Interview With Gediminas Gaidelis

Gediminas Gaidelis is the man behind AudioSolutions. The company was founded in the summer of 2011 in Lithuania. The research, which started as a personal pursuit, in designing good loudspeakers started in the winter of 2003 and lasted almost 8 years. Right now they are a small company making real handcrafted products in small batches. They do not want to become a mega corporation which makes few tons of products every day and where sound quality usually is at the bottom of their priority list.

 

GD: What does music mean to you?

GG: Music is everything to me. I don’t have a TV set and I haven’t watched TV for 8 years or so, but music never stops playing in my life. While listening to music, you can destress, if you need inspiration you can find some in music and if you need good emotional boost you can find it there too. Just a simple example: haven’t all of you had a situation when some particular music track reminds you of some important moments in your life? I think we all have had such moments with music. I believe music is magic and I think it is so for most of us.

 

GD: How did you come up with the idea of AudioSolutions?

GG: Well I was in a pretty strange situation a while ago. I was manufacturing loudspeakers for the local area and I was doing quite well. But I was getting bored of making the same models to the same type of people. I knew that I was capable of making better loudspeakers with better designs, but our local market didn’t seem to need any of those high quality products. I felt trapped in some kind of a never ending circle and one day I decided to make better loudspeakers for those who appreciate quality. The answer came naturally – export. Of course, I needed some name. I am an acoustic engineer and also an electronics engineer so I am a very technical person. So I chose my company’s name as AudioSolutions. It may not be a very appealing name from a marketing point of view, but since I don’t aspire for building a huge corporation, I think it will do just fine. More important is our slogan – art and science of speaker engineering 😉

 

GD: What more do you plan to achieve with AudioSolutions?

GG: Right now we are a team of 5 (craftsman, assembly person, designer, acoustics engineer and accountant). And we feel comfortable, we have enough people to make good quality product in small batches. What is most important is that we can react very fast if something goes wrong with materials or assembly or anything, small mechanisms like ours is more flexible than a big one.

My goal is to expand the company to have a little bit bigger production capabilities, maintaining quality and overall work satisfaction. Maybe have a team of 40. We also have plans for new loudspeaker lines but this information is privy for now. 

 

GD: What has been AudioSolutions’s best-selling product?

GG: Well from a sales and sound quality point of view, Rhapsody 130 is unbeatable. This is our best product for a given price, our customers also feel that way and the reason why we have sold quiet well from this range. On the other hand, Vantage is a new model that has already received the ‘Best of High End’ award and keeping in mind that they cost EUR 30k per pair, we have sold quite a lot of them in a very short period of time. So relatively, Vantage is our best-selling product.

 

GD: Who have been AudioSolutions’s biggest customers?

GG: The Chinese market is our biggest market. In Europe, Germany and Poland comes first place in our chart. If we do not look at selling quantities, I think the biggest/most important country for us is Poland. Because people in Poland are quite similar to Lithuanians. They all know what they want, all small details are noted and if you really screw up something, they will let you know and I appreciate that. The same can be said of Lithuanians as they want maximum quality and value for their money. This really makes us to push forward and offer the best for any given price. That’s why I appreciate them and I think such clients are most important to our business.

 

GD: How do you listen to music?

GG: Honestly I don’t listen to music often for pleasure. I listen to music at work with various listening tests, during the shows, or when fine tuning systems, or even when trying to find some imperfections in sound emotions. This is hard work and at the end of the day, I hardly want to listen music anymore. 🙂

Occasionally, I power on my Guimbarde loudspeakers at home and give them some blast with some old 80’s-90’s pop music or Eurodance. Yes this is not audiophile music but it has something which modern music doesn’t have. I also listen to a lot of jazz and classical music, or even RNB, dub… Well I listen to all kinds of music actually if it is worth listening to for some special reason.

I try not to listen to car sound systems as I believe that it is better not to listen music at all rather than listening to bad quality sound systems. Maybe that’s why my car has a custom sound system. It sounds ok for a car sound system but nothing near high-end.

 

GD: Do you think cables, accessories and tweaks makes any difference in a music system?

GG: The best tweak is to tweak your room, fight with first reflections, room modes and make your listening position as much reflection free zone as possible. This will give the best results with way less money than other tweaks.

 

GD: What music do you listen to?

GG: Oh a lot! Literally I listen to all music genres. First of all, I must listen to as many genres to know how our loudspeakers will sound, since our customers have different tastes for music. And secondly, I like to listen to various genres not only jazz, blues or classical music which are my favourite genres, but also some old hard rock or new style noise music which are nice too. I of course choose what is more right for me and what is not.

 

GD: Where do you get your music from and what formats do you listen to?

GG: I would like to have a LP, but I am not buying one because I don’t have enough time to have another hobby. 🙂

I mostly use CDs which I buy from recommendations of my friends, forums or even Facebook. Also in my free time, sometimes You tube is an answer to everything. But yes I seek quality and FLACs or CDs are best for me.

 

GD: What do you think about free downloads and piracy?

GG: You can’t stop piracy, well at least as long as people will not have enough free money and enough understanding about intellectual property. Free downloads might be an answer, and already many singers use it to promote their work. People who like to have original CDs will still buy CDs, LPs or downloads. I like to feel the CD in my hand, it is somehow impersonating. It normally happens that I buy 2CDs of the same record—one for listening, the other for collection and I keep it unopened.

 

GD: Do you have any other hobbies?

GG: O yeah! Lots of them. Sadly all my hobbies are now pushed aside because of my passion for work. So I can say work is my hobby now. I like to push the limits and try to improve things up to perfection. When I have more free time I like hobbies which I call “precision hobbies”. For example I like RC aeroplanes. I like to build them from complete zero. I mean starting from making blueprints to real flying model itself. It takes lots of time and gives me huge satisfaction when the plane flies like I planned.

Another hobby is Airsoft. This is all child’s dream – we play war with real guns replicas. I play with sniper. As modelling this takes lots of precision and patience. It is boring for most of airsofters because you need more concentration and sometime you can spend half a day just lying under some debris or old leaves and make no shot at all. But it is highly rewarding when you make a one-shot-one-hit in 100m or even 150m and nothing spots you.

I also love cats and various exotic pets. I own approximately 25 different tarantulas (bird eating spiders). They are very nice creatures, but most of my friends are afraid to come to my place. Well less mess. 🙂

I also have a big dream to have a desert lynx known as Caracal. Few years ago, it was marked in CITES as ‘endangered species’, but now they are marked it as ‘least concerned’ so it is a big hope to get one. I even found a breeder (I am against capture of course) in Ukraine. I also like motorsports (rally). But I don’t have enough time nor free money to drive in professional level. So I am only driving in amateur cup and cross. I am also very interested in space exploration, but I don’t have any telescope due to shortage of time.  The only hobby I am finding some free time is for strategic board games.

 

GD: Who has been your greatest inspiration & why?

GG: My greatest inspiration is curiosity and best teacher is science.

 

GD: What is your favourite quote?

GG: Oh dear God, now you got me in corner. I must admit I don’t read many books, only science books. I am ashamed now. 🙂

I don’t know how much truth there is but I found on internet this quote: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”—Henry Ford

Well that says a LOT!

 

For more information on AudioSolutions please click on this—LINK.