Audio Concepts’ sound innovation

products and services

Location: 90 Commonwealth Ave., North Attleboro

Year Founded: 1978

Employees: Nine

Annual Revenue: WND

If you’re looking to sample a unique entertainment experience, you might want
to drop in to the Audio Concepts store in the Attleboro Falls section of North
Attleboro.

Ask Donald Houde or one of his obliging colleagues for a look at one of the store’s four “lifestyle” rooms. Step inside, settle into one of the lush easy chairs, and prepare to enjoy a movie or sporting event or newscast – not on your everyday, 25-inch TV set, but on an eye-popping, 55-inch, rear-projection, high-definition monitor, the kind of system that gives fresh meaning to the term “home theater.”

For a relatively modest retail outlet in a relatively remote location, Audio Concepts does big things in the audiovisual world, whether it involves a plasma-TV set, digital camera, cell phone or an AM/FM clock radio. With clients throughout New England, the store’s customer list ranges from individual homeowners to Fortune 500 companies.

And its stock in trade is truly state-of-the-art. Take, for example, one of the lifestyle rooms, equipped, as it is, with a home theater setup. Touch-screen remote control devices allow the occupant to organize his or her entire recreational environment at the touch of a finger. The remote features a touch screen that can control everything from the window shades to the room lighting, the tilt of the lounge chair, and the images on the screen. And if you’re so inclined, you can plunk down your credit card and purchase the whole package, theater seats and all.

The fancy controls may seem a bit over the top, but Houde doesn’t think so. He theorizes that some people are intimidated by standard remote control units. Not so with the touch-screen version, which features easily understood icons for every element of the environment that can be controlled.

“Many people,” said Houde, “don’t want to wrestle with 12 different remote controls” to adjust their home theater facilities to their precise desires. With the proper equipment, “they can have the experience of a movie in their home without the mumbo-jumbo. Specialists do all the research to provide ease of use with these items.”

The “items” in Audio Concepts’ showroom carry well-known labels: AT&T Wireless, Bose, Nextel, Panasonic, Leica, Toshiba and Yamaha, to name just a handful.

Impressive though Audio Concepts’ stock may be, it’s the service that differentiates the store from the big stores – “the selling boxes,” in Houde’s lexicon.

“We provide solutions,” he said. “We spend a great amount of time educating people. And we want to know their lifestyle expectations.”

Another trick of the trade: staying current with the technology.

“We’ve kept embracing whatever was happening in our industry,” Houde said. “We were one of the first in New England to sell CD equipment, VCRs and high-definition TV. We were literally the first to do satellite TV.”

How can he make that claim?

“Well, we placed the first order in the country for Dish TV,” he said.

Houde got into the A/V business early in life – at age 8, in fact, when he started working with his father, Albert Houde, in a small shop on East Washington Street in North Attleboro. It was at that tender age that he learned how to repair radios and television sets.

At Roger Williams College, Houde studied electro-mechanical engineering.

When he graduated in 1971, he hit the road as a sound technician for bands that performed throughout the Northeast.

In 1975, he and a friend started a business in Woonsocket, selling and servicing home and automobile stereo equipment and recorders. In time, he and his partner opened a second store in North Attleboro. Houde bought out the partner in 1978, and launched Audio Concepts – adopting a name suggested by a graphic artist friend.

Now he employs nine people – eight of them full-timers – and has been growing the business at a rate of 10 percent to 15 percent per year.

Those staffers are fully capable of helping customers make sound purchases and deal with malfunctioning telephones, balky cameras, and the like. That expertise, Houde said, is largely a function of experience.

“Our people have been here for a long time,” he noted, “some as long as 20 years. You build a knowledge base over those years. My own knowledge is in engineering, so I read the journals and see what’s coming along.

“That’s the job of a specialist: to embrace the new stuff and hope you make good decisions.”

With products priced from $99 to $2,500 and more, Houde said, “It’s a challenge to identify the people who want our services.”

But once he gains customers, he generally keeps them.

“I had one guy come in that I hadn’t seen in 22 years,” he said. “Why did
he come back? It (the product he had purchased) finally broke.”

Dick Sherman is a contributing writer to PBN.