When Wi Digital first introduced their breakthrough product, the AudioLink, they ran into a peculiar problem – customers didn’t believe that the tiny units could actually work. The product, which was designed to reinvent the way musicians and engineers could approach wireless connectivity across platforms, was several factors smaller than the typical VHF/UHF products that dominated the market for years.
“Those older systems would come as basically a belt pack,” says COO Pierre Abboud. “And that was just the transponders. There was also a big clunky receiver that you’d have to place somewhere onstage.” Users had been trained to expect bulk with their wireless products.
Abboud and co-founder (and president/CEO) Dr. John Gibson founded Wi Digital as a personal challenge to themselves. They’d gotten to know each other while playing music together, setting up charity events and performing for fundraisers for organizations like hospitals and the British American Business Council. Abboud says a problem they discovered quickly was that, even for gigs they’d only be playing for an hour, they were having to spend two hours on set-up time.
“The cables were just too much,” he said. “We wanted the convenience of not having cables to deal with as well as being completely compatible with all the different devices onstage – instruments, computers, tablets, and other digital devices.”
They filed papers for the company in 2007 and used that to hold themselves to their goals, which were ambitious. “We were to make no compromise when it came to the sound quality – clean, digital, pure. Yet it’s eco-friendly. It’s extremely portable and the whole system can fit in the palm of your hand. I mean this was serious list of challenges that had been impossible for other manufacturers.”
Abboud and Gibson were uniquely suited to the project, both coming from strong computer engineering backgrounds. Abboud has 25 years of experience in the tech sector, helping develop portable USB mass storage peripherals, home digital media servers, and more. He’s also served as a consultant for companies like Apple, Roland, Sony, Yamaha, and TEAC. Gibson ended an accomplished career in pharmacology to found Wi Digital – by 2007, he’d worked in international product development with Allergan, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and Wellcome, getting product approvals across several fields. He helped develop Botox for therapeutic and cosmetic use.
All of which is to say both founders shared a history of innovation and effectiveness in bringing new products to market.
“We knew back then that the lines between the MI industry and the consumer electronics industry were getting blurred very quickly,” says Abboud. “I love to use technology in my studio for recording – I was using Apple already to get my sounds to record and write music. I realized that the time would come when I would need to get those sounds that I had achieved at home onto a stage for performance that delivered the same quality.
“Inevitably, that would be true of anyone in MI.”
Enter the AudioLink. The new technology gave users, for the first time, the ability to convert from analog to digital and back again to analog in a way that provided nearly lossless quality of sound. Abboud says that, along with achieving the conversion in stereo, was major.
Almost at the same time, the company was able to cleanly translate getting USB to analog wireless, which allowed musicians to integrate computers onstage wirelessly. The combination of these two breakthroughs meant that Wi Digital had officially arrived.
Acceptance wasn’t immediate, of course. The quality of a new audio system is a tough thing to convey without demonstrating it right there in front of customers, so that’s eventually what Abboud and Gordon did.
“That took some time,” says Abboud. “A lot of it was trade shows, though we also did a tremendous amount of traveling and visiting with dealers, potential distributors, artists.” The approach has finally caught on, though, to the point where musicians of all genres are actively seeking out new ways to connect devices from previously disparate worlds. “The idea of a personal wireless system that can be transported easily and integrated across any setup they may find themselves in is a must.”
Abboud says that the company’s volume has increased dramatically, as Wi Digital products are now distributed across the U.S. as well as in the U.K., Germany, Spain, and South Africa. It’s also showing the signs of any good tech product – it’s wandering into other markets as users discover new uses for it. Camera users and DSLR filmmakers, for instance, weren’t anywhere near the company’s target market, but the connectivity between digital devices is becoming popular among that segment, untangling remote connections between cameras and audio recorders. The company also counts television connections and personal in-ear monitors as areas where Wi Digital has proven successful. At the same time, digital wireless is slowly becoming the norm. “In the beginning, we were one of maybe two who were doing anything significant with digital wireless,” says Abboud. “Today, you’re seeing companies like AKG and Sennheiser coming into that field and validating that technology.”
But now that the company seems to have found its moment, Abboud says that they only have plans to grow. They’ve just introduced a set of their own new in-ear monitors – the Micro In-Ear Monitors – that they hope will revolutionize the segment with their unique in-ear driver technology and high-end appointments. If they’re anything like the AudioLink, other companies will eventually follow.
The main thing they want users and retailers to remember is that they’re leading the way.
“Everything we do and everything we introduce, I can guarantee that it will be a completely different approach,” says Abboud. “We don’t do any ‘me-too’ products.”
