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The Vanguard: Kickstarting high fidelity sound

Apr 21, 2015

In this week’s edition of The Vanguard – InDaily’s weekly look at local innovation – we meet two Adelaide entrepreneurs who have crowdfunded an ingenious way to boost the sound quality from your phone, tablet or any other audio device. 

When Bart Kowalski and Joe Chehade embarked on a Kickstarter campaign to raise $15,000 for the development of their “hi-fi system for your phone”, they could not have imagined that they would raise $296,000.

Nor would they have thought that their product, UAMP, would undergo even further product development during the crowd-funding campaign itself as supporters (investors) willingly suggested improvements or their own personal design preferences.

The end result is an innovative product that has attracted interest world-wide and is small enough to fit in the coin pocket of your jeans.

UAMP – put simply ‘you amplify’ – is a tiny device that enhances the sound of music or other audio from a phone, iPad, tablet, laptop or other sound equipment like an MP3 player. It is plugged in-line between the equipment and the headphones to deliver high quality sound.

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The UAMP is plugged in between your audio device and headphones to boost sound quality.

 

Long-time friends and now business partners, Kowalski studied biomedical engineering (“which is basically electronic engineering with medical science on top”) at Flinders University and Chehade completed a commerce degree majoring in marketing at the University of Adelaide.

An early career as DJs brought the pair into the musical realm and it was from that standpoint that several innovative ideas flowed.

A leisurely walk listening to music on his iPhone led Chehade to question why that sound was relatively poor compared to when the same headphones were plugged into his computer. He quickly realised that the mobile phone was trying to do something for it was not primarily designed. It was a phone facing the additional demand that it also produce good sound for increasingly popular headphones.

And so the idea was born to place a minute amplifier between the phone and the headphones.

“When most people think about amplifiers they think of making music louder but there is much more going under the hood than that,” Kowalski told The Vanguard.

“Your phone doesn’t have a very good quality amplifier inside, so if you plug in different quality headphones the quality of the music changes because the phone is struggling to power the headphones,” he said.

“We put this device, which is specifically built for driving headphones and is more powerful, in between the phone and your headphones. It means that your phone can work at its best and the UAMP does all the hard work to drive your headphones.”

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Joe Chehade (left) and Bart Kowalski. Photo: Nat Rogers/InDaily

 

Kowalski and Chehade went to work and soon had a prototype that they had manufactured in China after initially trying to build UAMP in Australia.

“We knew it would be expensive in Australia but we were happy to pay more for faster turnaround and better service but actually we got better service in China,” Kowalski said.

“In China, it is so competitive that manufacturers will help small guys like us.”

In the true spirit of innovation, the Kickstarter campaign in February-March this year was a defining moment for UAMP.

With their financial aspirations pitched at a modest $15,000, the duo watched as interest and the financial pledges steadily grew. Along the way a global conversation started as people became excited at the novelty of the idea and UAMP’s potential.

Kowalski says people started making their own suggestions for improvements and personal preferences, from requesting a replaceable battery, to adding a clip to attach the UAMP to clothing, and having views about the configuration of the cabling and input locations – all on a device that measures 4.5 x 4.5 x 0.9 centimetres.

UAMP_3

Kowalski says the Kickstarter campaign added an additional 20 per cent of design features to UAMP.

As a direct result of feedback from a growing army of supporters – 95 per cent of whom were outside Australia with the largest single gathering in the United States – the pair fine-tuned the UAMP’s design.

Chehade adds: “More and more people started getting involved in the Kickstarter campaign and so we listened to our customers. You can’t just innovate for the sake of innovation, you have to deliver what your customers want”.

“At one point we made an assumption about a particular feature that we were going to put into the design and every single person who responded on Kickstarter said ‘No’. So, we said ‘no problem, that’s good feedback’,” he said.

Kowalski said the feedback through Kickstarter was more valuable than a conventional market survey because supporters already had a financial stake in the product through the crowd-funding campaign.

Kowalski and Chehade offered various packages to more than 3,600 Kickstarter investors, ranging from the standard device to coloured versions (green was popular) and a laser engraved ‘special’ edition. With an eye to future marketing they also offered ‘resellers packages’ of multiple UAMP units for people who might ultimately retail the product.

Currently finalising the technical requirements for certification by the Federal Communications Commission for the US market and local Australian standards, and finalising the design with the Chinese manufacturers, Kowalski and Chehade will apply for a world-wide patent to protect their intellectual property.

With pre-orders totalling around US$ 2000 within a week of being offered, Kowalski and Chehade said they expect to have UAMP on the market at a retail price of around US$65 per unit by the end of July this year.

UAMP is not the first foray into innovative technology for Kowalski and Chehade with six years working as disc jockeys being the genesis of another product called UMIDI – a novel, custom-made DJ controller system.

That idea failed to arouse sufficient financial interest but was an excellent learning experience, with a significant part of that education coming from a mentor the two engaged with through the SA Young Entrepreneurs Scheme (SAYES) run by Business SA.

“Our mentor really motivated us to keep going when we struggled to come up with a new idea after our first failed product. He sat us down and said ‘this is what your business needs to look like if you want to succeed’. He said we should go back to working on electronic hardware – and UAMP is the result,” Chehade said.

“And that’s the thing that anyone should learn – don’t give up. If we hadn’t failed with our first product, we wouldn’t be where we are now,” he said.

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