I know working on this, like you said, the way we talk to our customers. so we try to lead with things that they understand more. And I want to talk about something interesting that a lot of customers are like, I'm not an audiophile, so don't try to sell me anything. So I'm like, are you a sofa file?
Brandon and Brian: Right.
Bert Herrero: Cheap.
Noah: Are you a file? Do you, are you a refrigerator file? Because I wouldn't put like a cheap off the shelf refrigerator in your $500,000 kitchen. You know, like it's everything has to be thought of like, Hey, I feel like you're, I feel like you deserve something that's bespoke. That's interesting. That fits in, fits in with your vision, design vision. But I think we have to kind of dispel some stuff that sound is a commodity, right? Of course, there's commodity versions of everything, right? And I think the first thing I would just say is like, ⁓ yeah, those are really good for the kids' rooms or the side rooms, you know, that we can do something like that. But we want to give you something really beautiful for your main living areas where you're going to entertain.
Bert Herrero: I think a question, question I heard a while back ago was, you know, how, do you want your sound to look like? Right. Or what do you want your sound to look like? And I think that that really speaks to what we're trying to do in the customization side. Right. And it's trying to make sure that we have bespoke products that look great for specific rooms. Right. It's like you said, right? Like you could have a guest room and Hey, throw a sound bar in there and just, you know, whatever fill the room. Right. But.
Noah: Yes. Absolutely.
Bert Herrero: in your main areas, you're spending a ton of money when we're building these homes and doing all the design work and stuff. And then you're just gonna throw a cheap black frame TV up on the wall and what? And then black speakers or in-wall speakers with the white grills. mean, it just, there's so much more available out there.
Noah: There's so much more and I think that we really have to get back to that. And I want to address something interesting, which is I know we do a lot of speakers in the, you know, lot of in-ceiling speakers, a lot of invisible speakers, and you really won't see us working that much in that category. Because Leon, our core differentiation is about sounds you can see. What other companies are working on is really things you're really meant to conceal or hide. And we do a lot of concealing products in media decor and with hiding TVs and with concealing them. But when it comes to sound, we have people now accepted at least that a sound bar, it's kind of like the speaker of right now, right? It's the biggest category of sound ever. We never would have thought. 30 years ago, like I had to convince people five years that it was okay to put three channels of speakers in one bar. And we called it the horizon because it looked like the horizon line. Um, but now it's pretty widely accepted. And so now we can work on it as what we call a sound fixture, a sound fixture, like, because just like a light fixture, I think a lot of speakers turned into like there are people are working on the bulb and not the fixture.
Brandon and Brian: never, ever.
Noah: Right? So it's like, cool. we want to be the, we want the walls. We want the halls. Like we're really not good at the lid on the ceiling. I think it's cool to make, to have less digital, like less visual noise there. When it comes to what's in front of you, we want it to feel like art. want to transform your television into a living piece of art. Like something that you could really live with. It doesn't interrupt the design. It feels like it makes it cool. There you go. There you go. Like you can change it. It works with you. It's a free piece.
Bert Herrero: Thanks. ⁓
Noah: of art, it's alive, it's living, and so, and it becomes part of the texture of the house. I am so happy that we now have options to get rid of the damn shiny black screen, because I'm going to these houses, the most immaculate space in the world, and then you see a shiny TV with no frame on it. You can see like the wires and the metal behind it. I'm like, and that's what they think of all the work we do. Think about it as integrators, like all the work we do to put that thing up, they'll never know.
Bert Herrero: Thank
Brandon and Brian: You have an industrial box on the wall.
Noah: Then you put an industrial box that you can get at Costco on the wall. That's all they see every. And then if it doesn't work, they're like, we're mad at the remote control. Like, cool. We can be bad. We can work on that. But what we, want to do is, know, as much care as the integration, as the integrators put in, you know, like how the system works, the engineer behind it, what the rack looks like, what the control room looks like. I want to work as much on that on the foreground. What does the room look like? What is the client interacting with forever? And that's critical. This is the thing you're going to stare at for 32 hours. So me as an artist and a designer, I'm like, I'm paying real close attention to what that feels like. this year.
Bert Herrero: Thank you. Yep.
Noah: all the materials I changed to really be state of the art, get sustainable. And strangely, through working on that with companies that are just so incredible, you mostly in design and furnishings, we learned that like, not only are we finding that it's more efficient to work with these higher end materials, but it's also better, it's more sustainable. I think sustainability is something we can all write off, so it doesn't matter. But I certainly don't want to fill landfills with junk. You know, I want the Leons are built for life. Like a speaker that we built is literally guaranteed forever. So we're getting speakers back from literally the nineties that look like they have never been used and we'll refurbish them. We rebuild them or build them to the right sizes. Yeah, we don't want them to end up as just like, you know, landfill. We want them to be, they want us to have a little legacy, you know, of what we're building.
Bert Herrero: you
Brandon and Brian: It's amazing. That is what we're trying to get around to people is a lot of people are looking for sustainability. A big word is future proof. ⁓ you I don't want to have to do this again in five, six years. And you're trying to explain to them, okay, well, you break your knowledge a little bit and go from that basic system and spend some more money. You're looking 15, 20 years you have a product as opposed to five or six, you're replacing it. So it's, again, it goes back to education, right? Just trying to get people and talk about this and let everyone know.
Noah: Yeah.
Bert Herrero: Okay.
Noah: That's the hard part because you guys are in front of the clients. It's really difficult for people to understand how difficult that is. You know, to be in front of clients that I really expect the most and they're amazing people and they're usually highly creative and they have really specific tastes as we know. You know, when they get to work with the best designers and architects. And I think the job, like the reason we're doing the design shows is just to get them familiar with what's possible. Right. Here's some stuff. Here's some solutions. They need to see it and they need to touch it they need to say like, it's not foreign. It's just like picking a light fixture. can pick, they pick the shades now. Right. So I've been like talking to audio dealers about like spending more time with interior designers. Cause I think does the interior designers hold a lot of the keys to the kingdom.
Brandon and Brian: They need to see it.
Noah: Right after the architect passed off to design, like, and I think, and this is going to be a little controversial. I actually think that we are not just technology designers. We're not, we're clearly not AV guys anymore. Right. We are interior designers. Interior design will be led by technology, not just by the furniture and fixtures and finishes in the house. Right. Like how does this house feel? Like, look, what's happened to lighting. Like look what catcher is done.
Brandon and Brian: 100%.
Bert Herrero: Hmm
Noah: to the lighting formats of the entire, like everything is changing, right? You can't unsee it. It's so much better. It's crazy. And I think like, so we've actually partnered around the country, you know, with Lutron to kind of show like, look how we could transform how this room feels.
Brandon and Brian: transforms a room with a little color, right? You inject a bit of color.
Noah: I think it would be cool for us with Daisy to make that experience. Here's what's possible.
Brandon and Brian: Yes.
Noah: You know, like how do we create a small room with a small story that takes you through sound, not just of movies and shows, like sound of what meditation, sounds of nature, sounds that sounds that will ignite your mind, you know, and like, how does it coordinate with the shades? How does it coordinate with the lighting? How does it coordinate with how you talk to it? You know, there's a lot to do, but I think we can, it's all finally working, which is a good start because I would say like 10 years ago, this stuff is not working. You know, it was barely working.
Brandon and Brian: Right, right,
Bert Herrero: good conceptually, and we knew we'd get there, but we weren't there.
Noah: No, and it's still really difficult and it's still, it's definitely art. It's definitely design. And the fact that every house is different and that you guys will walk into every home, it'll be completely different.
Brandon and Brian: Everyone's unique.
Noah: Everyone's unique and that's why this is an art. Integration is definitely an art. And so I just want to continue to promote that, continue to investigate it. It's the same thing we always talked about. Now we're just trying to think more of like, how do we awaken creativity in that regard? How do show it? How do we tell it? How do we teach it?
Bert Herrero: So would you say that this is like an emerging trend that you ⁓ advise to like designers and homeowners and stuff, or do you think that there's a different emerging trend in the audio world or technology realm?
Noah: I mean the cool trends I'm seeing, like if you go to New York City or any major city, Vegas, you LA, you're going to see complete listening lounges focused on analog listening experiences happening. I was trying to build one in New York City all of last year. We're building them all around. There's a huge focus on analog experience for sure. And definitely on, you know, like how the house is going to make you feel like the wellness, the design. This is, this is absolutely a trend. And I would say it's a forever trend at this point ⁓ that we really should pay attention to. And like, we're going to need to create shows about this just like this, but imagine shows where we show, Hey, this is kind of where it was at. This is where we're going. What do you prefer? This is kind of like what it looks like if you get a commodity install in your house. This is where we think you should, what you deserve in your house. Right. And like, we're not talking about things that are super costly, right? Even to put in Ketra. Yes. It's, it's definitely expensive to put in Lutron shades. It's definitely expensive. Good in ceiling or invisible speakers. Yes. Quality work around TV, but ultimately it's a small expense for the amount of time you get with them. You know.
Brandon and Brian: And it changes the livability of the space. We've all seen it. A terrible lighting design destroys an otherwise beautiful architectural space. if there was a poor lighting design done, there was no layers of light. know, it was, you know, did same thing with this. mean, no one, someone really needed to lead the way with bridging the art and technology together to be able to even have this discussion.
Noah: ⁓ it's... Yeah. where it's at, you guys. This is it. This is where we're going to do it. And it's going to happen. I didn't think it would take, I actually didn't think it would take 20 or 30 years. We were designing a lot of this stuff off the jump because we were thinking more like designers. We were trained next to architects when we were designing. So we were always thinking of space. But now that everything is kind of technology caught up to this thought, we really have to work on how we implement. And make sure that we implement what we believe is the best case scenario as many times as possible. Right? Like make one great space, even if we have to do it for free for a designer, just be like, Hey, let us take, let's just do this for you. I've probably done that 20 times this year. I'm like working directly with designers. I'm like, let me just send it to you. You pick it up. Feel it. Right. Anyway.
Bert Herrero: So let's circle real quick. Go back to this analog experience. Can you define that a little better for some of our viewers? Because they are design partners, trade partners, and they don't live in the realm that we live in,
Noah: So this kind of new trend was definitely defined in Brooklyn and New York City. There's some incredible sound designers ⁓ that ⁓ really started looking at... how the greatest designers of the 50s, 60s, 70s created speakers, like Altec Lansing, JBL, the original large format speakers that were really thinking about sound creatively. ⁓ the objects really are, they're enormous and they don't seem practical. They're almost so impractical now that they're super artistic looking, right? Cause they're foreign objects, they're enormous horns. Yeah, like so to have been trouble out of, you who's been designing,
Bert Herrero: Very retro.
Noah: a lot of these systems. And this all started probably, it was going on in New York City, but definitely in Japan, a lot like the Japanese listening lounges that were formed based on really the appreciation for vinyl. And vinyl is a really great example of something that is not about what is easiest, right? It is really hard to design a listening lounge that sounds authentic, that can reproduce vinyl. Think about how many iterations you can use. But to think about designing a space where now people can slow down, have an analog experience that focuses on features like art. Right. It's a modern art show. Like I was in New York City at Silence, Please, which is a small new company coming up. And they're designing really vintage style speakers, designing amplifiers, tube amplifiers. But the warmth of the sound is so different than what you get on like your phone or like you were saying your laptop. Right. Right. It's like it's outrageously. It's like amplifying it by a thousand fold. And now it's starting to trickle in.
Brandon and Brian: Mm-hmm.
Noah: to luxury restaurants. I'd say we're designing right now for large chains, sound experiences that I would have never imagined they would put into a retail location. It's like becoming part of the normal part of a soundscape. Like how's this place going to feel, right? What's the ambiance? So I think what's really fun about this listening lounge, like If you go to one, definitely you should, because they're also thinking about the cocktails. They're thinking about like, what are we going to play? What DJ are we going to bring in? ⁓ And from our standpoint, we're working on this as well. Like we have a place in our factory called the Leon Loft.
Brandon and Brian: Ha ha ha.
Noah: where we've created a different style version of it. So like we created handmade large format PAs and subwoofers, but they're all decked out in leather and hardwood. We use vintage horns, dual 18s, dual 15 inch drivers, like, yeah, state of the art mixers. Yeah, got it. Tomorrow we have Iron and Wine playing. We are super lucky and it just keeps me.
Bert Herrero: Beautiful. ⁓ I gotta see this.
Brandon and Brian: You guys have amazing artists come through there.
Noah: keeps me going every day. Iron and Lion coming tomorrow. We get to capture and record and playback. And so I think this trend is really, it's showing us what people really wanna do. Like they wanna unplug a little. Right, we know like we can get sucked into our phones and. sucked into like the constant media that were being sold to me. And sometimes you just want to be like, yo, let's put on a record, which to me is like putting a like, to me, it's like putting a log on a fireplace. Like I want to put, like sometimes I'll listen to one record for like 10 days. was just like this last week and I was at Detroit vinyl fest. It was packed. got, it was packed with kids.
Brandon and Brian: ForceFed. I love that.
Noah: ⁓ it sick. People of all ages, you know, they were selling posters and art and people were dancing, DJs were live and there was 50 vendors. But this appetite is there right now and we definitely can deliver that. Our industry can deliver that in your house and we can make it so you don't even, if you want to see it, cool, we'll make you something radical. If you don't want to see it, we'll make you something radical. And I think people like, so I start talking to like, you start
Brandon and Brian: Right.
Noah: talking to your customers about listening lounges, their vibes, what they love, their interests. And now we're talking about lifestyle. Now we're on a different motorcycle, right?
Brandon and Brian: That's where my own kids, like there's seven and nine and they listen to in our two channel space, which is in our parlor, right? Like it's separate from everything else. There's no other technology in it other than the stereo. ⁓ ⁓ grown up knowing that's how dad listened to music. That's how mom listened to music. ⁓ there's a record player there. They can see, feel, touch the records. They know where they go. You know, there's an option for digital there. We we have a CD transport. We've got, you know, we've got stream. We've got a Bluesound streamer on there as well. the fact is that there's two sets of speakers there. We could switch in between them. It's B &Ws. You know, we need some Lyons in there. we've got a couple options there. You know, we've got some floor standards and some towers and they can hear the difference in the sound. And that's where they enjoy listening to music because we can just relax on the couch.
Noah: all right. hey, is good. I'm down with BMW. Those are great.
Brandon and Brian: and sit back and listen to music and it doesn't have to be this, you listen to one song and jump. Like, no, you can put the album on and really consume it and enjoy it for what it is. And it's so nice to see that my kids enjoy that even at their age.
Noah: ⁓ my God. ⁓ Yeah. By 70, he's record player all day. He came with me to the show, you know, like you said, and I want to make this more, I want to feel continuity with what you just said. So like, it feels like when you go to a restaurant or a club, you're noticing it sounds right. You know, when you go in your car, it sounds right. You go in your home, it sounds right. And of course, we're all gonna listen to You know, our headphones, AirPods, whatever you got. But you'll know that that is, that's background, right? And sometimes you move the art into the foreground. And that's what's so cool about like, what's being created right now. Like, I think like TV is having a moment. Like some of the shows I'm watching. are insane. Did you guys saw White Lotus? mean, like, what? How could you write something that insane and that good? I'm watching like beef right now. I'm like, I can't stop. It's nuts. The Bear? Holy shit. I mean, these shows are so well made. When you listen to that on a proper system, just like when you listen to a record in a listening lounge, now you're feeling something. And to me, that equates to you are alive. And let me tell you how much time we get on the planet Earth.
Brandon and Brian: Ha ha ha.
Noah: this much space. From the moment you wake up, open your eyes, and you move on to the next state of energy. So what are we going to do with our time, gents? What are we going to do?
Brandon and Brian: Enjoy it. Enjoy the people and enjoy the environment.
Noah: That's right.
Bert Herrero: Enjoy every second you're alive, Bottom line.
Brandon and Brian: Don't take it for granted.
Noah: I think we could end on that.
Noah: Hey, so good to be here, gents.
Brandon and Brian: And we got Brandon here, head of sales in the Boston location and a good friend, Bert Herrero, our constant co-host. Our Nick is offsite today. So we're joined by a new face who'll be here once in a while with us. And here we go. Let's Leon, man.
Bert Herrero: Awesome. Let's do it.
Brandon and Brian: How about a little brief introduction though about yourself and the company. It's some storied history there and I'm sure you've told them million times, but they're going to be listeners that may have not of Leon.
Noah: ⁓ every is new. That's how it all starts. Right. But yeah, I'm Noah Kaplan, the founder and president of Leon ⁓ and We are literally going into our 30th year of business next year. So year 29 right now, we started this company in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I was a musician and an art student. So we started the company when we are in our early 20s. And it really started as a group. It didn't start as like a formal company. It started a group of musicians and artists and designers and engineers that we all met. We kind of formed this concept that we named Leon. not knowing really it would be a company for the next 30 years. It's been an incredible run and it still honestly feels like that same first era. know, the studio has gotten bigger, the collaborators have gotten so incredible and a lot of the team I've been working with for over 20 years. So we grew up together and we still stick to the same vision, which is all about kind of exploring the intersection between art and audio. I've always been such a huge music fan. It kept me going as an artist, exploring music and writing music. That's always been such a part of our entire collaborative team. ⁓ moving it more into like how design and technology work together kind of came a little bit later. And more recently right now, we're still very vision driven. We're very studio driven. And our new vision is all about awakening creativity. So you'll see lots of eyes around me. They're a part of like how we're trying to see sound differently. Yeah, yeah. Thanks for having me on the show.
Brandon and Brian: Love it. Cool stuff. ⁓ you're one of our favorites, buddy. ⁓ you know, this is a podcast, too, that speaks to our trade partners, but, you know, this is going to blow.
Noah: Thank you.
Brandon and Brian: appeal to wider audience as well. Anybody interested in technology and your products really just they bridge the gap, right? The designers love them, the clients love them and ⁓ the architects need to know about them if we haven't had the chance to get in front of them. So we're trying to hit a wider audience with this stuff as well. So, mean, our friend Bert right there, he's down in Florida right now and he's got some Leon stuff behind him.
Noah: Because you know, right now our go-to mantra is all about leaving nothing if I'm finished. So Bert, them what you got behind you.
Bert Herrero: but quiet. Yeah, so what we've got back here is a 85 inch bravia with a studio frame around it and it's running the artwork that was provided by Leon on the app and it's sensational. I mean, what a difference between something like this and you know, the competing product in the market, right?
Noah: Thank you so much, man. All right, first of all, so good. Appreciate you doing all that and appreciate everything you do. One thing I love about our industry and what I love about Daisy is that I feel like we're in like a hyper creative industry.
Brandon and Brian: True.
Noah: It takes a really specific person to be able to manage the scale of technology that we're dealing with and like, especially in a luxury home. And not only do you have to make it work perfectly, but everybody really does care about like the design vision and how it looks. And so I finally... feel like we're getting to the time when the A &D community is realizing that technology is really going to be part of the American landscape of interior design. It's 2026 y'all, right? So, but behind you, what's so cool is I had always imagined that these TVs should be more of artistic expressions of your personality than just, you know, a black rectangle on the wall, right? From the first time I saw flat screen TV, I started designing products around it because I realized that it's going to change entertainment. It inherently would change entertainment because it was pushing these TVs into the living spaces. Places like the living room, the bedroom, the media room. ⁓ It was a clunky process, y'all, and we know this. know, putting one of those early TVs, which I know we all played with, that weighed 200 pounds and had a giant silver frame and stuck like eight inches off the wall and had lots of cords and no art on it. Very different times now. ⁓
Brandon and Brian: They were all bezel.
Noah: The ability to not only display artwork around a house through these is, I think, incredibly important, but also how do we want to finish these pieces? How do we want to frame them? How do we want to choose art? ⁓ And I think that gives interior designers a lot to play with.
Bert Herrero: I agree with that wholeheartedly. think we are in a very creative industry and that brings on lot of ability from a lot of different angles with what we do. And I think that leads right into a really good question that we've got planned here, which was audio integration. Why should it be considered as part of the early design process? And share some examples of what early planning ⁓ led to in results of projects. And of course, No, I think that all of us in the industry are on the same page as to why we should be there early. But I think that this is really going to speak more to our design partners who are out there that want to have a better understanding or should have a better understanding of the type of role that we play in home, not just from a technology perspective, but from a design perspective, right? From an aesthetic point of view. Artistic, I should say.
Noah: Absolutely. And you know, we could all take a second to think about the evolution of the industry. You know, when I was traveling 20 years ago, I mostly was visiting really incredible stereo shops. You so one of my first campaigns was all about, it was about a flat screen TV and it said, this is not a stereo, right? This is something that's going on your wall. This is decor. Right, so to me, we all know how many steps it takes to just imagine starting a project from, you know, a client interaction meeting with an architect, their group of contractors, designers. When can we have that conversation? And I think what we're talking about is really, when do we start the lifestyle conversation? Right, so. Instead of going in with a lot of gadgetry or things that kind of might be off putting to an architecture designer, I think now that we're working with shades and with lighting and with switches and with choosing art and working with digital art and frames and technology, we could all agree that sound is an incredible, incredibly important part of interior design. Like I would say a hundred percent of designers. I would say they love sound. Probably before they'd say they'd love light, right? Sound has always been like music, entertainment has always been like a core reflection of like how a house feels, right? So I like to really get in there early. And I know we don't always get to talk to the homeowners, especially in the luxury market. In the commercial market, it's really different and I've learned a lot from the commercial market where it is very, it's very early. That's where it is all discussed because it has to be operated by the buildings. So like I've learned a lot from the commercial side, especially from our big commercial companies where they're designing, you know, 200 rooms, 300 rooms, spaces, connected spaces, entertainment spaces where the architect and the designers are working on it. We'll create a design vision for each space. We're thinking about how it's going to be used. And then we'll design into that spec. In luxury space, it's kind of every house is different, right? And you have an interior designer who might have their opinion and the architects have their opinion. And then we're trying to integrate all this complex technology. But we all know the first thing coming into the house, like probably the most important thing to build on. What would you say it is? It's like starts with power is the power is clean power coming in. Right. I was just talking to Joe from Rosewater, Rosewater about like how to create clean power. was just with him yesterday. ⁓ Joe Piccarelli and like, ⁓ thinking about like, wow, even the first stage is still about technology and design and having the architects understand that the next stage network. Like we're trying to run everything on a digital bed. Right. And so networks, these are things that aren't that fun to talk about necessarily. And so we don't talk about network. always talk about like wifi. Let's get, make sure you get great wifi in here. Cool. We don't need to know the details, just like you don't need to know the details of HVAC, but everybody knows every house needs electricity, which is the veins of the house. Right.
Brandon and Brian: Mm-hmm.
Noah: We all need HVAC, know, the heart and lungs of the house. And technology is kind of the consciousness, how the house works. So I think there's a lot of education that we have to provide there. And I've realized over the years, it's, we're really just trying to provide that education at this point and not talk about gadgetry too soon. So like one of my favorite questions is, where do you like to spend time with the family? Let's talk about client. Let's talk about their needs. When can we interject what's possible? I have a story about this. There's one person I've worked with for literally over two decades and he always starts his whole kind of, I would call it a pitch, but it's a little deeper than that. His first thing is always like, tell me about what you do in the morning. And that could be a scary question. Like, what do you mean? Well, how often do you come to this house? because you know there's usually three to six houses. When are you here? ⁓ How often are you here? When does family show up? Where do you entertain? ⁓ And I watched him do this where he literally by the time you're only up for a half hour, he's already figuring out, you know, when your shades come up, when your lighting goes on, you know, what it feels like when that happens. Your coffee machines are activated. You know, we're talking about where's the sound like, okay, cool. I like to listen to I like to listen to really, I like to listen to lot of music, like actually right away in the labs, you know, let's go like in the morning where we go next to the kitchen. cool. How does that sound? By the time we get to the media rooms where you know you're going to be you know like let's face it if you're if you're in the states the research shows that you will watch like over 30 hours of screens a week between all the fans you know a lot of time who watches Netflix here?
Brandon and Brian: Allah.
Noah: What do you watch? What do you guys watch? This is one of my favorite questions. Yeah, Bert, what do you like to watch? What's your mainstays?
Bert Herrero: Man, I'm tough with TV because I don't watch a lot of it, but when I do watch it, it's got to be something with guns and action-packed, things blowing up. I mean, that's my life.
Noah: There you go. Yeah, movies. That's entertainment. like that. That tells me a lot right there, right? What do we want to do? You need a full scale media room to activate your soul. How about you guys? What do you like? What do you guys like? What are you guys into?
Brandon and Brian: We do family night on Fridays, we limit screen time for the kids. So we try to make it a family thing. So if we're not doing the Switch 2 in the media room, then we're doing a movie. So ⁓ it's usually a family movie, animated movie, but ⁓ we gotta have good entertainment space for when we do use it. ⁓ It's gonna be enjoyable. Because without good audio, man, I'm taking right out of something.
Noah: It's right. Like the video is important, but you know, the, audio is like the impactful part of it. The thing that activates you, you know, ⁓
Brandon and Brian: Personally, it's more important. That's a lot of what we have to get around to people is, know, come in there and they're just like, ⁓ yeah, I just need a TV on the wall. It's like, okay, like you said, qualifying questions. What are you watching? Because if, you know, we have a lot of complaints, I like to watch baseball every night.
Noah: Yeah. Where you at?
Brandon and Brian: And you have a lot of complaints. Well, ⁓ when the crowd's noisy, I can't hear what the announcers are saying. I can't differentiate into that sound. it's like, OK, well, yeah, you don't have a dedicated speaker. Have those voices come at you like you should. So let's work on that. answering those questions and finding out what they're liking is just a huge, huge way to start the conversation.
Noah: ⁓ Yeah, it's lifestyle. You guys are right there with me. And for me, studying what's coming out of a television is as critical as like, what are we listening to? Right? So the reason when we started formulating like the early science of Lien, we created a more of like a psychoacoustic thought that we call direct source audio, which means like for the history, I studied the entire history of how television was created. And even on the first television, which was created and launched at the World Fair, this is 1939, even that first TV had a full-scale integrated speaker on it. And that's because the way that you record TV or movies is much different than how you record stereo. And what I realized quickly was that... through watching how people use their televisions, I realized we kind of get really strategic about like what we're delivering on that TV because some people watch sports, movies, TV, sitcoms, all that kind of thing. And then they switch over to movies, which are all like highly incredibly detailed processed kind of soundscapes. Me as a designer, I started seeing in New York, like when it all started, there was just putting so many speakers around a TV that were gargantuan. But what frequency comes out of a TV? 80 % of it is dialogue, very small scale, know, the small scale like of dialogue driven sound comes out of a TV. And then all the details, all the stuff, all the feeling comes out of like the satellite. And then, you know, you add the subwoofer, it's just like theater. So I always imagined these TVs to be just street living space theaters, right? It's not. Leon doesn't create soundbars. that when we started designing the first speakers for TVs, there was no such word as soundbar. This is in the mid 90s and when I realized that 80 % of the signal came out of the center channel, I focused really clearly and closely on what was coming out of the center channel and that's why we still use the finest drivers on earth to reproduce these vocal sounds.
Brandon and Brian: Right.
Noah: When it comes to surrounds or to like how you watch a show, sometimes like it could be stereo sum to mono or mono sum to stereo. Like how it comes out for like how they're recorded the show from what era. Cause what's also cool is like who would have ever known you could watch TV from at any time from any era. And like our kids could be watching stuff that we grew up on. They do it right? It's sick. They know it. It's like, and then we'd get to like watch shows like at this level.
Brandon and Brian: And they do, right?
Noah: and how good the shows are now. Like, it's incredible.
Brandon and Brian: instead of on a 19 inch TV with the speakers like we did when we were kids. ⁓
Noah: Yeah. Black and white night. Yeah, exactly. Like we got it. Like we were lucky to like get like tune it in with the antennas. My parents wouldn't even go.
Bert Herrero: You guys, you guys, you guys realize that you're all talking about tuning with antennas and the only one here that's old enough to remember changing tubes on TVs is right here. So, but let's ⁓ let's date myself just a little bit.
Noah: The dog. I get very, I get very into this because it's such a bizarre thing that happened. You know, like thinking about like now we're plugging in 115 inch TV and it's supposed to go in a living room. know, it's
Brandon and Brian: I'm from India, right? Think of your own wall.
Bert Herrero: So a a couple true stories. So first off, my very first business, I was 18 years old and I was the antenna doctor was the name of my business. I actually found a business card stuffed in one of my old books that I happened to have moved a few, like I've got to find it just to share it one day because it's no BS, right? But it was like my first.
Noah: What? I'm hoping to note on that, I'm a little note to myself about the antenna doctor.
Bert Herrero: It was my first business at the age of 18, which was a lot of moons ago. So, but another cool thing is, is, and going back to the audio experience, you know, one of my, one of my mentors, and I'm going to date myself here. So one of my mentors, put me in front of the television and muted the audio and asked me to watch something. And okay. He was done watching. And so he changed a channel or moved on to a different movie or something. And he. pulled the S video off of the television, because that's the dating, okay, it was S video. And he pulled the S video off, so I had no video, but I had all the audio dialogue, and I was able to sit there for 10 minutes. And when we finished, he said, what was the first movie about? Like, I have no idea, I couldn't hear it. And then he moved on to the second movie, he goes, what was the second movie about? And I basically told him the whole storyline for the 10 minutes that I listened to it, right? So the point is that while the video is super important because the video kind of gives you that first feedback, right? The audio is what gives you the interpretation, right? Of what is playing, right? And so that's how important the audio side is. I've used that example for many, many years with people that are more into the video and the audio really wasn't a thing to them. I explain them, right? Just give them that little scenario and they start to recognize the experience that they're missing by not having the audio portion really consume them, right? So.
Noah: I, yeah.
Brandon and Brian: So I have a lot of arguments with a friend of mine who's a big movie watcher and this or that, but he doesn't like a lot of the things that I like. And I'm like, how is this possible? This movie was great. This TV show was great. And he travels a lot. Finds out all he does is he pirates movies and watches them on his laptop in his hotel room. And that's the experience he's getting. was like, oh, so you're missing all the sound design that went into making this. All the fidelity. That needs to be there to fully enjoy this. And you're just getting, you're getting a quarter of the experience you should be.
Bert Herrero: Right?
Brandon and Brian: and that's why you're having the attitude that you are. So it's a big difference when there's no sound.
Noah: That is really important what you guys are talking about. Sometimes, I was very lucky at a young age to work on a lot of film sets. I did storyboards for film, I worked behind the set. I learned from a lot of my friends who are filmmakers, so I got to see what that looks like. Like you guys are talking about, I would say film, TV, these are some of the highest art forms possible. Like the amount of coordination and effort they put into creating these kind of experiences is, it's the height of technology. Right, when it goes into tell those stories. So I totally agree with you. It's really, you don't need to do it. But if you do, you know, it just changes how you can appreciate art. And so now like where we're going, is, is cool as like, we want to appreciate art through an artistic expression of not only what was created, but through the hardware, a light like with the same like kind of analogy with music rather with playing music, right? Like we, like with Leah and I always talk about, we're trying to make you the finest guitar possible, but how are we, what kind of amplifier are we going to use? You know, how are we going to dial in this system? How far can we push it? ⁓ And the fun part is like, I think we can all work together to rebuild this experience because a lot of the experiences become commoditized. And I have talked with a lot of you guys, know that, like, how do we talk to a world that feels so commoditized and give them something special, right? So especially in luxury home, which is kind of where we work, luxury home, and then. really big corporations, people mistake that they can hear something like physically with what they're hearing and it's the same thing you can imagine with a car, right? Like you can get to where you want to go with any car. You can get to where you want to go with bicycle. You get to where you want to go with rollerblades. It's fine. But when it comes to the things that people want in their homes where everything is bespoke, They've considered every single detail of the house from the switchers to the shades. What do you want this experience to feel like? And how quickly can we show you that difference? Right? So like, as you know, like if you just listen to the TVs right now, the speakers fire at the wall out of the box. The frames that come with the TVs are made of plastic. Arguably like they're becoming too thin the TV. Right? Like what artwork in a luxury home is three eighths of an inch thick? It's weird. So, you know, like adding a little bit of materiality to that entire experience and then adding like the proper sound to fit that space. ⁓ You can only, I guess, do it by showing people. And I think that's, you know, building the trust one person at a time. and building that story somehow and like, want to work on this. I want to work on this as an industry and I want to work on this. Like, how do we get this story out to people through media, right? Like we're already there watching it. How do we tell the story? like, Hey, this is how Daisy sets it up. This is what we want to give you. This is what Leon's about. The experience, you know, and also like, was it made? Where does it come from?
Brandon and Brian: the experience.
Noah: Like what in a luxury home is going to be made out of plastic or come out of a factory that comes from nowhere where you don't know the makers? You know, Leon, we like every last thing, the last thing we do at every Leon is add our makers mark because we still handcraft every single product every single day you order. you.
Brandon and Brian: There's so much to be said for that. So much
Bert Herrero: think, you know, I'm sorry, go ahead, Brenda.
Brandon and Brian: I was just saying, I mean, I'm in homes all the time and we try to bring up Leon in a conversation all the time. Because the majority of the people are talking about the more retail based competition that's out there and what they have to offer, unaware that there are other options out
Noah: Thank you.
Brandon and Brian: And the car analogy was great. ⁓ I was in a networking group full of people and I had to give presentations once a quarter or whatever. And that was always my example, is who here drives a car every day? Answered all those questions. Okay, who here watches TV every day? Everybody can shut up. was like, so why can you justify? spending $400 on an 85 inch TV and just be okay with it when there's something out there that really doesn't cost that much when you look on an everyday usage and you're getting a much better experience. I was like, how many of you guys rolled down your windows? No, you have automatic windows, right? How many people have a Parola? No, you all have SUVs and trucks and everything else is like, there are other options, but you chose luxury on certain items, why not on something else you use every day? It's the same thing with speakers, with everything that we do in our industry, it's just education, right?
Noah: ⁓ That is so important. And some of you said just also rang a bell, which is like. I wouldn't want somebody to just do like even on any level, like even if you think about something you don't think like HVAC, like even someone like, like I don't want just the entry level thing that you see at a big box store, right? That's not fun for me. Even if I can't afford something, I want to know what I got to earn for. Right. ⁓ I obviously am an enthusiast of many things and like, you know, I'm someone who will save up for art. You know, it's something that I want to get and like, but What you said about, you know, the thinking about what we're creating in the luxury landscape is, is hyper important. Cause even when I go to some shows, I still feel like what we have to work on is like, how do we connect to what a luxury kind of transaction feels like and make it less transactional, right? A luxury conversation is about desire, What's going to feed or feel right for this kind of home? So like when we're building Leons and creating what we call the materiality for the products, we're only thinking about what is right for a luxury home. That starts with the drivers and the design, what's coming out, how natural is it, how listenable is it, what does it feel like? We want it to feel like something that you'd expect in a luxury home. just like you'd see in the kitchen. And so like the new materials we're working on right now, they're all completely sustainable materials. We're using Italian laminates or American kiln dried hardwoods. We're working with the best companies in the world on the components. And those are things that like, just like any automotive company would be talking about. You know, any luxury company, that's what you would come to expect. And that is really the most important thing. Like how do we put the right samples? You know, that's let the designers feel it, touch it, understand that this is what it's going to be made of. No, this is going to be bespoke handmade for you. Right. And we all know this is what the expectation is. So we started doing design shows a couple of years ago, like full exhibiting, like we will be exhibiting at ICFF next week in New York city. and which is a huge, it's called the Industrial Contemporary Furniture Fair. And we're exhibiting a brand new collection, which was a huge collaboration at the World Trade Center to show people, like the first thing people want is options. So when you go to a big box store, if you're thinking in retail, like what on earth would even go in a luxury home from a retail location? that you would see, you know, the field stone, the floor treatments, the window treatments, the sofas, these are things that will take it's all handmade. And so like that is why sometimes I. like, I'm always trying to let people know, like we take care of every detail, like if you take a Leon apart, every single part of the entire product is thought out. And you could come and watch it being made.
Brandon and Brian: So I'll hand it.
Noah: ⁓ And you don't pay an ultra premium for this. you said, you know, like if I told you, can build you a custom handmade home theater and install it in your home. What would you expect to pay?
Brandon and Brian: We know the costs on this stuff. So a little bias.
Noah: Yeah. Well, when you know about it, right? Like, so a theater could cost you a million. It's, it's, could, if you're talking about theater, it could be a million dollar thing. When you're talking about media room, how much is a media room theater cost? Well, holy cow. We got to design it for you. We're going to have 10 meetings about it. We're going to choose all the hardware. We're going to design what it looks like.
Bert Herrero: We're not answering.
Noah: We're going to choose the frames, the art, the sound, the amplifiers, the wiring, how it works, how it turns on, all digital handshakes have to happen, everything. ⁓ So we said we can design that and build you a literal custom theater for $12,000. Does that sound like a lot? Yeah. And that's not at all. That's a handmade Leon complete system, two subwoofers, completely bespoke. ⁓ you know, left center, right speaker, the frame surround sounds amplifiers, you know, so me like, show me something else, right? What else can I get? Like I like, have all Mac amps on everything on every speaker I have. So, know, obviously I'm obsessed with power, not that kind of power, not gross power amplification power. I want, I love the thought of just like,
Brandon and Brian: Yeah
Noah: that the whole single chain, how it feels, is all coming from people who care about it. So that starts with the artists or the producers or the creatives that made the content and goes all through the way, that single path. What are we really doing to make it cool, make it right?
Brandon and Brian: It's such a cool lens to look at it through, do know? Yeah, you know, it's the. In the fact that this stuff is made in-house in US, you know, there's it is right in Michigan. It's like it's it's it's right there. You know, it's like we can, know, ⁓ can go see it, right? We can go to a concert at your ⁓ it's just there's so much to be said for that that's lost on so many people when we've dumbed down.
Noah: Thank you. Yeah, every day.
Brandon and Brian: audio with soundbars and with Bluetooth speakers and the lazy way of sort of slinging a solution rather than designing and thoughtful integration of a solution. it's just you guys have tackled that though, too, instead of an ugly soundbar being under a TV, have a tone case. I mean, I'm like, you guys have so many.
Noah: Ugh. Right. I wanted to be right so bad that we will take other people's like off the shelf stuff and customize case works to make it look like it belongs in a fine house, you know?
Brandon and Brian: And it transforms it. does not one client ever complains once they get their tone case installed. Totally worth it.
Noah: Right, because then it's like the more expensive than the speaker.
Brandon and Brian: The important thing you said there was options, right? I mean, we go in there and majority of the time, I'd say 85 % time, you have one person that's going home and the other person is stalemating. Like their walls are up, I don't need this, it's not gonna look good, I don't want anything else in my room. Okay, well, what kind of experience do you want? Again, that's the question to get it. Well, I want great sound, but I don't want anything in my room. Like, well, you just did a whole remodel with no infrastructure put in, so you can't do anything invisible. You can't do any of this. So what options are you left with? Okay. A sound bar. Well, sound bars are ugly. Okay. Well, I have a beautiful case here that we can at least hide that for you and make it a little better experience for you. So having that option just avoids the no, because you never want to get into that no territory. So that's fantastic.
Noah: Yeah. I love, right, that's so true. That's why like leading with like the finish, the frame, like to us, like we started saying like, how do you want to frame your TV? And people are like, what do you mean? You're like, ⁓ yeah, you don't just have to have it look like out of the box anymore, right? That was cool 15 years ago, but these things are ubiquitous now. They're inexpensive. You know, so like who would have ever thought you get a ⁓ hundred inch TV for less than, like, what is it?
Brandon and Brian: Mm-hmm.
Noah: a of grand, five grand, 10 grand. It's nuts, it's cheap. And so like, it really, the conversations change dramatically. And I think we all like, we are all, I know working on this, like you said, the way we talk to our customers. so we try to lead with things that they understand more. And I want to talk about something interesting that a lot of customers are like, I'm not an audiophile, so don't try to sell me anything. So I'm like, are you a sofa file?
Brandon and Brian: Right.
Bert Herrero: Cheap.
Noah: Are you a file? Do you, are you a refrigerator file? Because I wouldn't put like a cheap off the shelf refrigerator in your $500,000 kitchen. You know, like it's everything has to be thought of like, Hey, I feel like you're, I feel like you deserve something that's bespoke. That's interesting. That fits in, fits in with your vision, design vision. But I think we have to kind of dispel some stuff that sound is a commodity, right? Of course, there's commodity versions of everything, right? And I think the first thing I would just say is like, ⁓ yeah, those are really good for the kids' rooms or the side rooms, you know, that we can do something like that. But we want to give you something really beautiful for your main living areas where you're going to entertain.
Bert Herrero: I think a question, question I heard a while back ago was, you know, how, do you want your sound to look like? Right. Or what do you want your sound to look like? And I think that that really speaks to what we're trying to do in the customization side. Right. And it's trying to make sure that we have bespoke products that look great for specific rooms. Right. It's like you said, right? Like you could have a guest room and Hey, throw a sound bar in there and just, you know, whatever fill the room. Right. But.
Noah: Yes. Absolutely.
Bert Herrero: in your main areas, you're spending a ton of money when we're building these homes and doing all the design work and stuff. And then you're just gonna throw a cheap black frame TV up on the wall and what? And then black speakers or in-wall speakers with the white grills. mean, it just, there's so much more available out there.
Noah: There's so much more and I think that we really have to get back to that. And I want to address something interesting, which is I know we do a lot of speakers in the, you know, lot of in-ceiling speakers, a lot of invisible speakers, and you really won't see us working that much in that category. Because Leon, our core differentiation is about sounds you can see. What other companies are working on is really things you're really meant to conceal or hide. And we do a lot of concealing products in media decor and with hiding TVs and with concealing them. But when it comes to sound, we have people now accepted at least that a sound bar, it's kind of like the speaker of right now, right? It's the biggest category of sound ever. We never would have thought. 30 years ago, like I had to convince people five years that it was okay to put three channels of speakers in one bar. And we called it the horizon because it looked like the horizon line. Um, but now it's pretty widely accepted. And so now we can work on it as what we call a sound fixture, a sound fixture, like, because just like a light fixture, I think a lot of speakers turned into like there are people are working on the bulb and not the fixture.
Brandon and Brian: never, ever.
Noah: Right? So it's like, cool. we want to be the, we want the walls. We want the halls. Like we're really not good at the lid on the ceiling. I think it's cool to make, to have less digital, like less visual noise there. When it comes to what's in front of you, we want it to feel like art. want to transform your television into a living piece of art. Like something that you could really live with. It doesn't interrupt the design. It feels like it makes it cool. There you go. There you go. Like you can change it. It works with you. It's a free piece.
Bert Herrero: Thanks. ⁓
Noah: of art, it's alive, it's living, and so, and it becomes part of the texture of the house. I am so happy that we now have options to get rid of the damn shiny black screen, because I'm going to these houses, the most immaculate space in the world, and then you see a shiny TV with no frame on it. You can see like the wires and the metal behind it. I'm like, and that's what they think of all the work we do. Think about it as integrators, like all the work we do to put that thing up, they'll never know.
Bert Herrero: Thank
Brandon and Brian: You have an industrial box on the wall.
Noah: Then you put an industrial box that you can get at Costco on the wall. That's all they see every. And then if it doesn't work, they're like, we're mad at the remote control. Like, cool. We can be bad. We can work on that. But what we, want to do is, know, as much care as the integration, as the integrators put in, you know, like how the system works, the engineer behind it, what the rack looks like, what the control room looks like. I want to work as much on that on the foreground. What does the room look like? What is the client interacting with forever? And that's critical. This is the thing you're going to stare at for 32 hours. So me as an artist and a designer, I'm like, I'm paying real close attention to what that feels like. this year.
Bert Herrero: Thank you. Yep.
Noah: all the materials I changed to really be state of the art, get sustainable. And strangely, through working on that with companies that are just so incredible, you mostly in design and furnishings, we learned that like, not only are we finding that it's more efficient to work with these higher end materials, but it's also better, it's more sustainable. I think sustainability is something we can all write off, so it doesn't matter. But I certainly don't want to fill landfills with junk. You know, I want the Leons are built for life. Like a speaker that we built is literally guaranteed forever. So we're getting speakers back from literally the nineties that look like they have never been used and we'll refurbish them. We rebuild them or build them to the right sizes. Yeah, we don't want them to end up as just like, you know, landfill. We want them to be, they want us to have a little legacy, you know, of what we're building.
Bert Herrero: you
Brandon and Brian: It's amazing. That is what we're trying to get around to people is a lot of people are looking for sustainability. A big word is future proof. ⁓ you I don't want to have to do this again in five, six years. And you're trying to explain to them, okay, well, you break your knowledge a little bit and go from that basic system and spend some more money. You're looking 15, 20 years you have a product as opposed to five or six, you're replacing it. So it's, again, it goes back to education, right? Just trying to get people and talk about this and let everyone know.
Noah: Yeah.
Bert Herrero: Okay.
Noah: That's the hard part because you guys are in front of the clients. It's really difficult for people to understand how difficult that is. You know, to be in front of clients that I really expect the most and they're amazing people and they're usually highly creative and they have really specific tastes as we know. You know, when they get to work with the best designers and architects. And I think the job, like the reason we're doing the design shows is just to get them familiar with what's possible. Right. Here's some stuff. Here's some solutions. They need to see it and they need to touch it they need to say like, it's not foreign. It's just like picking a light fixture. can pick, they pick the shades now. Right. So I've been like talking to audio dealers about like spending more time with interior designers. Cause I think does the interior designers hold a lot of the keys to the kingdom.
Brandon and Brian: They need to see it.
Noah: Right after the architect passed off to design, like, and I think, and this is going to be a little controversial. I actually think that we are not just technology designers. We're not, we're clearly not AV guys anymore. Right. We are interior designers. Interior design will be led by technology, not just by the furniture and fixtures and finishes in the house. Right. Like how does this house feel? Like, look, what's happened to lighting. Like look what catcher is done.
Brandon and Brian: 100%.
Bert Herrero: Hmm
Noah: to the lighting formats of the entire, like everything is changing, right? You can't unsee it. It's so much better. It's crazy. And I think like, so we've actually partnered around the country, you know, with Lutron to kind of show like, look how we could transform how this room feels.
Brandon and Brian: transforms a room with a little color, right? You inject a bit of color.
Noah: I think it would be cool for us with Daisy to make that experience. Here's what's possible.
Brandon and Brian: Yes.
Noah: You know, like how do we create a small room with a small story that takes you through sound, not just of movies and shows, like sound of what meditation, sounds of nature, sounds that sounds that will ignite your mind, you know, and like, how does it coordinate with the shades? How does it coordinate with the lighting? How does it coordinate with how you talk to it? You know, there's a lot to do, but I think we can, it's all finally working, which is a good start because I would say like 10 years ago, this stuff is not working. You know, it was barely working.
Brandon and Brian: Right, right,
Bert Herrero: good conceptually, and we knew we'd get there, but we weren't there.
Noah: No, and it's still really difficult and it's still, it's definitely art. It's definitely design. And the fact that every house is different and that you guys will walk into every home, it'll be completely different.
Brandon and Brian: Everyone's unique.
Noah: Everyone's unique and that's why this is an art. Integration is definitely an art. And so I just want to continue to promote that, continue to investigate it. It's the same thing we always talked about. Now we're just trying to think more of like, how do we awaken creativity in that regard? How do show it? How do we tell it? How do we teach it?
Bert Herrero: So would you say that this is like an emerging trend that you ⁓ advise to like designers and homeowners and stuff, or do you think that there's a different emerging trend in the audio world or technology realm?
Noah: I mean the cool trends I'm seeing, like if you go to New York City or any major city, Vegas, you LA, you're going to see complete listening lounges focused on analog listening experiences happening. I was trying to build one in New York City all of last year. We're building them all around. There's a huge focus on analog experience for sure. And definitely on, you know, like how the house is going to make you feel like the wellness, the design. This is, this is absolutely a trend. And I would say it's a forever trend at this point ⁓ that we really should pay attention to. And like, we're going to need to create shows about this just like this, but imagine shows where we show, Hey, this is kind of where it was at. This is where we're going. What do you prefer? This is kind of like what it looks like if you get a commodity install in your house. This is where we think you should, what you deserve in your house. Right. And like, we're not talking about things that are super costly, right? Even to put in Ketra. Yes. It's, it's definitely expensive to put in Lutron shades. It's definitely expensive. Good in ceiling or invisible speakers. Yes. Quality work around TV, but ultimately it's a small expense for the amount of time you get with them. You know.
Brandon and Brian: And it changes the livability of the space. We've all seen it. A terrible lighting design destroys an otherwise beautiful architectural space. if there was a poor lighting design done, there was no layers of light. know, it was, you know, did same thing with this. mean, no one, someone really needed to lead the way with bridging the art and technology together to be able to even have this discussion.
Noah: ⁓ it's... Yeah. where it's at, you guys. This is it. This is where we're going to do it. And it's going to happen. I didn't think it would take, I actually didn't think it would take 20 or 30 years. We were designing a lot of this stuff off the jump because we were thinking more like designers. We were trained next to architects when we were designing. So we were always thinking of space. But now that everything is kind of technology caught up to this thought, we really have to work on how we implement. And make sure that we implement what we believe is the best case scenario as many times as possible. Right? Like make one great space, even if we have to do it for free for a designer, just be like, Hey, let us take, let's just do this for you. I've probably done that 20 times this year. I'm like working directly with designers. I'm like, let me just send it to you. You pick it up. Feel it. Right. Anyway.
Bert Herrero: So let's circle real quick. Go back to this analog experience. Can you define that a little better for some of our viewers? Because they are design partners, trade partners, and they don't live in the realm that we live in,
Noah: So this kind of new trend was definitely defined in Brooklyn and New York City. There's some incredible sound designers ⁓ that ⁓ really started looking at... how the greatest designers of the 50s, 60s, 70s created speakers, like Altec Lansing, JBL, the original large format speakers that were really thinking about sound creatively. ⁓ the objects really are, they're enormous and they don't seem practical. They're almost so impractical now that they're super artistic looking, right? Cause they're foreign objects, they're enormous horns. Yeah, like so to have been trouble out of, you who's been designing,
Bert Herrero: Very retro.
Noah: a lot of these systems. And this all started probably, it was going on in New York City, but definitely in Japan, a lot like the Japanese listening lounges that were formed based on really the appreciation for vinyl. And vinyl is a really great example of something that is not about what is easiest, right? It is really hard to design a listening lounge that sounds authentic, that can reproduce vinyl. Think about how many iterations you can use. But to think about designing a space where now people can slow down, have an analog experience that focuses on features like art. Right. It's a modern art show. Like I was in New York City at Silence, Please, which is a small new company coming up. And they're designing really vintage style speakers, designing amplifiers, tube amplifiers. But the warmth of the sound is so different than what you get on like your phone or like you were saying your laptop. Right. Right. It's like it's outrageously. It's like amplifying it by a thousand fold. And now it's starting to trickle in.
Brandon and Brian: Mm-hmm.
Noah: to luxury restaurants. I'd say we're designing right now for large chains, sound experiences that I would have never imagined they would put into a retail location. It's like becoming part of the normal part of a soundscape. Like how's this place going to feel, right? What's the ambiance? So I think what's really fun about this listening lounge, like If you go to one, definitely you should, because they're also thinking about the cocktails. They're thinking about like, what are we going to play? What DJ are we going to bring in? ⁓ And from our standpoint, we're working on this as well. Like we have a place in our factory called the Leon Loft.
Brandon and Brian: Ha ha ha.
Noah: where we've created a different style version of it. So like we created handmade large format PAs and subwoofers, but they're all decked out in leather and hardwood. We use vintage horns, dual 18s, dual 15 inch drivers, like, yeah, state of the art mixers. Yeah, got it. Tomorrow we have Iron and Wine playing. We are super lucky and it just keeps me.
Bert Herrero: Beautiful. ⁓ I gotta see this.
Brandon and Brian: You guys have amazing artists come through there.
Noah: keeps me going every day. Iron and Lion coming tomorrow. We get to capture and record and playback. And so I think this trend is really, it's showing us what people really wanna do. Like they wanna unplug a little. Right, we know like we can get sucked into our phones and. sucked into like the constant media that were being sold to me. And sometimes you just want to be like, yo, let's put on a record, which to me is like putting a like, to me, it's like putting a log on a fireplace. Like I want to put, like sometimes I'll listen to one record for like 10 days. was just like this last week and I was at Detroit vinyl fest. It was packed. got, it was packed with kids.
Brandon and Brian: ForceFed. I love that.
Noah: ⁓ it sick. People of all ages, you know, they were selling posters and art and people were dancing, DJs were live and there was 50 vendors. But this appetite is there right now and we definitely can deliver that. Our industry can deliver that in your house and we can make it so you don't even, if you want to see it, cool, we'll make you something radical. If you don't want to see it, we'll make you something radical. And I think people like, so I start talking to like, you start
Brandon and Brian: Right.
Noah: talking to your customers about listening lounges, their vibes, what they love, their interests. And now we're talking about lifestyle. Now we're on a different motorcycle, right?
Brandon and Brian: That's where my own kids, like there's seven and nine and they listen to in our two channel space, which is in our parlor, right? Like it's separate from everything else. There's no other technology in it other than the stereo. ⁓ ⁓ grown up knowing that's how dad listened to music. That's how mom listened to music. ⁓ there's a record player there. They can see, feel, touch the records. They know where they go. You know, there's an option for digital there. We we have a CD transport. We've got, you know, we've got stream. We've got a Bluesound streamer on there as well. the fact is that there's two sets of speakers there. We could switch in between them. It's B &Ws. You know, we need some Lyons in there. we've got a couple options there. You know, we've got some floor standards and some towers and they can hear the difference in the sound. And that's where they enjoy listening to music because we can just relax on the couch.
Noah: all right. hey, is good. I'm down with BMW. Those are great.
Brandon and Brian: and sit back and listen to music and it doesn't have to be this, you listen to one song and jump. Like, no, you can put the album on and really consume it and enjoy it for what it is. And it's so nice to see that my kids enjoy that even at their age.
Noah: ⁓ my God. ⁓ Yeah. By 70, he's record player all day. He came with me to the show, you know, like you said, and I want to make this more, I want to feel continuity with what you just said. So like, it feels like when you go to a restaurant or a club, you're noticing it sounds right. You know, when you go in your car, it sounds right. You go in your home, it sounds right. And of course, we're all gonna listen to You know, our headphones, AirPods, whatever you got. But you'll know that that is, that's background, right? And sometimes you move the art into the foreground. And that's what's so cool about like, what's being created right now. Like, I think like TV is having a moment. Like some of the shows I'm watching. are insane. Did you guys saw White Lotus? mean, like, what? How could you write something that insane and that good? I'm watching like beef right now. I'm like, I can't stop. It's nuts. The Bear? Holy shit. I mean, these shows are so well made. When you listen to that on a proper system, just like when you listen to a record in a listening lounge, now you're feeling something. And to me, that equates to you are alive. And let me tell you how much time we get on the planet Earth.
Brandon and Brian: Ha ha ha.
Noah: this much space. From the moment you wake up, open your eyes, and you move on to the next state of energy. So what are we going to do with our time, gents? What are we going to do?
Brandon and Brian: Enjoy it. Enjoy the people and enjoy the environment.
Noah: That's right.
Bert Herrero: Enjoy every second you're alive, Bottom line.
Brandon and Brian: Don't take it for granted.
Noah: I think we could end on that.
