Several years ago when Hagai and I began to transform an already successful local company into the company you know today, we sat down and spoke often of the network as a new frontier. A digital landscape that had just begun to take shape in the residential space and one that would grow to transform not only the industry, but all of our businesses and lives. Today, the constant excitement in our offices for what we do and where the industry is headed is not only palpable, but contagious. We all should be very excited about the future of our industry. While some categories have fallen to the way side, a broad array of new opportunities lay just on the horizon.

Among all of them (and short of the network itself) there is one core part of our industry that sits closest to my heart: Stereo. And I mean good-old two channel stereo systems. I have simply never gotten over the excitement that two speakers and a great set of gear can create in a room and in my heart. The past three years I have been part of a growing community of music lovers who have ditched their CD players in favor of a music streaming scenario. Digitally stored, lossless music files streaming across a local area network (LAN) to a properly designed, well voiced DAC (Digital to Analog Converter) is by far the most radical development in music playback since the advent of the vinyl recording. I am not alone in this feeling. No longer are we caught in the trappings of a compromised delivery system. Warped cassette tapes (where’s your pencil?); warped records, scratched vinyl, scratched CD’s – all a thing of the past.

For me, our mission at Access Networks, the network itself and the growing interdependency of our stereo systems on the network are directly tied to the overall excitement I feel for the future of our industry: Starting right now with 2012. This year we will buy less CD’s, in favor of digitally delivered music. We will stream more movies from the cloud than we purchase a hard copy of. And, if we’re lucky, the music industry will wake up and start making hi-resolution files (88Khz/24bit, 96Khz/24bit, 192Khz/24bit) a standard offering, rather than the 1981 standard of 44Khz/16bit, which lacks detail and the dynamics our stereo systems are now capable of resolving.

What’s key to this radical and exciting shift in the playback medium for music (and movies) is a robust, powerful network. Clearly, this infrastructure is now the digital foundation of our homes, our lives and our industry’s core offerings. Our personal communications and the communication between various devices in our homes and offices all rely on this critical infrastructure to deliver their given feature sets. Now more than ever, your company must have a comprehensive strategy to address this category. Without it, it won’t matter how much music you have stored on your NAS drive or Sooloos system, it just isn’t going to work properly.

As for our industry at large, I cannot remember a time in my career when more change was afoot. There are more choices for automation systems than ever – some moderately priced, some not. There have been radical developments in the design and manufacturing of loudspeakers. There are more powerful subwoofers with smaller footprints. Today, more than any other time in our industry’s history, we can offer a broader feature set in a smaller package – and that means more opportunities for all of us.

With an election cycle just ramping up our country is about to take a hard look at where we’ve been and where we would like to go. Let us not get caught up in the negative banter about our struggling economy and the big choices we face as a nation and a people. I believe that there is a clear and present silver lining surrounding us and the dark period we have all survived is near an end. As you may have read, sales across the industry in 2011 are up from 2010 and should continue to track upwards in 2012. This year offers all of us a huge opportunity to grow our businesses, hire new employees, increase revenues and add new clients to our rosters. We should all stay focused on our core values, our brands, our clients’ needs and our individual goals for this year. A friend and mentor of mine taught me very early on in my career to never lose sight of the fact that what we sell to our clients is a want and not a need. “At the end of the day, we sell stereo systems, not defibrillators,” he told me. This is not meant to discount the serious nature of running an integration company or to make light of our industry, but instead meant to point out that we should not lose sight of the fun that we are trying to deliver to our clients. Music, film, and the arts in general are an essential aspect of our creative lives. Whether we work to create art or enjoy its consumption, art in its purist sense is an expression of our human experience – life, love, happiness, sadness, among others. When executed properly, it moves the soul and enlightens the heart.

The sound systems we sell and the home theaters we design and build are all meant to be portals into an experience that is bigger than our daily life. Our industry is an extension of Hollywood, a compliment to the broader consumer electronics market and a conduit for the celebration of life. Whatever your personal preference, our industry should strive to deliver an exceptional experience to our clients and their families. If we keep this in mind in 2012, as I know we will, we’re all going to have a great year.