After a lifetime of achievement, Michael Henriksen is still going strong. Paul Skelton talks to the man responsible for Australia’s custom electronic Scandi-mania!

In the October 1982 edition of EDA Circuit magazine, page 12 to be exact, there ran a piece on a young Danish man who was setting up shop in south-east Victoria to distribute Jamo loudspeakers and AM-KEMI, a company that specialised in cleaning accessories for records, pick-up, tape decks and video recorders.

“The economic climate in Denmark has worsened, and many people have emigrated to Australia,” he said.

“The reports that I had seen about Australia were very positive so I decided to come here and have a look to examine the possibility of starting my own business here.

“I was in Australia in March this year and I travelled around the country and did some market research for Scandinavian hi-fi products, with a positive result.”

On 11 May 2011, 29 years later, that same Dane, QualiFi’s managing director Michael Henriksen, was presented the lifetime achievement award at the CEDIA Electronic Lifestyle Awards in Darling Harbour, Sydney.

“I started in the industry in 1977 for a company called Tone Electronic, which was the first representative for Jamo in Denmark,” Michael says.

Tone also had the agencies for TDK tapes, Alpage cassette decks (the hi-fi business, not car audio) and Peerless headphones.

“Despite being a Danish company, Jamo had never been available in Denmark because the company was focused on exporting its speakers throughout Europe.

“A year later, we had four sales reps on board and we just kept growing. We grew 300% each year for four consecutive years. It was unbelievable.”

In 1982, Michael says he got “itchy feet” and thought Australia would be a great place to visit.

“In September 1981 I met a couple of girls from Australia in Berlin at the IFA trade show. I was there with my sales rep from Copenhagen and as they started telling us about Australia I thought it sounded really interesting.

“On the way home from the show I asked my rep if he would like to become the sales manager for Tone. He didn’t believe me, but six months later I was travelling up and down the east coast of Australia to get my head around the local loudspeaker market.

“I took the information back to Jamo’s export department and they said if I got set up in Australia they would give me the exclusive agency. It took me three months to get permanent residency after which I bought a one-way ticket and the rest is history.”

Upon his arrival, Michael started Scan Audio (short for ‘Scandinavian Audio’); a company that would later see many Australia home automation industry notables pass through the ranks – for example Rob Sanders (SnapAV/TotalQ), Rob Costello (Canohm) and Nick Libertone (Convergent Technologies).

“I approached a number of Danish manufacturers and ended up with about 15 agencies including Jamo, Dali, Peerless and DynAudio. Basically everything except Bang & Olufsen.”

Michael recalls that his first address in Australia was in the Victorian suburb of Doveton, which at the time was a public housing estate just outside of Dandenong. It was a one bedroom granny flat that cost $40 a week to rent.

“I didn’t even have a fridge, so I used an Esky and bought a pack of ice twice a week to keep my milk and butter cold,” he says.

“I lived like this for about 12 months while trundling up and down the east coast of Australia in a second-hand Commodore station wagon, establishing my dealers.

“Whenever I travelled I had a sleeping bag in the back of my station wagon and at night I would pull over near forests, take my speakers out of the car, roll a mattress out and sleep in the back. In the morning I would sneak into caravan parks and have a free shower. Looking back, it was good fun.”

After spending a year living this transient lifestyle, Michael went to see Dandy Sound – a group that started in Dandenong and expanded to operate a handful of stores around Melbourne. One of the directors, upon seeing Michael’s business card, took issue with his Doveton address.

“He looked at my card and told me that I couldn’t have a business address in Doveton. So I went around the corner and got a PO Box in Dandenong. My business address then became PO Box 741, Dandenong, Victoria 3175. That was a bit more respectable.”

THE NINETIES AND THE NAUGHTIES

By the mid-1990s, Scan Audio was a very successful enterprise that was held in high regard. So much so that Michael felt it was time to sell the business and move on.

“In 1994, a German approached me to purchase my company. He already had a few German agencies signed, and he wanted to establish a distribution network for them in Australia.”

Three months later the two parties agreed that the German would buy the business and Michael would stay on as managing director for two and a half years, to the end of 1997.

“He had big plans for Scan Audio and he brought all of these brands on, and even managed to purchase Marantz from Philips, but he never funded it properly. So the whole process became fairly traumatic.”

At the end of 1997, Michael decided to put his feet up, relax and start a family. However, Jamo had other plans for their former Australian distributor.

“About nine months after I left Scan Audio, Jamo contacted me and said they needed me back because the German was crazy. So they offered me the exclusive local agency once again and I accepted.

“Nine months later Scan Audio went into receivership and we put a bid in for Marantz. We were appointed the local distributor and things really started to take off. With Jamo and Marantz together we have always had incredible success in the consumer space.”

Upon re-starting his business, Michael opted for the name Jamo Australia. But when he took on the agency for Marantz, he quickly realised he had to change his company’s name.

“We had an internal competition to come up with a new name, for a prize of $500. It took a while to come up with something, but one day I remembered that there was a company in Denmark called QualiFi. The business and domain names were available in Australia and I thought that the name represented what we were doing – quality hi-fi. So I told my staff that we had a new name and that I had won the $500!”

WORKING REMOTELY

Of course, a lot of QualiFi’s success came from the distribution of the incredibly popular Philips Pronto remote controls.

“In the late 1990s, Philips developed a division called Pronto for high-end programmable remotes,” Michael explains.

“The first one to come out was very much a groundbreaking technology because there was nothing else on the market that could do what it could do. By today’s standard it was very basic, but for that day it was phenomenal.”

At the time, Philips not only wanted to sell Pronto under their own brand name but also OEM the technology. As a result, the technology reached the market through leading brands such as Yamaha, Onkyo, Denon and Crestron.

However, the only one that continued with the technology was the Philips subsidiary, Marantz.

“When it first started, Philips weren’t really successful with Pronto. But Marantz was,” he says.

“When we became the Marantz distributor in 1999, on the price list

there was the RC-5000, but we had no idea what it was. A few people bought them and asked us how to program them but we didn’t know what they were talking about.

“But, as dealers figured out how to program them the number of these remotes we sold grew, which led to better ones being released. We looked at our internal figures and the Marantz remote was 16% of our overall Marantz turn over – it was huge.

“Then, in 2004, we saw Pronto coming into the Australian market and realised they were basically identical to the Marantz remotes. So we contacted Philips and they were quite happy to hand the product over to us.”

Of course, Pronto’s recent closure has been well publicised, as were Michael’s efforts to purchase the company.

“The deal simply wouldn’t come together,” he says.

QualiFi has since become the distributor for Universal Remote Controls (URC) – “a broad spectrum manufacturer of remote controls with a rock solid platform that American installers are using quite successfully.”

The company’s new Total Control product line enables URC dealers to deliver whole house audio and eliminate the need for a conventional analogue matrix.

The eight-zone DMS-1200 digital multi-zone amplifier delivers 50W of audio per channel to up to six zones as well as pre-amp outputs for two additional zones that require increased power, such as outdoor areas.

The DMS-100 is a single-zone amplifier that delivers 50W per channel to local speakers, as well as a pre-amp output for connection to a local amplifier or receiver.

The rack-mountable SNP-1 streaming network player outputs 44kHz streams of digital audio to DMS-1200 and DMS-100 amplifiers; analogue outputs for third-party amplifiers are also included.

To prevent multiple audio streams from consuming excessive amounts of network bandwidth, URC also introduced two network switches that provide MAC filtering: the MFS-8 and a Power over Ethernet (PoE) version, the MFSPOE-8.

BEYOND 2011

“There’s no doubt that, financially, the industry is facing some challenges. But challenges come and go,” Michael says.

“The good thing is that the economy in Australia is still ok, but there are a lot of uncertainties. The housing market is a little subdued at the moment and, along with the carbon and mining taxes, is having a flow-on effect, especially in the CE space.

“A lot of consumers are getting benefits from buying direct from overseas, and there’s no doubt that a lot of people are doing that.”

Michael ensures that the custom installation channel is very much a focus of his company, and it’s an area where “we see a lot of opportunities, more so than in the consumer electronics space.”