ZOOM! POW! WHEEEE! Wes Visits TAG
McLaren’s Huntingdon Factory
Back in 1997, the TAG McLaren Group stunned the
audio world by purchasing Audiolab, a chronically cash-strapped British manufacturer known
for its superb, moderately priced high-end offerings. Speculation ran rampant as to why an
international conglomerate, best known then for its TAG Heuer watches, TAG Electronics
(manufacturer of high-tech electronics components for 75% of all Formula One competitors),
McLaren Cars (the world's fastest production sports car), and TAG Aviation (distributor
and operator of executive jets) would even deign to notice the relatively stagnant world
of high-end audio.
Some wags speculated that the firm needed a loss-leader and
fronting an F1 team hadn't proved expensive enough, since Dave Coultard and Mika Hakkinen
insisted on coming in first so consistently. But it quickly became apparent that TAG
McLaren Audio had no intention of doing business as usual. At 1998's HiFi Show &
AVEXPO, the company made a huge splash, bringing in an F1 racecar and setting up a booth
complete with multiple "fantasy lifestyle" systems, which melded cutting-edge
industrial design to some seriously nifty audio vaporware. This official launch probably
set the company back £250,000, but it certainly got everyone's attention.
During that extravaganza I managed to schedule an exclusive
interview with TMA CEO Dr. Udo Zucker and I found him fascinating. Self-confident and
self-assured, he was a dream interviewee -- supremely confident of his marketing strategy
and given to uttering pithy koans like, "An open checkbook never won an F1
championship, but an open mind might." He was sure that TAG Electronics was up to the
task of matching or bettering the best audio technology in existence, and he took it as a
given that a multi-tiered marketing giant like the TAG McLaren Group could show high-end
audio a trick or two when it came to marketing to the discerning luxury-goods consumer.
And then, there was deafening silence -- or so it seemed
over here in the States.
In reality, the company did take longer than
expected to bring its own projects to market (it started out by re-badging the Audiolab
components). TMA was, perhaps, overly optimistic about the "nearly completed"
status of some of the developing Audiolab products, but I suspect that it also took a
while for the company to forge its own path in the new market.
Aphrodite/Calliope system
F1 Engine Management System
TAG's anechoic chamber
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And boy, did it ever! Some of the most
spectacular industrial design in audio is represented in TMA's AvanteGarde lifestyle
products: the $5500 Aphrodite single-box music system, the $3300/pair Calliope
stand-mounted monitors, and the $29,995/pair floorstanding F1 loudspeakers. These are
about the only TMA products to get much media play over here and they got that off the
sheer sexiness of their livery -- but the real story is how TMA has, step-by-step, forged
a stable of products that offer consumers new and, some would claim, better options.
Not that I knew any of that when I scheduled a visit to
TMA's Huntingdon facility. After leaving the 2002 HiFi Show & AVEXPO, I traveled to
Cambridge to decompress, and my old buddy Steve Harris arranged for a side trip, since it
was just "up the road a piece." (I didn't know that Brits said stuff like that,
but that's what he said -- really!)
The factory, built from the ground up to construct TMA
components, looks like almost any other contemporary industrial building from the outside,
but the minute you walk into the lobby, any resemblance to an ordinary factory ends. Step
inside the front door and you are confronted by an Aphrodite/Calliope system clad in
electric blue and aluminum trim, sitting in front of an F1 racing shell. Awards and
product prototypes are displayed in a series of trophy cases arrayed around the lobby's
perimeter. Harris pointed out a TAG Electronics-designed-and-manufactured Engine
Management System from one of the McLaren F1 cars Ayrton Senna drove -- it's stuffed with
the most densely packed circuit board I've ever seen. Heck, all it has to do is
individually control 12 valves and fuel-injectors at 18,000 rpm for a 300km race -- oh,
and did I mention its telemetry must be capable of downloading over 7GB of encrypted data
per race?
For the first time, I understood Dr. Zucker's confidence in
TAG Electronics. Although most of the basic board stuffing is accomplished at TMA's
Huntingdon plant, the really tricky stuff is tackled at TAG Electronics and delivered to
TMA for final assembly.
TMA is actually two buildings kinda sorta connected, but
not really. It's all under one roof, but it's divided, with the R&D facility (which
includes several different-sized listening rooms and an HT facility) electrically and
acoustically isolated from the manufacturing facility. The listening rooms are tuned and
tweaked, but represent small, larger, and full-blown dedicated listening spaces. The
R&D facility also includes an anechoic chamber (rarer in speaker manufacturing
facilities than you'd suspect -- they ain't cheap).
The manufacturing facility is extremely impressive. It's
presided over by production manager Neil Burton, who lives, breathes, and probably sweats
zero-tolerance. Burton is intensely proud of TMA's products, its workers, and his
department's dedication, and he's the man who determines what's going to be built from day
to day and is responsible for reconfiguring the factory's product flow-through for each
component.
As Burton walked me through the assembly procedure, he
pointed out that TMA operates just a little differently from the old school of product
design. None of the pure TMA-designed products has ever been made obsolete by model
changes, so upgrades, both physical and software-based, keep TMA customers loyal and
happy.
For example, the AV32R Surround Sound Processor can be
purchased with a number of surround options. If you buy it as a Dolby Digital unit and
later decide you need DTS-ES 6.1 Discrete, all you have to do is call the factory and pay
the difference between the base model and the DTS model (which includes the DTS licensing
fee). When you do, the customer service rep will ask for the serial number and the
circuit-board ID number and then give you a 10-digit number. Input that number with the
AV32's remote control and you'll activate the DTS-ES 6.1 Discrete processing.
Okay, I hear you asking, what happens if you want TMA's new
ultra-flexible AV192R Surround Sound Processor, which offers lots of functions the AV32R
doesn't? The company offers a program called recycling. The AV32R remained pretty
stable through 14 major upgrades, but the 192 offers about seven times the processing
power of the older model. It adds THX Ultra 2 and much-improved bass management to the
32R's bag of tricks and offers Dolby Headphone as an option. The 192 also pays a lot of
attention to video processing beyond the capabilities of the AV32R. However, about 85% of
the components in the AV192R remain the same as those in the AV32R, so owners of the older
unit can return their units to TMA and have the relevant boards transferred to the new
model. They will be charged only the cost of the AV192R in the configuration of their
choice minus the full price they paid for their AV32R (including upgrades, if any).
It's a guaranteed upgrade path that keeps the loyal TMA customer from paying an upgrade
tax.
Burton wanted me to understand all of this TMA
upgradability because it ensures that TMA's service bay is kept full of products
undergoing upgrades and recycling. "I'd like to tell you that we have achieved zero
defects," he said, "but I can't. We're still human and as hard as we try, things
do break. But my job is to see that anything that goes wrong is taken care of immediately
and conclusively. And we keep defective units down to what would be considered acceptable
in the world of F1 racing, or as close to 1ppm as possible."
Did he really say one part per million?
 On my way off the manufacturing floor, I
spotted a pair of F1 loudspeakers waiting to be crated in front of the factory's wall of
circuit breakers -- it was such a cool-looking image, I couldn't resist snapping a
picture.
We ended the tour with a spell in TMA's home theater, which
employed the AV192R prototype and the spanking new VP2048R video scaler (the model number giving a
clue as to the number of lines it can generate) -- a
stand-alone video processor. There were absolutely no jaggies or edge artifacts
whatsoever. I've heard lots of superbly constructed, jaw-droppingly great-sounding home
theaters, but the video image in TMA's theater was every bit as impressive as the sound.
We watched the big scenes in The Matrix -- it's an
HT demo law, I think -- but we were all bored with it. Then they really surprised me: Ian
Heaton, who ran the demo for us, cued up The Legend of Bagger Vance and it
was a revelation. Not just the film itself, which I found far more engrossing than I had
anticipated, but the subtlety of the presentation -- both audio and video -- was
such a relief after all the bombast that usually accompanies HT demos.
I mentioned this to Harris and he said, "That comes
from Dr. Zucker, who keeps pushing the team to take the video quality to the same degree
of resolution as the audio. People can see that pretty easily, which means at the end of
the day they can enjoy their home theater, not just certain movies."
I'm all for that.
Keep your eyes peeled for TAG McLaren products to make more
of a splash over here in the States. They've got a fantastic roster of components and a
new approach to customer satisfaction -- one we've never seen before in the cutting-edge
audio and A/V world. Now that they're getting their US distribution sorted out, I suspect
they're going to shake things up.
I, for one, can't wait.
...Wes Phillips
wes@onhometheater.com
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