Heaps Normal Sound System

One of my earliest lessons in business came from Marty Wirth, then CEO of the coolest record label on earth, Modular, where he told me, as a 19 year old dance music promoter, that if you could marry beautiful design with substance, you would always win. 20 years later, Marty and his partner in crime, Jenna, run Present Company, an agency that personifies that idea. All their work is beautiful, and works on multiple levels. Even the money work. Marty and I are speaker fanatics. His are more expensive than mine, and one night when I was helping him try and make said things work, we started talking about how it would be nice to take a classic JBL speaker and make it so you could cart it around the country. Nice, in theory. Harder, in practice. Lucky for both of us, his client, Heaps Normal, wanted exactly that. And so we made it happen. Building these things is a journey through the esoteric, and Heaps Normal embraced the insanity. Andy Miller, their visionary CEO, blessed me with infinite patience through the birthing process where my team had to figure out how to make this old design new again, and easy for people to take off a truck and plug in at your local pub gig or festival side stage. Tim Snape, the HN brand guru, made sure we applied the KISS principle, and Benny, the co-founder and lord of the brewery at HN, managed to fend off everyone from our corner of their slice of Marrickville, while we built, re-built, and re-built again. I think their patience and sense of adventure paid off. It's a gorgeous system that can pump pubs, festivals and house parties. Regrettably, they need to buy another one of these little Kei-class trucks to haul the second stack around, but good sound weighs a lot. This is based on a Don Keele Jr design, but with a new HF section, and all actively processed with DSP. No amp cabinets. Sustainable FSC birch plywood. And a gorgeous brand piece integrated in a way that looks so natural - laser etched into the front of the cabinet.