Additions to Russound AirGo Line Will be ‘Evolutionary’ As Company Pushes Hard-Wired Solutions
"We don’t believe Russound is a dot-matrix printer in a laser world,” CEO Charlie Porritt told Consumer Electronics Daily in a conference call with consultant Oscar Ciornei on the company’s future plans. Porritt was commenting on an industry observer’s view of Russound’s position in the custom electronics industry (CED May p1). Porritt cited innovative initiatives the company has taken in the past with Exceptional Innovation, whose Lifeware software was based on the Windows Media Center platform, along with Collage, a multi-room audio system with a power line carrier backbone to take advantage of the retrofit opportunities for the existing home market.
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More recently, Porritt noted, Russound delivered the AirGo speaker, which works with Apple’s AirPort Express to send music outdoors or to additional rooms in a home. AirGo is sold through retail, “a bit of a difficult channel for us,” Porritt said, noting it sells through Crutchfield, Magnolia and Best Buy. With AirGo, Russound wants to stay “within an ecosystem” vs. delivering a spate of SKUs, Porritt said. Any advances in the AirGo product line will likely be “evolutionary,” Porritt said, with the addition of Bluetooth and “other technologies."
A primary Russound focus now is the DMS-3.1 digital media streamer, which Porritt called a bridge between the digital IP world and Russound’s legacy C3 and C5 analog controllers. “A hard-wired system is always the best whether you're talking about a network or dealing with audio,” he said. The digital streaming world presents challenges that companies like Russound haven’t had to face before, including the constant evolution of technology, consumers’ “changing tastes,” and transitions in where and how consumers want to listen to music, Porritt said.
One of the biggest issues for small audio distribution companies, Porritt said, is “we are not in control of that world.” Ciornei said content companies today “are acting the way the big music labels used to behave.” If an audio playback company can’t sell “hundreds of thousands of pieces,” they aren’t interested, Ciornei said, an issue plaguing a number of legacy players in multi-room audio. “The entire CEDIA [Custom Electronic Design & Installation Association] audience is smaller than companies like Pandora want to work with,” he said. “It’s very difficult for niche players to get licensing rights to use their services.” That will change in time, Ciornei said, “but right now they're riding the big time, and they are looking at the mass market.” Russound’s DMS server is compatible with DLNA and AirPlay for streaming user-owned content and offers vTuner and Sirius streaming services, Porritt said.
Over the rest of the year, Russound plans “get back to basics” with a focus on service, Porritt said. The company is planning a “continuous stream of product,” which he described as “singles” vs. “home runs,” including an Android app, a single-chassis tuner and sub-zones for its A-Bus system. In the digital world, “you still need amplifiers and loudspeakers,” Porritt said, and the company sells both, including digital amplifiers. “Everyone is looking for technologies that will bring audio services to an amplifier and a speaker, and there are many different ways to do that,” Ciornei noted. For custom installers, a hard-wired solution remains critical for differentiation in an increasingly wireless world, he said. “If Russound sticks to just wireless devices, then integrators don’t have something uniquely special to offer,” Ciornei said. “The ultimate performance is in the wire.”