On Heels of Aphex Acquisition, DWV Ramps Up Product, Licensing Efforts
Quick Bio
COMPANY: David Wiener Ventures/Aphex
HEADQUARTERS: Salt Lake City, UT/ Sun Valley, CA
BIG PICTURE: Aphex develops technology to enhance music and vocal performances. At InfoComm, the company expects to demo signal processing gear for commercial venues, including churches, restaurants, and theme parks.
“We want to create excitement and have fun doing it—and for people around us to have fun too,” said David Wiener, president and CE O of David Wiener Ventures (DWV) and Aphex.
Despite this seemingly laid-back approach to business, Wiener has ambitious plans rolling out in the next year, the most significant of which is for Aphex, the audioprocessing and pro audio technology company DWV acquired at the end of May 2010. “Right now our big focus is on Aphex,” he said. “We purchased the company, and we’re doing a massive turnaround on it—creating new products, improving operations, bringing in management, and turning it into the great company it deserves to be.
“We’ve already launched multiple new products in a short timeframe,” Wiener continued. “All these incorporate the legendary Aphex technology, and we’ve taken them to a new level in terms of performance, user interface, ergonomics, and design—not to mention construction quality and consistency.”
A variety of these software and hardware products will be onboard for InfoComm in June. Wiener expects to demo signal processing gear for commercial venues, including churches, restaurants, retail stores, and theme parks.
Aphex will also be meeting with dealers and distributors at InfoComm to get feedback on what they would like to get out of the company, how to improve it, and to demonstrate that “the new and improved Aphex is going to work with them.”
And there will be some musicians tagging along too at the Aphex booth, “just to have a little fun.”
When not developing new products or expanding licensing partners, David Wiener (right) and Robin Sibucao (left), of David Wiener Ventures and Aphex, let the good times roll.
DWV has also started a major licensing campaign with the Aphex technology. Wiener sees licensing as a no-brainer. “It impacts the performance so dramatically, and the cost is so reasonable. It’s like buying a Ferrari for the price of a Chevy,” he said. “In our case, not everyone needs or wants a Ferrari, but everyone wants music to sound better.”
On the licensing front, DWV is working with music providers and commercial audio system manufacturers, as well as various consumer electronics manufacturers. “We’re spanning pro, commercial, and consumer audio,” Wiener explained.
One area where Aphex technology performs especially well is in improving speech, “In the church market, for example, you can dramatically improve the performance and intelligibility of the spoken word,” Wiener said.
Wiener has a peppered past, having dabbled in developing luxury vehicles, fashion, and furniture, as well as high-performance sports equipment, and eventually, because of his love for music, loudspeakers. The first major breakthrough in the latter category was spun off into SoundTube Entertainment. SoundTube was the first example of a shift in focus for DWV from consumer products to commercial.
“In the early stages, we decided that commercial AV was a great market for us to use to test my designs and products,” he said, “because the commercial people are so critical, and a lot are very professional and talented.”
The thought process at the time, he recounted, was that “if we could survive in commercial AV then we could probably go anywhere.”
Lindsey Snyder is assistant editor of SCN.
