My trip to Mitek's Phoenix facility.

I had a chance to go out to MTX's facilities in Phoenix in June of 2003 with my coworker from Car Domain Jeromy. It was a relatively mild summer day in Arizona, so it was only 382 degrees out (a dry heat is what the locals called it).

Lots of fun stuff went on, our tour guide was Manny K., one of the guys who had been responsible for alot of the PPI show vans back in the day (the Sedona and some of the art series amps). A car audio geek like Jeromy and I who had been part of the industry for over 15 years.

The facility we went to is where most of the amplifiers are made, where most of the rep training takes place as well as the sales/adminstrative/customer care call center is.

Our first stop was to head back and take a quick peak in the marketing department. Since they were working on some of the new products at that point, I didn't really take too many pictures. I visisted right as they were about to launch the campaign where they called out their competitors. Very hush, hush at that point. They were also working on some campaigns for the new 9500 (which hadn't shipped at that point), and packaging as well (a 60 pound woofer needs a very heavy duty package, which protects the driver from UPS' abuse, as well as looks good on the sales floor).

After that, we headed to the training area in the back. Mitek spends alot of time training their sales representatives and they wanted to have a top notch area for them to get intimate with the product. Instead of heading to a hotel or convention center, they built everything that would be needed to train for all the Mitek lines (Atlas, DCM, MTX, Xtant, Streetwires, Esoteric).

Here is the stage they have in the back. I didn't get a good shot, but they have had a few local bands perform here (Alice Couper is good friends with Loyd Ivey, Mitek's owner)

Here are some of Loyd Ivey's favorite products he developed. There are some MTX home speakers, Xtant amps, Xtant signal processor, and one of the items that started it all, the Scram (a ultrasonic rodent repellant). Here are some of the current MTX home speakers.

One area had a dedicated home theater, with a projector and theater-style seating.

As you walk in, the majority of the real estate is taken up by car audio products, with the focus on MTX.

They had areas dedicated to each brand, with demo boards, cars and products.

Here is a picture of the Coustic area.

Here is a picture of a really nice green classic car, and the MTX board right beyond it.

1 more picture of that classic hot rod. There is also a picture of the RFL amp that never was (supposedly two of their biggest class D amps strapped, on one chassis that looked like a mechanic's creeper).

A shot of each of the Xtant demo boards. One has the X series, the other the Xtant and A series on it.

Another beautiful classic hot rod. The area behind it is where they have trainings and meetings.

Here are two shots of the Xtant 3 series BMW that had been featured in some of their advertising.

A "classic" streetwire wiring diagram, using the old pre-Mitek product. Nice to see one of these, lots of attention to detail.

Why have a huge meeting place, and no place to eat? The rolling doors open on cooler days and they have BBQ grilles they can make food on for trainings and things of that nature.

Here is the big meeting room that is in the back. Here is where most of the sales trainings take place from what I'm told.

Here is Mitek's customer care area. The screen shows what every legit customer call center should have (stuff like average hold time, people on hold, customer care agents logged in, service levels). The other cool thing is that they take all phone calls. Some other vendors have a dealer number and a consumer number. Mitek has one for both. They treat everyone the same (which is good, I hate going through a phone tree only to have to leave a message).

After the meeting room, we went out to lunch before coming back and checking out the amplifier assembly operation.