Every month, I try to write about things that I hope are interesting to our customers.  I like to take new photographs but lately that is getting more difficult.  I ask the factory what they have available for me to photograph and they always tell me that whatever they made is shipped out right away.  It is true that I have taken  many hundreds of photos and that I have a photo of every type of speaker we have ever made.  However, I always like to take more newer photos. Partly because the cameras I have now are better and partly because I think our speakers look better now than anything we used to produce.  

Another issue has been that I have not have much free time.  This month, I got permission from one of NorhTec's customers to let us know who they are and what they are doing.  I am not putting out a news release yet.  I will wait until CES in January.  None-the-less, this website is a pretty good place for me to let the people who have been following us know what is going on.

NorhTec and nOrh are two separate companies.  They were founded by the same people but NorhTec was a larger scale effort and we needed to raise money in order to get the project off the ground.  I put in all the money for nOrh out of my savings.  nOrh was not set up to be a company that would provide me with any income.  NorhTec was set up to grow big enough that it could pay me a salary.

The staff who started nOrh are all with NorhTec but they are volunteering their time to nOrh.  Yuth is in charge of NorhTec Thai operations.  Namphung handles import and export.  Lek works on special projects and does most of the electrical work.  Pan is the property manager.  Sitthipong (Noi) joined NorhTec directly and he does all of  NorhTec's mechanical designs and runs the factory.  Shafquat does the website. We have another 15 or so people.  Two of them were originally with nOrh, Book and Nok.  

My hope is that I can integrate nOrh into NorhTec at some point.   I believe that computers will become the center of home entertainment systems and that streaming audio and video and the desire to move music and video files from one device for another, will create opportunities to integrate audio and video.

For the past two years, NorhTec has been proposing a variety of solutions to Pay by Touch (www.paybytouch.com).  Pay By Touch knew exactly the type of hardware they needed and approached us to compete to offer them a solution.  NorhTec provided over 1,000 computers for Pay By Touch's first major rollout -- Piggly Wiggly.  The first roll out was a success and we received an additional order that was more than four times larger than the first.  Needless to say, this is a very significant order for us.  

In addition to the large orders that NorhTec has received from Pay By Touch, NorhTec has had some additional successes and is working on some interesting new technology.

Here are some photos about some of the projects we are working on.

Upcoming web pad

The Classic 6.1s now sell for $795.00 in 2005 and this includes shipping

Back in 1997, our original "top of the line loudspeaker was the nOrh 6.5.  The nOrh 6.5 sold for $900.00  and back then this did not include shipping.  That means it would have cost about $1200.00 to buy a pair of $6.5s.  We updated the 6.5s to the 6.9s.  The tweeter we choose for the 6.5 was the exact same tweeter used in a pair of Krell Lat 1 loudspeakers that sold for over $30,000.00.  Today, we sell the SM 6.9 (synthetic Marble) for $1,195.00 including shipping.

Synthetic Marble nOrh 6.9

One of the most striking examples of what a great value nOrh Loudspeakers continues to be is the pricing for the nOrh 7.0s.  At that time, we made only a handfull of the nOrh 7.0s. The nOrh 7.0s used the very expensive Scanspeak drivers and because we bought them in small quantities, the cost to build them was very high.  Today, the Scanspeak drivers are even more expensive. The US Dollar has dropped about 30% against the Euro so Scanspeak drivers are so expensive that only the world's most expensive loudspeakers use them.

In 1997 we sold the nOrh 7.0 for  $2,100.00 and this didn't include shipping.  Today, we sell the Classic 7.0s for $995.00 and this includes shipping or we have the Synthetic Marble 7.0s for $2000.00 -- including shipping.

nOrh Synthetic Marble 7.0 -- $2000.00 shipped anywhere to the US

How is it possible that the 7.0s are less expensive today than they were 7 years ago?  The main reason is that nOrh was never set up to be a money making company.  Our goal was to win respect respect and put people to work.  Quite frankly, until going back and looking at our previous web pages, we had forgotten that we lowered the prices of the speakers and we have struggeled very hard to continue to send out our speakers even though costs have continued to rise.

The nOrh 7.0s are an amazing value at the current prices.  I doubt that there are any loudspeakers under $5,000 per pair that use these high quality Scanspeak drivers.  The nOrh 7.0 received many outstanding reviews and given the rising costs of high quality components, oil, labor and the declining US dollar, the 7.0s are a far better deal today than they were 7 years ago.

Writing this month's newsletter certainly proves that the price of our Classic 7.0 wood loudspeakers is priced way too low.  After this month, we certainly have to raise that price.  Imagine, 7 years ago, we sold the same loudspeaker for $2,100 and didn't include shipping and now we offer the same loudspeaker for $995.00.  I will have to take care of that by next month.

Namphung 1997