Armour’s New Polish

The recent Street Life show at the NEC was used by Armour Automotive to launch their new dealer initiative and a couple of hugely important products. They had taken a special room for dealers and press to visit alongside the main hall and Talk Audio were invited to go report on the doings and what it’ll mean for us lot as well as the shops.
The first concept is about efforts to make Armour’s mobile electronics dealerships look more professional. You go to John Lewis or even the new Marks and Spencer’s technology departments and you get a totally upmarket professionalism and display. How often have you been into a shop that looked like a piled-up Souk? Great for bucket-bargain dahn the Saturday market in a field but we need to have a trade that treats us like grown ups.
Called the Armour Store Concept (well, the idea is a business to business one) it’s all about how we perceive a dealership that sells the Armour brands of Veba, Mutant, Autoleads and Kicker. If you go into a huge chain shop, you get the Autoleads display of adaptors but a true specialist will want to rack more of them and even allow you to find the bit you need, without having to rummage through a heap in a dump cage.

A modular system, it’ll mean that your local shop will be able to add and assemble whichever units of the thang that they feel is best for their outfit. So instead of a range of different bits of woodwork, you’ll see a coherency in how it looks. So far, so what you ask? Well, it is of course about Armour achieving some loyalty from their dealers but that translates to something I personally hold dear, which is the ability to go back to a shop later and upgrade without finding that they no longer sell what you bought and you have to start again or go find it elsewhere. I like to buy stuff that will be supported and warranted and not find that the dude who sold it to me is not interested if I have any problems as he no longer deals with the people he did when you got your toys. This makes for a bit of stable continuity, even if next year’s model will still tempt you.
The dealers’ Autoleads Cable Miles thing is exactly the same in that it’s about dealer loyalty. In these days of commodity product, especially in cabling, there are some truly dodgy cables out there, all with labels claiming to be four gauge, that vary absurdly. In fact most folks know that unless you get all your cables and power distribution blocks at the same time, the chances of your ever being able to find exactly the same range of kit in the same shop can be slim. Autoleads’ fuse holders, for example are the collet fixing type, that grips a big power wire all the way around instead of holding it by use of the more common grub screw. This means the cables must be the right size. A weedy so-called four gauge won’t wash. So if you go back to the same place and find the same cables and fittings, you can upgrade to an extra amplifier and still make it all pretty with the wire labels all matching and the jackets the same colours. It’ll be safer too and you’ll get a better long term relationship with the shop that stays along a path you get to know. Of course, they could never do this if the stable of equipment on offer was not able to go all the way from Entry Level to How-mad-do-you-want-to-go?
The product stories are the iKick and the iO Play. Both happily climbing on the ‘I’ with the iKick being Kicker’s own iPod dock device. Rated at a healthy slice, it has a Big Difference to the normal docks. They come from a solid speaker making background (Like the hugely successful B&W Zeppelin) and one with big hairy balls.
The device looks smart and has a neat dock on the front with two-way component speakers left and right. However, the real meat and potatoes is around the back, where you find a passive radiator diaphragm. Based upon their own in-car developed L7 square woofer suspension technology (that took years to perfect and has never been copied successfully) there is a big area of the box that wobbles. This offers all the deep bassy advantages of a deep breathing port but best of all, allows true deep bass to be created as it isn’t limited by a port tuning frequency but rather the wobbliness of the passive radiator. Passive radiators give you the best of both ported and sealed and I don’t know of any other dock quite like it. In fact as the diaphragm is automotive derived I reckon I can stretch a ‘mobile’ electronics point and review one, as I am intrigued and reckon it might be as compact yet seriously high powered as the marketing executive at Armour who told me about it! Also, it takes 22V DC, so I want to know if truck drivers can have them in their cabs for night use off the truck battery system. You don’t need a full on in-dash system when you are parked up in the lorry park&;

Here’s what Kicker have to say about the iKick: 
From the indisputable leader in car audio comes its loudest and most innovative stereo system available for your iPod digital media player: the KICKER iK500. For nearly 30 years, KICKER has set the standard as the dominant car audio brand by producing high-performance equipment that guarantees unbeatable sound quality and hard-hitting bass. Now, KICKER busts out of the car and into the home with the KICKER iK500 Stereo System for iPod.
Designed to be the loudest MP3 docking stations on the market, the iKICK lets you get more out of your MP3 player than ever before. Bass and treble adjustments allow you to enjoy your music the way you want. The big five-inch woofers, 19mm tweeters and 40-watt stereo amplifiers deliver the kind of crisp, powerful sound you expect from a KICKER product. KICKER’s patent-pending six-inch square reflex subwoofer delivers a dynamic bass response unmatched by other MP3 docking stations.
Equipped for any setting, the iK500 includes a credit-card-size infrared remote, allowing you to navigate with ease through your iPod’s entire menu. The innovative remote lets you adjust the iK500’s bass, treble, and auxiliary-in options, as well as the iPod menu directories. Select standby mode to continue charging your MP3 player even when it’s powered down.
A minijack input also lets you connect additional media to the iK500, including other MP3 and compact-disc players, as well as desktop and laptop computers. With adapters fit for most iPod models, (all but Shuffle Ed) the iK500 delivers a complete entertainment experience.

The iO Play is an A2Dp Bluetooth streamer that is set to allow ‘normal grown ups’ to happily upgrade their car’s sound system to whatever music is in their phone or other Bluetooth device, and add to the sound’s weight and clarity, without so much as cutting a wire. Equipped with a original equipment-looking knobber, the iO Play also has hide away bits that simply plug into your car’s stock sound sytem and adds some power. This means your tunes in your stock system for less than most methods and with total access to your mates’ music too. Armour reckon this is going to be huge – a ‘crossover’ product that will excite the regular car owner, not just the ice-fan. There has been some serious investment in developing it and yes, Talk Audio is lined up to bring you news of its impact and how well it works.
Watch this space!