Marshall's new Chinese ownership

J

jwin615

Well-known member
This seems to be flying under the radar.
It appears Zound cashed out.
So much for making it a "lifestyle brand"

-------from one article:


HongShan Capital Group, formerly known as Sequoia Capital China, said it agreed to acquire a majority stake in Marshall Group in a deal that values the European audio equipment maker at 1.1 billion euros ($1.15 billion).

The deal is HongShan’s largest-ever investment in Europe, the Chinese venture capital and private equity firm said. The founding Marshall family will retain a 20% stake in the company, which is famous for its electric guitar amplifiers. Marshall, which was founded in the U.K. in 1962, was acquired last year by Sweden’s Zound Industries.

HongShan, which raised a total of nearly $9 billion for four investment funds in 2022, is looking for more opportunities outside China. In China, domestic venture capital and private equity deals have slowed down in recent years amid the country’s economic challenges, making it harder for funds to deploy the large pools of capital they have already raised.
 
Count me in on the "cost cutting measures" side of the coin.

Ventue capital has a tendency of buying companies up, stripping them for parts, and dumping the husk for the rats. Part of why they've been trying, and failing, to make Marshall a lifestyle brand.

Innovation isn't what Marshall is good at. They've produced fantastic amplifiers, but live music isn't a thriving scene anymore. Venture capital has already been there.

Best case scenario: they keep making good amps that cater to more of a bedroom rocker crowd cause that's who's left.

Worst case scenario: they become a exclusively a faux-vintage clothing company.
 
Stickman393 said:
They've produced fantastic amplifiers, but live music isn't a thriving scene anymore. Venture capital has already been there.

Best case scenario: they keep making good amps that cater to more of a bedroom rocker crowd cause that's who's left
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and then even the bedroom rocker crowd, many are just using digital/modelling solutions and probably aren’t all that likely to even use amps at all, let alone pedals - which made me wonder a bit about the release of the pedals, but at least they’ll hit those nostalgia dollars.
 
Truth. The guitar ain't going nowhere anytime soon: it's still a valuable element of the plethora of sounds available. But digital modeling has made it far more convenient to get decent tones at home without the hefty investment in a dedicated tube amp.

Tubes are likely to always draw a crowd, but their marketshare is going to be diminished in the future.

I mean, shoot: SS class D has gotten so good and so cheap in recent years that it's hard to imagine that tube power amps are going to be very common in brand new products that come to market.

Seriously, the possibilities of cheap, clean (like 0.01%thd) 200 watt per channel stereo setups are super doable.

Though, for any kind of digital modeling, latency is always going to be present. It's not necessarily the sort of thing you can hear, but it is something that, if bad enough, you can definitely *feel* it. Indescribable, but it's a slight sense of cognitive dissonance in the milliseconds between playing a note and having the amplifier reproduce it. Dunno what the threshold is there for being able to detect or feel or intuit that: shoot, it might just be a means of explaining away why some folks say they can hear the difference between modern day modelers and a tube amp. But the presence of latency of the A/D/A conversion process is going to be non-negotiable for the foreseeable future, unless we find some kind of room temperature superconductor.
 
HSG's portfolio is full of heavy hitters with several household names, they're not exactly a liquidation VC firm like a lot of music purchases we've seen recently. Not sure how well the parallels apply today but it's hard for me not to compare it to when Korg bought Vox or Yamaha bought Line6. Good or bad? Probably a little of both.
 
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JTEX said:
Unpopular opinion: guitar amps (at least the big, chunky ones) are slowly going the way of the Dodo bird, with silent stages, in-ears, modelers and all that. There's no serious money to be made anymore, so the previous owners just bailed out.
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This is unfortunately very accurate. I attended one of Snarky Puppy’s recording sessions in Utrecht a couple weeks ago and all three guitarists were using Kempers. I guess it’s much easier to carry your Kemper patch (is that a thing?) with your rather than carry a fancy tube amp? Also it was a live recording so it’s probably easier without a speaker.
 
The last bike-shop I worked at had a Marshall boom-box for streaming ambiance.
Then there's the Marshall headphones, I think I saw them at London Drugs here, or maybe it was a Fortress shop in HK, just past the LCD screens...
So the slippery slope... we had already begun sliding down long long long ago.




Personally, if it means I can have that Man-Cave Marshall-stack Bar-Fridge for cheaper then I'm all for it.

Probably will bring down the cost of the matching Marshall Bar-Stools, too, that look like Marshall knobs. A Marshall Dart-Board would be de rigeur, with a bulls-eye that goes to 11. Hang that over the far end of the room with the Marshall-black velvet ragged Regulation-sized Snooker-table, oh and a a Marshall-stack chest of drawers for storing the drink mixes next to the bar, Marshall pull-knobs of course. A gold-monogrammed Marshall black-leather couch with oatmeal grill-clothe throw-cushions (also monogrammed Marshall). Then throw a few Marshall schematics-under glass up on the wall for some art, a Marshall plexi-face-plate hat-rack on the wall for my Marshall-logo basetruckerball-cap...
All made somewhere in China.

Why stop there?

A Marshall-Stack tool-chest in the garage, filled with Marshall-monogrammed tools. A Marshall-Stacked hoist for working on the underbelly of my Marshall-Tesla or for simply parking the Gold Marshall-Tesla above the Black Marshall-Tesla. The garage, no the entire house, should look like a Marshall Stack! A manicured lawn with Marshall logo and Topiary shaped like Marshall Stacks, a whole hedgerow for a Wall Of Marshall Stacks between me and my pedestrian-looking neighbour's place...
 
giovanni said:
This is unfortunately very accurate. I attended one of Snarky Puppy’s recording sessions in Utrecht a couple weeks ago and all three guitarists were using Kempers. I guess it’s much easier to carry your Kemper patch (is that a thing?) with your rather than carry a fancy tube amp? Also it was a live recording so it’s probably easier without a speaker.
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Definitely, I've seen a lot of touring musicians mention how much easier it is to carry a modeler as carry-on luggage. I recorded some drums and bass for my project this month, and I also used a modeler so there's no bleed in the drum mics (plus we all had headphones so we could hear the click track too - to be fair I don't own an amp, but even if I did I still wouldn't want guitar in the drum mics). Bassist played through some of his pedals directly into the box too.

That being said, I don't think amps are going to go away completely, I can see a bunch of bands recording live in the future even with amps in the room, or just people preferring to tinker around with tube amps. It's not all about efficiency, it's art after all, but the general trend is definitely away from tube amps.
 
Well, don‘t hate the greedy guys who kill a company. Hate the guy who handed it over to them. Was Marshall on the brink of shutting down? There you have it. Let it die or sell it and let it die later in a different way.
 
Stickman393 said:
Though, for any kind of digital modeling, latency is always going to be present. It's not necessarily the sort of thing you can hear, but it is something that, if bad enough, you can definitely *feel* it. Indescribable, but it's a slight sense of cognitive dissonance in the milliseconds between playing a note and having the amplifier reproduce it. Dunno what the threshold is there for being able to detect or feel or intuit that: shoot, it might just be a means of explaining away why some folks say they can hear the difference between modern day modelers and a tube amp. But the presence of latency of the A/D/A conversion process is going to be non-negotiable for the foreseeable future, unless we find some kind of room temperature superconductor.
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For the longest time, any latency under 10ms was considered "close enough" to be acceptable, at least when tracking in a recording setting. I got used to playing and hearing my mic'ed up tube amps through headphones with about 5-10ms of latency, and so did tons of people far more talented than I playing on far more famous recordings.

The latency on my Helix is about 2ms, which due to the speed of sound is about the equivalent of me standing 2ft away from my amp. Most modelers right now I think are somewhere in the 1-3ms range. I literally feel no difference under my fingers versus my actual tube amps.

BOSS's latest tech has sub-1ms latency, which is basically equivalent to having your ear a few inches away from the speaker (or, if you were recording, where a microphone would go).

(Yes, latency increases as you use more DSP, but not all that much really given the speed of the CPUs and the way these processors manage their blocks. The A/D and D/A conversion still seems to be the slowest part.)

I dunno, latency was never a problem for me even when I could kinda-sorta-ish feel it but I could at least understand it - but with modern modelers, I genuinely don't believe anybody who claims it's an issue. 99% of them are lying (consciously because they wanna be cool, or unconsciously because they already think they are cool), the 1% that actually *can* feel a 1ms delay are probably insufferable people who apparently *never* take a step in any direction when playing live lest their performance be affected by this now-insurmountable change in the time it takes sound to reach their superhumanly-sensitive ears.
 
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^ I'm inclined to agree on all points there.

Although I'll point out that the latency would be additive. So, it's basically like adding *another* two feet to ones distance from the amp.

Which, yeah, probably doesn't matter much. I've been using modelers since the POD 2.0 says, nowadays I've got a fractal FM-9 run through a 1500 watt PA amp, running stereo into a 2x12 with a pair of Jensen N12Ds. No complaints. Beats the hell out of the old stuff.
 
Stickman393 said:
Although I'll point out that the latency would be additive. So, it's basically like adding *another* two feet to ones distance from the amp.
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If you're using a cab on stage true; I use IEMs myself, so 2ms round-trip latency from my Helix to my headphones is just the 2ms.
 
Stickman393 said:
Iems with cables, or wireless?

Goddammit. I'm turning into the "well, actually stickguy..."
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Cables, Ernie Ball makes a *fantastic* but *expensive* 20' cable with 1/4" TS instrument cable and a headphone extension cable in one that was clearly designed for floor modeler use, the IEMs connect at the perfect spot down by the strap button when you thread it through your strap. Silly thing to call a "game changer", but it really did clean my setup up a lot.

I dunno what wireless system latencies are like these days, haven't used any since cheapie VHF systems in like the early 00s and the audio quality was a nonstarter for anything serious.
 
JTEX said:
Unpopular opinion: guitar amps (at least the big, chunky ones) are slowly going the way of the Dodo bird, with silent stages, in-ears, modelers and all that. There's no serious money to be made anymore, so the previous owners just bailed out.
Click to expand...
I really do believe this; like as an example, love or hate him, it's impossible to deny that Finneas is a pretty damn famous and influential musician, and he said in a recent interview that because he grew up plugging his guitar into his computer, that *is* the sound of guitar to him. Generationally, I believe this is the case.

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There's plenty of FRFR cabs on the market right now that love to talk up how they get that "amp in the room feel"; ToneX is the latest, just dropped theirs at NAMM. They're basically trying to keep their main product (their ToneX software and pedals) relevant to the shrinking number of players who still enjoy their "big, chunky" guitar amps.

That's all well and good and I'm sure they'll sell a fair number (although honestly I think they should've aimed to undercut the Fender FR12 on price, but that's a separate discussion), but I think those are all just transitional products that'll eventually fade out of the marketplace since all they really are are PA speakers in square guitar-cab shapes.

Whether or not they truly nail the "amp in the room feel" (which I feel I can simulate pretty damn well with a touch of room reverb at the end of my Helix chain) isn't really all that important in the long run, because the next generation of guitar players won't have grown up ever knowing what an "amp in the room" even sounds or feels like.

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To bring it back to Marshall, honestly like @spi pointed out, as most of their profit is in like bluetooth speakers and shit, I feel that current-day Marshall probably lines up pretty well with the goals and operations of their new investors.

One thing I can actually see them doing is licensing out their branding to the modeler companies to make some cash, doing like an "official" Marshall amp model pack. Ampeg's got a few official models in the Helix, Mesa's done it with ToneX, etc. Probably a relatively cheap way to keep your name familiar to the next generation of players who might one day grow up to be the sort of well-heeled blues-lawyers who'll buy a hand-wired tube amp from the boutique line you keep making as an aspirational "halo" product.
 
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