News

It's been almost exactly a year since I reported on the opening of a new store dedicated to high-performance audio and video in Unionville, Ontario. To mark the first anniversary of the store's opening, they had a party to celebrate the occasion.

Trevor Wong and Stacey Sniderman (right to left in the photo), owners of Update TV & Stereo Elevated (which I will just refer to as Update), have two more stores in the Greater Toronto Area, but these are more oriented toward home theater, whereas the Unionville store, while not slighting video and home theater, has a strong emphasis on high-performance two-channel audio.

As well as knowing how to manage a high-performance audio store, Trevor and Stacey also know how to throw a party—as perhaps you can tell from the picture above.

In any business, the first year is the most important, and opening an audio store is not guaranteed to be an easy way to fame and fortune. Just to survive represents considerable achievement, and Update has done more than that. Asked about the challenges they've experienced in the store's first year of existence, Trevor Wong admitted that the traffic flow in the winter has been lower than anticipated, but, despite that, they've come out in the black. The aim of opening a store in Unionville—a tourist destination known for its cafés, ice cream parlors, shops, restaurants, and picturesque locations for taking wedding photos—was in the hope that it would attract customers other than traditional audiophiles, and, according to Trevor, they've met with considerable success in this respect. "We've gained a lot of younger buyers from the location, just people walking by." They've also had a lot of interest in turntables—which, he says, have "technology that's very cool to the younger generation." Their turntable sales show strong growth—and so have the sales of digital equipment like streamers.

Update started with a good assortment of high performance audio products, and in the past year they've taken on Bryston, ASW, Devialet, and KEF, whose flagship Blade is in the left foreground in the photo above. Stacey told me that they're looking forward to receiving the KEF Blade Two, which received a glowing report from John Atkinson in the June issue of Stereophile.

Asked what they were looking forward to in the future, Trevor said they want to make people aware of what's available in two-channel equipment. "We're not doing this just a make a dollar. We're passionate about it. We're here to help. " Stacey added that this attitude extends to the video side as well, so that they become a "one-stop-shopping" destination.