MadisonAV goes MI

Ceo Ken Kyle Is Enjoying ‘Working In Retail’

The last six months have heralded more than a few changes in both the Australian audio distribution landscape and the perception and market influence of brands within it.

Things really kicked off at the Integrate tradeshow last August, when MadisonAV made their debut as the distributor of the full HARMAN range, including all of their retail product. It came as they unleashed the news that Canberra’s Elite Event Technology had purchased a Qudos Bank Arena-sized fleet of JBL VTX A-Series top-of-the-line PA, single-handedly bringing the brand back into the mainstream of high-end production.

With a completely new portfolio and market vertical to address, MadisonAV hit the ground running to build capability, investing in excellent talent from the retail sales and marketing sectors nationwide. While the DJ and musical instrument (MI) retail channel represented a new area for the business, CEO Ken Kyle has been open about the company’s deliberate approach to learning the category and surrounding itself with experienced specialists.

“It is a new vertical for us, and that’s why we had to very quickly put together a dedicated team,” says Ken. “We’re already getting some traction in the market, only a few months in. We have some notable names in the team that have been connected to the vertical for a long time. They’ve come on board in sales, marketing, and business development roles. Our General Manager of Sales, Robert Lackey, has a huge amount of experience in that area. He’s applying decades of retail audio experience to build a more structured, intentional dealer network that clarifies who we work with and how we support them. The result is tighter alignment between manufacturers, distributor and retailers, leading to better in-store execution, stronger partnerships, and improved outcomes for end users.”

With Harman shifting from split distribution model to a single distributor within a relatively short timeframe, MadisonAV had to make a significant investment in working capital and stock. “We needed to get the message out there that if it’s HARMAN Pro AV in Australia, you now get it from Madison AV,” continues Ken. “And we needed to do it with some haste to start to see R.O.I. Robert and I did an initial tour of duty of retailers around the country, and we got some warts-and-all feedback about the HARMAN portfolio and how it sat in the market. After that, we realised we needed to announce ourselves and pull all the key players together in one place.”

The first iteration of that idea came to fruition in an event held at Melbourne’s hip Collingwood Yards on December 3, 2025. The pre-Christmas gathering introduced the new MadisonAV Retail team to their MI partners and the broader Victorian studio and broadcast communities. The evening offered guests the chance to put faces to names and get a sneak peak at products coming down the HARMAN pipeline.

“We chose to do the first event in Melbourne because that’s where a lot of our retail staff are based, as are a lot of the head offices of the retail groups.” Ken offers. “We have more events for Sydney and Brisbane in planning. I think change works best when it’s discussed and there’s collaboration before it’s implemented. Everyone agrees that there’s some adjustments needed in the pricing structure. All the partners want to know what’s next in the product roadmap, what’s new across the portfolio, and what they can expect. When HARMAN decided to refresh the retail audio range over the past few years, they did so model by model, and by the time they finished, it’s almost time start again. It never really stops.”

While concentrating on the retail audio market, the event proved that there’s been an undeniable halo effect caused by JBL’s recent success with VTX A- Series and SRX Series high-end PAs.

“There’s a lot of awareness in the retail market of JBL VTX A-Series, and I think we’ve done a great job of marketing it since 2022 when we took it on, then launched it at Star City in 2023,” evaluates Ken. “We really got things moving, doing a lot of festivals and shows, and every time we did, we got amazing feedback. We had some prominent Australian acts and tier one artists partnering with us, and everyone was very pleased with the results. Positive stories attached to the JBL logo in the local environment are always going to have a halo effect. There’s been a lot of awareness that JBL is certainly ‘back’ in that big end of town touring market. The announcement of Elite Event Technology having the most significant PA sale in the vertical for quite some time was an important step for us as well, and it certainly did raise awareness of the brand across all of the pro verticals.”

The MI audio retail environment in Australia breaks down into a few sectors; regional or small musical retailers who mainly supply instruments but can sell audio when someone asks, DJ and tech retailers who do a regular trade in monitors and portable PA, and larger and diversified retailers who also have installation and/or production arms. The latter category is a large market, and a more complex one for a distributor to service.

“The thing with the big companies with install or production arms is they are saturated with many, many brands,” agrees Ken. “They have to make commercial decisions as to what they’re going to range; you can’t range everything from everybody. Some of those companies own JBL SRX and are tendering everything from theatres and venues right down to smaller school installations. There’s nothing in our range as far as audio goes that is not in their wheelhouse. We’ve met with these businesses, and in some cases, they were an existing JBL dealer, and in some cases, they weren’t. We’ve retained business that was there, we’ve grown in some cases, and some are still in discussion. As a product offering, we’ve got to have something unique and special, and I we think we certainly have that in JBL, AKG and Soundcraft.”

I personally dislike split distribution models in a market as small as Australia, having been around the traps long enough to see them all inevitably fail. I told Ken that I was glad, for the market’s sake, when HARMAN changed their model. “I think it’s become much easier for everyone,” concedes Ken. “As far as HARMAN product goes, there’s no more silos. It’s one product range and it’s a simple message. MadisonAV are a mature business with established market verticals. We have a terrific Technical Sales Support Team, both pre-sales and post-sales. We make our pre-sales technical team market-facing. The resources are there to assist customers with designs and proposals. We do pre-delivery checks and firmware updates, and we even offer commissioning assistance on complex projects. The more product we have, the more people we attract. And once customers use our services, they realise that we’re going to be a great value-add to their business.”

One of the great value-adds MadisonAV is offering to both HARMAN and their customers is a dedicated facility to experience the range, and new technology like FLUX:: Immersive audio processing. “We’ve just finalised the establishment of our Experience Centre here in Sydney,” Ken enthuses. “We’ve secured a new premises for our New South Wales warehousing as of February, and the entire warehouse here in Silverwater will be repurposed into the Experience Centre. We believe that will drive things forward and help our customers by having somewhere to demo immersive audio, line arrays, and big box PA to their customers.”

With MadisonAV’s roots in telecommunications and hard-core corporate AV, how is Ken liking the new market? “I’m really enjoying working in retail!” jokes Ken. “My personal hobbies have always led me to music stores. Combining a bit of work with my hobbies makes dealing with this market extremely enjoyable. MI retailers are a great group of people; they’re passionate, they are or have been DJs or musicians, or just really into the technology. They’ve been really accepting of us and given us fair opportunity.”

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Main Pic: KEN KYLE SPEAKING AT THE MELBOURNE RETAIL EVENT