BUSINESS BITS

Faithful amplifier
HEINZ BULOS

Hanging on a wall in Carlos Casas’ home office is a faux Michaelangelo painting of angels flying a bearded man skyward. The painting is captioned with the words “The Voca CDX 101. You don’t have to die to go to heaven.” The Voca, a stereo amplifier, is described as the “only amplifier in the world that can accurately reproduce live surround sound as perfectly as it was originally recorded.”

Casas, 62, perfected the Voca, his super amp, years ago. It’s an invention that won first prize in the Department of Science and Technology’s National Inventors Week in 2000 and was called “The Most Outstanding Invention of the Year” by the World Intellectual Property Organization in 2003. The Voca was so convincing that a reviewer for U.S.-based Stereophile magazine raved after testing it. Japanese giant Pioneer Electronics, no slough when it comes to making amplifiers, is considering selling it in 150 high-end stores in Japan.

Casas, who acquired the patent for his amplifier in 2001, brims with the energy of an upstart salesman. “It does not require a good speaker, playback, and pre-amp,” he says. One after another, he popped an audiocassette, a CD, a DVD, and a recorded HBO movie into a player, and each time, he pointed out that the audio quality and surround sound were simply heavenly despite the unremarkable set of speakers he was using.

An inventor and a businessman, Casas discovered he had a knack for business while taking up accounting at the University of the East in Manila, when he started a tailoring service at his mother’s gift shop and then grew it to a string of shops. He discovered he also had a knack for inventing in 1978, when he came up with a racquet sport called Bolaro, and then followed that up with the Triko, a tricycle for the disabled, and the Alcogas Stove, an alcohol-fired oven. He hit pay dirt in 1987 when he created the first gugo shampoo and called it Forest Herbs.

“That started everything,” he says. “I made my first million in six months.” Then came that eventful week in 1988 when Casas, a member of the Development Back of the Philippines’ Entrepreneurs’ Forum, joined a contingent on a visit to Singapore, where a tour of the biggest electronics firms opened his eyes to the industry’s size and potential in the Philippines.

Inspired by what he saw, Casas, an audiophile, recalled the days when he used to assemble speakers as a teenager, and without delay he set up a new company, Voca Laboratories, and rented a facility in Sto. Domingo, Quezon City, where he housed several people to develop stereo equipment. They came up with Turbosonic, a “tube” that reproduces and sustains the lowest notes without the electronic circuitry of a subwoofer. But it was while he was working on a jukebox project that Casas had his eureka moment.

“We accidentally discovered that the audio problem was coming from the wrong circuit design of the amplifier itself,” Casas explains. As it happened, his deal with the jukebox manufacturer fell through, so he told his people to perfect their work of a power amplifier, and in 1997, after a year of research and development, they came up with a working model.

Still, Casas realized too late that his development costs were surging. He had financed his project with the money he’d earned from his shampoo, but when the money ran out, he got into debt and soon got into more trouble when creditors foreclosed on his assets. Production of his super amp came to a halt. Struggling, Casas decided to do a quick feasibility study of his own. He figured that the 275 amplifier units he had completed were worth around P15 million, enough to sustain his operations.

“Kayak ko ito,” he recalls. After all, he’d installed his Turbosonic surround sound system in more than 100 homes, but the Superamp had far greater potential. Casas estimated that if he could get just one percent of the 30 percent of Philippine households that could afford his P70,000 amplifier, he’d be looking at a P2.3-billion business.

Today, Casas is positioning the Voca as an upgrade from the mass stereo segment to the high-end audiophile market. His selling point it that people can experience high-end audio and home theater sound with his amp without spending more on other components. A high-end audio setup wound cost up to P2.8 million, but that aspiring audiophile needs only to upgrade to the Voca while keeping the rest of his equipment to get great sound. Indeed, Casas is offering the Voca for test demonstrations in people’s homes to show them that they don’t have to die to go to heaven.