Michael Henriksen has spent a lot of time building up the Australian AV industry on both the commercial and residential sides. Sean Carroll speaks to the 2024 Most Influential Person to learn more about his storied career.

Michael Henriksen wanted to steer clear of electronics. Just stick to loudspeakers, his bread and butter. When he had the opportunity to become the Marantz agent in Australia, all he could think about was issues with repairs, spare parts and warranties – too much of a headache.

Fast forward to the present day and I’m speaking with Michael about his decorated working life and the accomplishments that saw him named Connected magazine’s Most Influential Person for 2024. He’s receiving this award in no small part due to his decision to step away from just audio solutions and start manufacturing electronics with iconic HDMI distribution company Blustream.

Early days

Growing up in Denmark, Michael Henriksen always loved audio technology. When he was a teenager, he got his first hi-fi system, and it was the start of a lifelong career for the young Dane.

“After I got my hands on that hi-fi system, I started building loudspeakers in my dad’s garage,” he says.

“I think I built about 50 pairs of loudspeakers and sold them to friends and family. It’s safe to say, I don’t have any of those speakers left.”

Working in the plumbing industry at the time, Michael saw an advert in the newspaper where someone was looking for a sales representative to sell pick-up cartridges, car loudspeakers and headphones. Michael went to interview for the job, driving over to Copenhagen to have a chat with his future employer.

While interviewing for the role, Michael looked at some of the loudspeakers that they were going to sell and was blown away by the retail pricing. He could see the components used in the high-end Jamo loudspeakers and knew that he couldn’t even build speakers himself for such a competitive price.

“After I recognised the drivers and saw the cost, I knew the brand had huge potential. And that’s how it all started, it was just an ad in the paper. Five years later, we were the biggest loudspeaker distributor in Denmark, and we had 27% of the market,” he explains.

There’s a Danish saying that goes something along the lines of: “Så er den ged barberet”. It translates to: “The goat has been shaved” where the “goat” in this instance is a ‘job’. So: “getting the job done”.

A peek into the past: An old Jamo Professional loudspeaker advert.

But if you’re guessing my momentary Google of Danish phrases ends there, you’re wrong. The title of this article, Jeg har det som blommen i et æg translates to “I feel like an egg yolk” which is used to say that you feel content.

Michael says that after a few years working in Denmark, he got itchy feet, wasn’t content and wanted to start his own business elsewhere. He wanted to shave the goat elsewhere.

Selling sound in Australia

“I took the cheapest flight I could from Copenhagen to Sydney which was with Air India. I remember it very clearly, we stopped at nearly every country on the way, and it took two days to travel across the globe,” Michael explains.

“I did a one-month market survey up and down the East Coast, from Melbourne to Brisbane, went back to Denmark, presented it to the Jamo export department and said that I believe there’s a market in Australia. They said: ‘Alright, if you can get in, we’ll get you the agency.’”

From there, Michael took a couple of months to get his permanent residency before packing his bags and touching down in Melbourne in August 1982.

In an October 1982 edition of EDA Circuit magazine, a cheerful young Michael Henriksen poses in front of the Arts Centre Melbourne with a meaty loudspeaker. The article talks about his new company, Scan Audio and the two brands he’s representing: Jamo and AM-KEMI, a manufacturer of record cleaning accessories, pick-up, tape decks and video recorders.

“We specialised in Scandinavian audio products, thus the name, Scan Audio. After ten years, we had pretty much all the Scandinavian brands represented, primarily loudspeakers, including Jamo, Dali, Dynaudio, Vifa, Peerless and Ortofon cartridges. I think the only brand we didn’t have was Bang & Olufsen,” he says.

In the mid-1990s, Michael sold the Scan Audio company but stayed on as managing director for just under three years. It wasn’t long after he had officially left that the industry called him back and he returned to lead Scan Audio.

This time, Michael made a move for Marantz, diving into electronics and control solutions, despite his earlier trepidation. But Scan Audio wasn’t just an audio company anymore and he had to change the name.

“We had an internal competition to come up with a new name, for a prize of $500. It took a while but one day I remembered there was a company in Denmark called QualiFi and it represented what we were doing: quality hi-fi,” Michael explains.

“Long story short, I won the $500 and we registered the name in Australia.”

QualiFi saw a lot of success distributing the Philips Pronto remote control. Looking back, it was rather simple technology but there was nothing else on the market that could do what it offered.

Philips eventually decided to sell the Pronto under its own brand name, so QualiFi became the distributor for Marantz in 1999. On the stock list was the RC-5000, a similar remote that was hard to understand at first, but once the team understood its full potential, its sales grew to 16% of the overall Marantz turnover.

The range of solutions on offer led to QualiFi selling hugely successful speaker packages with AV receivers, DVD players and later, Blu-ray players.

In 2013, QualiFi had the opportunity to buy out its biggest competitor, Audio Products Group (APG). The Sydney-based company, run by Ken Dwyer, were distributing Denon, NAD, PSB, Loewe Televisions, Tannoy and more. When the opportunity came, Michael says he struck fast and moved most of the APG solutions next door to QualiFi’s Mount Waverly, Victoria office.

“We didn’t know it at the time, but it was us buying out APG that started the idea of Blustream,” he says.

Enter, Blustream

Okay, so I wasn’t completely honest earlier. QualiFi specifically bought APG’s consumer electronics division, meaning APG was still operating its commercial and professional division, and one of the brands in that division was WyreStorm.

Currently distributed by Amber Technology in Australia, WyreStorm is a manufacturer that produces HD distribution and control solutions for AV signal distribution in professional, commercial, residential/custom install and retail markets.

“Suddenly, integrators and AV specialists were starting to ask me and Martyn Shirley, our custom installation sales manager in Australia, for HDBaseT products and we had to say we had nothing,” Michael says.

“So, I said to Martyn, ‘let’s go find a brand that we can represent.’ He got back to me a week or two later and said: ‘Look, the brands we can get, I’m not interested in and the ones I’m interested in, we can’t get.’”

What do you do when you can’t find a brand you want? Make your own of course.

A farfetched idea at the time, the two quickly came around to it. Martyn had experience on the manufacturing side before joining QualiFi and the two put together a business plan and had a long, hard think about it.

Michael says they went online and hosted a competition to come up with a name and a logo for the reward of $1,000. Shortly after, the name Bluestream was created, and the logo integrators came to know and love was born.

Well, integrators know Blustream. Only a couple of products were manufactured using Bluesteam with an ‘e’. Shortly after debuting, one of the brands that Michael was trying to secure for QualiFi had decided to go with another distributor, but they had a product with a very similar name, so the company dropped the ‘e’ to differentiate between the brands.

Blustream officially debuted at the Integrate Expo at ICC Sydney ten years ago.

Before the first day of the show, an industry colleague from New Zealand approached Blustream and asked if they were working across the Tasman. Initially, the answer was no, but by the end of the show, Blustream had its first customers outside of Australia. Not a bad way to start a trade show.

“A few weeks after Blustream’s first Integrate, we started getting inquiries from Singapore and other places. Shortly after that, two people from the United Kingdom, Phil Davis and Leon Tomasevic, heard about what we were doing on the internet, and said: ‘If we can get this agency in the UK, we can make this a really big brand.’”

Initially, Blustream was only designed with Australia in mind but after the international attraction, it made sense to expand.

“We set up a fully-owned subsidiary called Blustream UK and those two are still managing it after ten years. Very successfully, by the way,” he explains.

“And then in 2021, Brexit happened, and it became increasingly difficult to ship from the UK to Europe. So, our European sales manager set up another subsidiary in Madrid, Spain.”

From there, Blustream has seen products shipped across the world, including to Africa and the Middle East, in true keeping with Michael’s pioneering spirit and global experience.

Making the jump to commercial

When the pandemic hit, several companies wondered what was going to happen with the economy stalling, workplaces changing and questions coming at every corner.

Michael says he remembers a conversation very early on in 2020 when the world was about to stop: “Myself, Martyn and Toby Leader (Blustream chief technology officer) sat in a room and I was asked: ‘Look, we’re heading through tough times with these lockdowns. We have about 50 projects in the pipeline. What should we drop and what should we keep?’

“We were all very concerned about where we were going and what was going to happen and it looked like we were going to have a global recession immediately. Regardless, I said we’re going ahead with every single project.”

It was at this time that Blustream started developing more products for the commercial and professional AV markets. Before then, Blustream was predominantly operating in the residential space, but Michael admits that this side of the AV industry has matured and, if anything, is declining slightly.

With smart TVs getting smarter and soundbar technology getting better every year, Michael says there’s less of a need for residential AV compared to the bigger commercial market.

“Home theatre is a bit of an uphill battle these days. A lot of customers are saying that they’re content with a smart TV and sound bar,” he says.

“Additionally, the housing crisis is seeing people move into smaller homes with less room for a dedicated theatre space or the cost-of-living is hurting integrators’ abilities to convince people to install a full-blown theatre with five, seven or nine speakers, a couple of subwoofers and an AV receiver.”

Blustream isn’t just a residential company anymore. Michael feels as though they offer all they can in this space, but it was the company’s ambition and bravery in the face of a pandemic-led recession that saw them plant solid roots in the commercial world.

“Maintaining those projects during the pandemic was a huge decision for us. It helped us get into the commercial market and fulfil needs that we previously couldn’t,” he outlines.

“We also bought everything we could get our hands on and because of that, we weren’t as impacted by the chip shortages that hurt the AV industry. Because of this, we were able to find ourselves in spaces we previously didn’t have access to, and we’ve only solidified our position since then.”

The next challenge

“I’ve had a lot of good friends come up to me and tell me that if we want to break into the US market, we’ll be walking home with our tail between our legs in three years’ time with a very thin wallet,” Michael says with a laugh.

He appears supremely confident in Blustream’s ability to crack the biggest market in the world. And why not? Blustream has a partnership with RTI which is well-established in the United States with distribution, both direct and business, and Michael is confident they can grab a decent market share. Blustream has only seen success when taking on a new challenge, so there’s no reason it shouldn’t make hay in the US market

I tried to poach the secret herbs and spices from Michael, but to no avail, so we’ll just have to wait and see if the Australian-grown company can do it.

More personally, Michael says he and his wife are looking at spending more time in Denmark each year, hopefully dodging the freezing cold Melbourne winters for sunny Europe. It also allows him to spend more time with the European arm of his company.

“I’m very honoured and humbled to receive this award. I have to say, I don’t like to take credit for the success we’ve had because it’s due to the very talented staff that I’ve worked with and continue to work with today,” he explains.

“Without my team now and colleagues across the years, I wouldn’t be here accepting this award. I’m very thankful.”

The Most Influential Person award is an annual award given out by Connected magazine and voted on by AV industry peers in the Most Popular Awards. A full list of the Most Popular Awards can be found here.