What You See Is What You Get: My Autobiography (21 page)

The market for this makeshift stereo record-player with a pair of speakers was not really deemed to be the next growth area in the hi-fi industry. Instead, people were warming to the idea of a separate record deck, separate amplifier and a pair of speakers. Crazy as it may sound, people wanted four lumps of equipment instead of three!

The separate stereo amplifier market was starting to boom. It was monopolised by companies such as Armstrong and Leak and Japanese imports were also starting to make inroads. Leak's and Armstrong's amplifiers were very expensive. Teleton, a Japanese model, was cheaper, but still relatively expensive. I reckoned that if I could make an amplifier much lower in price than the Teleton, I'd be able to take a share of the market.

I challenged Chenchen to come up with a circuit design for an amplifier. I said I would invest some of my money and set up a production line to make it. He told me he was okay on the electronics side of things, but had no idea about the mechanical stuff. This was not an issue for me - my Brooke House
schooldays kicked in. I drew up a metal U-shaped chassis and designed a wooden cabinet for the chassis to slide into.

I could spend hours talking about every single amplifier and product we ever made, and it would be dead boring to everyone other than the old saddo hacks who used to work for me or buy from me. For the broader audience, I'm going to skip quite a few things and just cover the interesting points.

George Chenchen was fed up scratching around, making the odd few shillings per radio repair, so he asked whether he could come and work for me. I agreed and put him on the payroll. Between Chenchen and myself, we designed this amplifier.

It was impossible to start production at St John's Street, so I acquired a factory floor in Great Sutton Street, just down the road from St John's Street. The building was occupied by a garment manufacturer, but the first floor was vacant. It was approximately 1,000 sq ft, which looked massive when I saw it for the first time.

We moved everything out of St John's Street into Great Sutton Street. George bought a load of wood and made some assembly line benches, I recruited about twenty employees and we geared up for the production of this amplifier - the Amstrad 8000. I called it the 8000 as it was supposed to be eight watts per channel.

Dad was starting to panic again. Until recently there had been just me and him plus a van driver, Harry Knight. Suddenly I had about twenty employees.

'How are you going to pay for all this, Alan? What are you doing?' said my dad.

'Never mind, don't you worry about it. Look over the road . . . You see there's a bank?'

'Yeah.'

'Well, we're going to rob it.'

These jokes went down like lead balloons with my father. He had no sense of humour and couldn't grasp what I was up to.

I took the first production sample of the Amstrad 8000 to Premier Radio in Tottenham Court Road. The shop was owned by Ronnie Marks, my first supplier. He told me there was no point showing it to him, as he wasn't technical and wouldn't be able to evaluate it, but his manager, Nick, knew about these things.

I can't recall the number of times I drove back and forth between Great Sutton Street and Tottenham Court Road with various samples of this amplifier, only for it to be repeatedly rejected by Nick because of its poor
sound. Each time I told Chenchen why it was rejected, he would change a few components in the circuitry, and back I'd go again. This trial-and-error method of product design proved that Chenchen had as much knowledge about electronic theory as I do about butterfly collecting.

Later, I would learn that producing the right sound from an amplifier is relatively easy if you follow basic electronic principles. The irony of it was that any amateur reading
Practical Wireless
could have worked out the problem - it was all about the frequency response. To put it simply, the human ear starts to conk out above 15,000 Hz for high-pitched tones (dogs have a greater sensitivity at these frequencies; that's why they can hear high-pitched whistles which to us are silent). The deep bass sounds - which tend to blast your eardrums at discos - are at the other end of the frequency spectrum, at around 100 Hz or below.

Eventually, we got the amplifier to a state that Nick felt was reasonable, and at that point we started the production line. I think that Premier Radio bought the first six amplifiers off me.

With my plinth and cover business still subsidising the cash flow, I started to sell these amplifiers to all the electrical shops in Tottenham Court Road. At PS17, the Amstrad 8000 was much cheaper than anything else on the market. And simply because of the price tag, they started to sell quite well.

A lot of snobbery existed in the hi-fi industry at the time. The way you drummed up business was to advertise in the hi-fi magazines and try to obtain some editorial endorsement by way of technical reviews by the magazines' experts. I placed my first slice of advertising in one of these magazines. Unfortunately, their review of the amplifier wasn't great, and I spoke to the reviewers to find out why. In the end, I suggested the review should not be printed, but that I would still continue to pay for advertising.

Talking to the reviewers was a learning curve. Never mind what the retailers said; it was the
reviewers
I needed to listen to. These guys dictated what was needed. I found out just what they did in their test procedures and what results they expected to see.

I told Chenchen, 'Basically our amplifier is crap. The long and short of it is that the circuitry's rubbish - it doesn't have enough guts in it to produce the sound quality required.'

It was too late to do anything about it. I'd bought over 2,000 kits of components for this unit and we needed to make them. It wasn't that they didn't work - they did - but let's just say that if one were using it to listen to the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the gentlemen playing the triangle and
the double bass might as well have packed up and gone home, because the higher and lower frequencies were mostly absent.

Around this time, I changed the name of the company to A M S Trading (Amstrad) Ltd, and a couple of interesting stories emerged.

As production started to increase, I saw we had no expertise as far as assembly was concerned. Neither did we have any stock control system in place to ensure we didn't run out of components. I don't know what made me do this, but I called my old boss Sam Korobuck and asked him whether he would come and work for me, as he was a bit of a technical man. Sam accepted the job and started to professionalise our production process - the sort of thing he'd been doing all his life.

Chenchen, who by now had persuaded me to employ his wife to do the bookkeeping, did not like Sam's intervention. Sam used to talk a lot of sense. He would point out, diplomatically, that parts of the circuitry were not very good and that the assembly process was poor and inefficient. The internal construction of the amplifier was a joke, and Sam took it upon himself to design a small PCB (printed circuit board) which would do away with a lot of the wiring.

Chenchen couldn't really argue against it, though he wanted to. He had started to realise he couldn't blind me with science any more - I was learning the ropes fast. He knew he'd have to cut back on the Richter scale of bullshit.

As the years went on, I became very proficient in sussing out bullshit. The technical people I employed soon realised this and learned to tell the truth and own up to mistakes, or simply admit it when they didn't know the answer.

In spite of the problem with the Amstrad 8000, I was getting loads of orders, but the customer I
really
wanted to land was Comet, who had changed the face of retailing - they started discount warehousing. Most of their business was mail-order, though they did have a few warehouses in the north of England, so customers could turn up and buy in person. They took out full-page adverts in the hi-fi magazines and national newspapers, listing the names and prices of all the products they stocked. Customers would decide on which product they wanted, then simply look up Comet's price and purchase it. This form of retailing signalled the demise of the small electrical shop on the street corner, which simply couldn't compete.

The hi-fi boom was aided by this method of retailing. Manufacturers would advertise in hi-fi magazines and reviewers would give their expert opinions. Based on these reviews, various products would be commended as good value. The manufacturers' adverts would show the retail price - for
example, a Leak amplifier at PS40 - and Comet would list it at a discount, say PS35.

Their chief buyer, Gerry Mason, was nearly impossible to get hold of; he was being chased by every single supplier. I finally got Mason on the phone and tried to convince him that as our amplifier was so much cheaper than the others he was advertising, it would sell well and he should include it in his listings. After a lot of ducking and diving and about five phone calls, he agreed to a compromise: he wouldn't place an order, but agreed to list it in his advertising to see if there was any demand.

I pulled a bit of a stunt which, from a moral point of view, is not something one should be proud of, but business is business and it didn't harm Comet in the end. I got Chenchen, Johnnie and a few others to send orders with cheques to Comet for Amstrad 8000 amplifiers. Consider, Comet had none of these in stock. When they received orders so quickly after the first advert, I banked on it sparking off a large order from them.

I received a phone call from Gerry Mason's assistant who wanted to order six amplifiers to fulfil her mail-order requirements. Now came the big gamble.

'Six?' I said to the lady. Are you joking or what? We are a manufacturer - we don't mess about with six. You're supposed to be Comet - the big discount warehouse company. We cannot ship you anything less than a hundred pieces.'

'I'll get back to you,' she said.

Half an hour later, she did get back to me. 'Right,' she said, 'we'll take a hundred pieces.'

This was another milestone in the Amstrad story - once we had got into Comet, things
really
started to happen.

Comet was originally the only choice for people who wanted equipment at discount prices, though mostly they'd have to buy it mail-order. However, when companies like G. W. Smith and Laskys jumped on the bandwagon, customers had the option (which they preferred) of visiting the shops to see and touch the product before buying. Comet had to spread from their northern roots and open branches all over the country to compete. All these new-style electronic retailers were buying from me. I had the cheapest amplifier in the marketplace, it looked great value for money and it was British-made to boot.

Having witnessed this success, Chenchen and his wife were starting to think that they were my partners, though there were never any such discussions. He had never put a penny into this business and both of them were being paid very well. Nevertheless, they felt that Amstrad's success was down
to George. They could not see that it was me, the chief cook and bottle-washer, who made it all happen.

Trust me when I tell you that I am very loyal to my staff. People whom I work with and those that have helped to bring me fortune have nothing to complain about - I look after them all.
This
bloke deserved nothing.

Chenchen was the only electronics engineer we had, so after the products were assembled, they would come to him for final testing before they moved on for boxing and shipping out. There was no one else who could do it, and as a result, he was constantly holding me to ransom over the hours he worked, thus restricting the output of tested amplifiers, and his wife would be harping on at me: 'Without George, you would be nowhere.'

I could see their attitude changing week by week, as the prosperity of the company and sales of the product grew. At the same time, the arrival of Sam Korobuck made Chenchen more and more frustrated. Sam had incorporated some new production methods and, in doing so, had recruited some new people. In turn, Chenchen took on some allies in the factory - a couple of girls from Sunderland who were his favourites. In his eyes, they could do no wrong, and he sat them on the production line close to him.

I'm about to tell you a story that has haunted me all my life, and still haunts me to this day.

Sam had recruited the services of a young black kid, around fifteen years old. In those days, racial discrimination was rife. Chenchen was always dropping hints about black people - 'those people', as he would call them. I won't go into detail, as it makes me sick to think of it.

Sam sat the kid down and showed him how to assemble a PCB by inserting the components then turning the board over and soldering them into place. Sam had explained to him that we needed approximately fifty of these a day, but that he didn't expect him to produce all fifty - he should just do his best, as we had other operators doing the same.

I can visualise that kid now. He was happy as Larry, beavering away assembling these boards. Sam would come up to me and whisper, 'Look at that kid go - he's fantastic, he's really doing well.'

However, Chenchen would get up from his testing seat and go up to the kid and say to him, 'Look here, son, this is what's called a dry joint.
I'm
sat over there, working my arse off trying to fix these amplifiers, and
you
are making more faults with these dry joints, so watch out.'

A 'dry joint' meant that a component on the PCB wasn't making good contact due to poor soldering. In truth, there may have been the odd dry joint - even the Sunderland dollies made them - but certainly there were no more
than you would expect from any good operator. Chenchen was just angry that Sam had pulled off a great coup with this kid, who was the star of the factory. Chenchen couldn't stand it that a young black boy was making his favourites look stupid.