From working selling car audio in a shop in north London to running the biggest independent mobile electronics distributors in the UK, Gordon Dutch and BBG are a serious success story.

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Gordon Dutch has paid his dues, starting out in retail in a mobile electronics shop in North London. The BBG distribution operation began in 1993 and since then, he’s literally lost count of the number of times he has flown to Las Vegas to the WCES to see his American distributors and to entertain his top dealers. He’s even helped me get there from time to time. The show is huge and the after-show largesse put on by their MTX people was just fabulous. I saw that car from Pimp My Ride on that trip. The one with the massive 22 inch MTX Jackhammer in it. Nowadays, BBG has a 20,000 sq. ft. warehouse and employs just under fifty staff and distributes home brands of hardware too. With accessories lines such as AM, Profigold and Bandridge and AV bracketry from Vogels, speakers from Jamo and Ateca’s posh French AV furniture. On the car side, their array of kit is awesome. If you are a dealer who sells BBG’s stuff, the clued-up customer immediately knows that the shop is one where they know their onions.
Offering lots of training and education for their dealers, they also support car sound off competitors and have a goodly few trophies under their belt for their lads, with both SPL or loudness competitors and the Sound Quality ones, too. Here’s the stuff they deal in&amp$$.

JL Audio

JL Audio are a company that if they didn’t exist – I’d have to invent them as a concept and no-one would believe me. The fantasy would run like this&amp$$’How about a speaker company that puts monstrous amounts of its profits back into R&D and doesn’t care that others think they’ve done it all. They’ll apply huge brains to real engineering and make the best bass speaker in the entire world. One that makes your arm hairs stand on end and nobody ever disagrees that it’s the best there is!’ Sounds like schoolboy enthusiast nonsense doesn’t it? But it’s true.
JL have made a seriously wide assault on the whole field of mobile electronics, not just incredible subs. Their ‘Slash’ amps are cunningly made and they have some damn clever processing too. Their CleanSweep can be used for adding a pukka system to a deeply complex OEM system without the OEM EQ settings messing with yours. For me though, their JL W7 woofer, complete with its seemingly impossible method of fixing into a hole, is the most incredible bass maker in existence. A terrifyingly fast transient response, absurdly deep throb-ability and a massive appetite for all the power you can muster.
Serious Audiophiles, JL Audio’s near-legendary Mini demo car is at the time of writing, doing the rounds of the best UK JL dealers for their customers to listen to. Source Sounds Sheffield demolished and rebuilt a wall at their shop for their turn. You may wipe the car, you may not wet wash it, are the strict instructions. It won best sound at the Winter Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in its launch year. And that was against the best of the best.
Speakers from coax to components and subs from workmanlike pressed chassis items with astonishing performance, up to the best there is and a whole collection of well-made boxes. They make stealthy bass boxes for melting into the shapes of a lot of cars’ boots. They have a flat front but a back that fits in with the cars’ boot’s contours. They also sell the JL Audio line of posh power cabling and accessories and signal interconnects so you can be all of a piece with your whole system. From what was just woofers, they are now a major brand of importance. For me, though, the real excitement lies in their air-shifters. If you buy JL, there ain’t nobody ever going to question your taste.

Focal

The French have a well deserved reputation for making some of the finest loudspeakers in the world. Like so many of the world’s best speaker makers, such as Dynaudio, JBL, Altec Lansing and Boston, they also make speaker units just for use in cars. Their tweeters go all the way up to an inverted dome model made with Beryllium. Their biggest home speaker is a 1.74m high beast called the Grande Utopia Be. It weighs a mere 210kg. Their top car Utopia Be system uses a huge ‘Crossblock’ adjustable passive crossover unit that can set the crossovers to be at different levels on each driver. Like the Morels recently reviewed, these are also meant for sale for use as an active system. Focal’s esoteric near military-grade amplifiers go from 2x75w to 2x300w and £300 to £1,700, so they are very high end things. Their speaker ranges include the K2 Power, Polyglass and Access lines, all aimed at different price points but with effort made to offer as much of their technology as they can at each price point. The K2 Powers go up to £750 for the 18 in subwoofer or £650 for their top three way component system. Compare with £70 for a set of Focal Access line components. The Be subs have those cute discoidal magnets in clusters. Their build quality is world class and again, if your mates know about speakers, they’ll be well impressed if you get Focals. These are speakers and amps for audiophiles, with posh tastes. A big choice for the car audio competitors, you will see these in competition cars.

Eclipse

The Car Audio arm of the mighty Japanese Fujitsu Ten semiconductor company, their headunits have a cult following. Seen in a great number of American demo car installs, this is largely due to very high quality backed up with one of the most amazingThe Car Audio arm of the mighty Japanese Fujitsu Ten semiconductor company, their headunits have a cult following. Seen in a warranty back up reputations in the whole world. Less well known is that Eclipse carved-from-billet aluminium woofer cones are used in £26,000 Krell subwoofer systems. The things BBG deal in are the two Navigation products, the AVN8826 Mk II HDD system with a 7in screen DVD receiver to go with it or the double-DIN AVN2227P with a removable portable navigation system on board. The two CD tuners are both high end yet affordable. The £200 CD542SE has a five volt preout, while that on the £400 CD8445SE is at a whopping 8V. (A feature normally only found on far pricier units.) There’s a surround sound decoder (for Dolby & dts) and an eight disc CD changer. There are a couple of accessories, like Eclipse rear view cameras and an additional analogue input wire loom or an Audio Function remote control, both for going with the 5425. This is not the prettiest kit in existence but it is very high end for the money asked.

Mac Audio

A very German line of speakers, amplifiers, woofers and speaker boxes. They used to be seen as a good but inexpensive solution offering no style at all. This has all changed and their know how to produce good speakers for less wedge than most has now been fettled with a whole new designer look across the board. There are woofers and boxes that look a million bucks yet don’t cost it and are startlingly cool to those that thought they knew this solid brand. Their most expensive component systems are under £100 in the Super Audio line and their cheapest speakers are a mere £25 in the Mac Mobil line. Their enclosures have sealed, ported and bandpass designs in mostly ten and twelve inch woofer sizes, both singles and doubles and a single active woofer, called the Compact 220 for £250. Their Mac Olympic Gold 6x9s are a costly-for-the-genre £200 but they are huge-sounding, big-built joy units. I have tried them and they are incredible performers.

MTX

This is a huge company and in their corporate video the boss is seen riding around the factory on a bicycle. They are what’s called ‘vertically integrated’. This means that apart from digging up the copper ore, processing it and drawing the wire they use, MTX make just about everything they use to make speakers. They are a classic USA Might and Main brand. Their flagship image piece is a mad thing called Jackhammer that looks like it should be in a cartoon. It is 22 inches across and is massive. Looks like a weapon. The lines of speakers and amps and speaker boxes are mostly about bass and are all called Thunder. This is not about subtlety. Their catalogue generally has a section at the end dedicated to the MTX Thunder Force, or competition teams. Their cars and kit have no problem raising 150dB and their loudest installs around the world crack 170dB, which is mad. They are as US of A as Mom’s Apple pie and that can often mean that the slice is big, fat, luxurious and possibly not too good for your long term health.

AudioVox

A fine maker of 12Volt audio visual products, there is a single DIN headunit for £500 called the AUD-VME9311TS, which is a classic motorised 7 in touch panel with a DVD player in its guts- making this obviously a good VFM line, but the real story with AudioVox in the UK has to be the screens for roof mounting, both as monitors and also ones that include of a DVD deck of their own. There are screens from a normal 7 inches up to a huge (for car use) 15.4. There is a stand alone DVD player for £150, called the AUD-AVD400A, which is a goodly rate for such an item. A quality AV line with some really cool accessories like iPod connection leads for their headunits and even an FM modulator to add audio to any car hifi system. Workmanlike and effective rather than flash, AudioVox is a well established quality brand with great reputation to back up.

Magnat

This line is another from the German market and has a tough street graffito-looking cartoon dog as a logo. The slogan ‘Sound Mit Biss’ goes with it. They make speakers, amps and enclosures and many are priced well below even what Mac Audio can manage. Yet they are far from only able to make budget items. Their old Aggressor subs were stupendously large and were the same product as used in their £25,000 a pair active bass home high end hifi speakers. As well as doing the budget stuff, they sell their best and poshest speakers in Germany under the same brand. Complete with the cartoon dog in the background. This is because the Germans really, truly understand engineering and are less likely to be swayed by pretty or even daft graphics. I like their stuff and much of it has huge bling appeal. Even if your mates know nowt about car electronics, you go buy some Magnat kit and as well as working well for the cash you spent, it’ll look the, er dogs’.

 

StreetWires

I have a definite soft spot for StreetWires. Originally labelled also as ‘by Esoteric Audio’ you could not pick up an American magazine without seeing their stuff used to connect all the very best demo installs. Their products were the ones I chose to use with my first ever serious car audio installation. Now in a world with lots and lots of lines of cable products, the StreetWires stuff has evolved but what has remained the same throughout is the near jewellery-grade fit and finish of all their equipment. Even their cables are so beautifully labelled, that you get the urge to cut them such that the lettering is the same way up as each other piece on cable runs and you want to make it as neat and tidy as possible. Far from cheap, (their best combi fuse holder costs £100) StreetWires is still the brand to compete with, no matter how high end your new cable line is aimed. There are one or two others out there that come close but the original high end car power and signal cable company is still StreetWires and again, those who want to know they have bought into what is unarguably, unassailably the best around will buy this gear. It’s so shiny and pretty and red and gold and black&amp$$

Dynamat

I was once on a trip to the McLaren car factory and saw Dynamat extreme being applied to the McLaren F1 road car. I gather it would have cost BBG a telephone number to have bragged about selling Dynamat to the McLaren boys, so not many people know that but it remains well known that Dynamat is the best sound deadening product line. It comes in various grades from relatively cheap all the way up to incredibly vibration-absorptive for its weight and not cheap. That it is simply the highest technology in its field was backed up by the mad end sports car makers, as that car was made to a cost-no-object basis. The Inconnell metal exhaust manifold on one of them cost the same as a BMW seven series on its own. Dynamat are cool marketeers and go around shows making sure that any car that used Dynamat in its build has got the Dynamat triangular card thingy on its roof. Said to be the best upgrade to any car audio system, a decent bit of sound deadening in your car’s body work enables you to hear more of your equipment and less of the road noise. This is the only brand of sound deadening that anyone would actually ever brag about fitting. All the others they’ll tell you about price.

 

– Products from entry level to state of the art
– Some of the very best equipment available anywhere
– Products from Japan, Germany, France and the USA
– Complete installs possible within the brand spectrum from soup to nuts
– Serious effort invested in web presence and training courses for dealers
– Legends include the MTX Jackhammer and the JLW7 woofers
– Charismatic Nutter at the Helm, known simply as The Big G

Customer support telephone number 01923 205 605