News

Andy Regan, NHT's senior vice-president of sales and marketing, could barely contain his glee. "I'm happy—no, I'm proud—no, I'm happy and proud to announce that Mary Cardas is NHT's North American sales manager."

Cardas began her career in audio in 1989, working for Cardas Audio, the company started by her father, George Cardas. She eventually held the position of managing director, where she increased the company's sales by 65% and oversaw the line's expansion into an international presence. Ms. Cardas has also held supervisory roles at Theta Digital and Sunfire Corporation. Most recently, Cardas was general manager of Classic Records.

"I gotta tell you we are excited about bringing Mary on board," Regan told Stereophile in a conference call with Ms. Cardas. "You can tell by the way we keep laughing that we are definitely having fun yet."

Cardas, too, was excited by the new job and the challenges she and NHT face in a marketplace that seems to be changing daily (see accompanying article on the acquisition of Polk Audio by Directed Electronics or last week's article on the acquisition of API by Klipsch). "The market for specialty audio has been changing for longer than the customer has probably been aware of it," she said. "For one thing, the customer has changed. I don't mean that customers necessarily want different things now than they used to, but for a company like NHT, the customer is now the dealer and the specialty installer, who sell to the end-user."

"That's where education comes in," said Regan.

"Exactly," said Cardas. "My job will be training the salesmen and installers to do the crucial listening—to consumers. I've had salesmen tell me I never have had a customer say 'I want better sound.' I ask them, have you ever had a customer tell you he doesn't want to listen so loud? Ever have a customer say, 'I can't understand what's going on?'"

"Well, intelligibility is a sound quality issue. Salesmen love it when we teach them these things, because it allows them to connect with their customers in a way that just learning the product lines and price points doesn't."

"Yeah," said Regan. "We're going old school here."

"Some things have never changed," Cardas added, "and what specialty audio has always been about—and what NHT has always been about—is delivering the experience that ordinary electronics and loudspeakers just can't deliver. The only thing tricky is that we need to do that in a world with even more entertainment choices, so we have to do it better than ever."

Something tells us she's going to do just fine.

Contact Mary Cardas at maryc@nhthifi.com.