Milan Weber

In 1990, at the Tuzex store in Prague, I asked the shop assistant whether he might play me a SONY system with a CD player. “Just for a moment,” he replied. After about three minutes came: “That’s enough.”

Perhaps that small experience played its part too.

On 4 November 1991 my friend Robert and I opened the first specialist SONY shop in Moravia. It measured just 28 square metres.

The beginning was not easy. We had a beautiful shop and we tried to give excellent service — the customers simply did not come. So we had 15,000 leaflets printed and delivered them ourselves around Těšín and the surrounding area.

A few days later I arrived at work in the morning and there was a queue in front of the shop.

“We’re waiting for you to open, Mr Weber.”

You do not forget a moment like that.

In June 1996 we opened a larger shop in the centre. Alongside SONY and Philips came the brands that at the time stood for real hi-fi — NAD, Rotel, Denon, Tannoy, Mission and LOEWE. The shop now also had a separate listening room.

It was never only about selling something. We wanted to demonstrate the equipment, explain it, connect it properly and, where needed, install it in the customer’s home.

I was also very fortunate in my colleagues. Their decency, their willingness and the way they treated customers were among the foundations of our success.

In the mid-1990s technology took me in a rather different direction for a few years. A friend brought back from the USA something quite unbelievable at the time — a databank controlled by voice. I obtained the agency for our part of Europe and, in order to distribute it in Poland, founded the company VOICE.

We worked with the biggest players on the market, Optimus among them. We negotiated with IBM about localising the Speech to Text program, exhibited at INVEX and made the shortlist of the Crystal Disc competition. I then collected the award for significant technological progress in Las Vegas.

Thanks to all that I learned Polish, got to know the Polish market and gained distribution experience that later proved extraordinarily important.

It was becoming ever clearer that the field I really wanted to devote myself to was hi-fi.

So from 1998 I began building hi-fi distribution in Poland. At first in cooperation with Czech manufacturers — Pavel Dudek and his amplifiers, SHAN, Petr Král and above all the Pro-Ject brand.

Other brands followed step by step: Triangle, Sonus Faber, Cabasse, REL, Cardas, Primare, IsoTek, Balanced Audio Technology, Audiovector and Chord Electronics.

There came dozens of shows, presentations, tests and reviews, the building of a dealer network and thousands of hours of listening. Three times we won the award for best sound at the Audio Video Show in Warsaw.

It was a wonderful time — and an enormous education at the same time.

Perhaps I learned the most not from catalogues and technical specifications, but in personal meetings with the people who actually create top-class audio.

John Franks and Rob Watts of Chord Electronics, Christopher Cabasse, John Hunter of REL, Steve Bednarski and Victor Khomenko of BAT, Lars Pedersen of Primare, George Cardas and the designers at Sonus Faber.

With some of them, relationships grew that long ago went beyond ordinary business partnership. And it was conversations with these people that taught me one important thing: even after decades in hi-fi you do not know everything. There is always more to listen to, to compare and to discover.

One name, though, I must leave until last.

Heinz Lichtenegger, the founder of Pro-Ject.

In the early 1990s he stood at the birth of the Pro-Ject brand, and his vision contributed significantly to the return of the turntable and the vinyl record. I had the chance to be his business partner for more than twenty-five years and to watch at close quarters as a small Central European company became one of the most important turntable brands in the world.

For me personally it meant something more as well: a definitive return to analogue.

GO ANALOG.