While Sounds Good To Me is a side of the business that has always done well under Baxter's direction, and continues to do so, Graham is particularly pleased at the way in which business has taken off for the contracts division. Over the last two to three years, Sound Division has earned itself a formidable reputation as one of the premier suppliers and installers of audio, AV and lighting systems to London's most prestigious bars, clubs and restaurants.
"Our hard work has paid off," observes Graham. However, as he points out, it's not by chance or happy coincidence. "When we changed direction in 2000, we made it one of our goals to move up to the premier league in this market, and I think our portfolio of installations, both completed and currently on our books, proves that we've come a long way towards achieving our aim." As if to echo this sentiment, Sound Division has recently been nominated Installer of the Year in the prestigious national BEDA Awards for its AV installation in what has become something of an icon on the London bar/club scene - Lonsdale House.
Graham puts his success down to a number of factors. "The most fundamental aspect has to be about customer service," he states. "That's what builds trust and your reputation. At Sound Division we pride ourselves on completing our installations to time, specification and budget. So far it's served us extremely well. More and more of our work is either repeat business or coming to us via recommendation from satisfied customers. A large part of that success is due to the great team we have here at Sound Division, in particular Elliot Patterson who handles much of the contracting work. Another key factor is having good suppliers behind you. After all, once you've specified the job and promised the customer that you'll be there at a certain time on a certain day, if your suppliers let you down with the equipment, the one that looks foolish in front of the customer is you."
It is therefore no accident, says Graham, that so many of his installations are based around JBL systems distributed by Harman Pro UK. Rainer Becker's acclaimed concept bar and restaurant, Roka, is just one recent example. The brief was for a high quality sound system for the basement Shochu bar, with sufficient headroom to be able to go from background music levels up to foreground levels without any compromise in audio quality. Physically, the system had to be discreet in order to offer minimum distraction from the sumptuous surroundings, so Sound Division opted for a Crown-powered, distributed and zoned JBL system, based around Control Series loudspeakers and Cloud system control.
Four Control 29AVs and an SB210 sub-bass cabinet form the backbone of the system in the main bar area, while a further four Control 25AVs handle audio distribution to the peripheral lounge areas. Even the washrooms have not been neglected: here the company has installed a number of Control 24C ceiling speakers. The DJ booth is furnished with similarly high quality equipment, while system control and processing comes courtesy of a Cloud Z8 Mk2 eight-zone venue mixer, complemented by three Cloud RSL-6 remote volume and source select panels which will enable the operator to control volume levels and music sources independently across each zone. Signal processing from dbx comple
