Multiroom Audio is Spreading

Multiroom audio is like the little engine that could -- just look at the statistics. 2006 was the first year in history, for example, that sales of in-wall speakers eclipsed sales of shelf and floor-standing speakers combined, according to research by the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA).

CEA also found that, at least for the first half of 2006, the multiroom audio category -- which includes products such as speakers, distribution amps, matrix controllers, keypads, touchscreens and the like -- was tracking at 20-percent year-over-year growth for both unit sales and dollar volume.

The figures receded somewhat in the second half of the year due largely to the slowdown in new-home construction. By October, growth in the category was at 9 percent for unit sales and 14 percent in dollar volume.

Even so, "That's really good news," says Petro Shimonishi, vice president of marketing for multiroom audio provider NetStreams and co-vice chair of CEA's Multiroom Audio Video Council. "It shows no price erosion in the category. This is a great place to be."

That price erosion thing is certainly a big deal to integrators, who see margins fading away on TVs and other consumer electronics components. Also fueling interest in the category among homebuilders is CEA-2030, the new multiroom audio prewiring specification from CEA. Published in 2005, the document is already the second-most downloaded spec offered by CEA after a key HDTV publication.

CEA-2030 defines the cabling and connectors for use in distributing analog and digital audio signals throughout a home. The fact that a standard now exists for whole-house audio lends legitimacy to the category, which is less easily understood than, say, home theater.

iPods, Intercoms Stimulate Sales

Purists complain about the inferior audio quality of iPods and other MP3 players, but consumers don't care. They're snapping up these devices by the tens of millions.

Tom Wells of Integrated Media Systems, Vienna, Va., says despite the inferior quality of the iPod, the music player has gotten people to "rediscover their music collections. ... People are enjoying music again."

At the same time, the biggest gripe among consumers (28 percent), when it comes to their audio systems, is the inability to play PC-based music on them, according to a CEA study. Only 20 percent named sound quality as their largest source of dissatisfaction, the study found.

Manufacturers are responding in droves. Virtually every manufacturer of multiroom audio systems now accommodates music from iPods, PCs and the Internet, with two-way communications for metadata.

These products can be found with a dizzying array of capabilities, price points and connection mechanisms -- NuVo Technologies even has a wireless solution for networking an iPod into a whole-house audio network.

These products were just emerging in 2006 and, we suspect, will hit critical mass in 2007.

Dennis Sage of Phoenix-based Dennis Sage Home Entertainment says he hasn't yet seen the iPod phenomenon actually stimulate sales of whole-house music system but he agrees, "It will be a very important part of our future. These kids that are growing up with iPods and PC music will be wanting to listen to it throughout the house."

He has an iPort iPod music distribution system in his showroom and says, "Almost every customer that comes into our showroom sees it and thinks it's cool. It's a great closing tool. ... It is an added benefit to our industry to say that we can do it."

Besides the development of iPod-enabled music solutions, another category may also be contributing to the rise of multiroom audio sales: intercoms.

Elan Home Systems was one of the pioneers of multiroom audio integrated with intercom functionality, but few manufacturers followed Elan's lead, it seems, until 2006. Now a flood of audio companies are tackling the intercom issue, enabling their systems to mute when the doorbell rings, and allowing users to exploit their existing speakers and audio systems to page specific rooms or the entire house.

The existence of these new product may tilt the customer's decision in favor of whole-house audio systems instead of less expensive standalone intercoms.

"We've been doing intercoms for 25 years," says Eric Roden of C&R Systems, Inc., a Corona, Calif.-based integration company that installed about 6,200 home systems in 2005.

"Customers don't think they need both an intercom system and distributed audio. Many times it divides the household -- where one wants an intercom system and thinks background music through the intercom is good enough, and the other really wants a distributed audio system."

Roden says that, in the past, when customers asked for distributed audio up front, he was reluctant to bring up intercoms for fear "they would settle for less."

Then he discovered Russound's ComPoint, one of several new intercom systems that tap into a multiroom audio system. He estimates that C&R has experienced an 8-percent swing from intercoms to distributed audio since he started offering ComPoint.

Homeowners Just Get It

"New homebuyers are tied into music on a daily basis," says Keith Marshall, vice president of Proficient Audio. "Multiroom audio sells well because it makes a lot of sense to a new homebuyer. It fits into the lifestyle that they see themselves having in their new home. Also, from a dealer's standpoint, it's an opportunity to 'margin up' due to the number of architectural speakers in a multiroom system."

Marshall advises installers that in order to effectively sell multiroom audio in a competitive landscape they should consider setting up listening stations in places such as offices, as well as in areas like conference rooms and warehouses where an outdoor type of demonstration can be simulated.

He advises constructing demos that facilitate good-better-best comparisons.

And of course, choose your demo materials wisely, Marshall advises.

Vista Enters Multiroom

In the past, it was difficult to integrate music from a Media Center Edition (MCE) PC into a whole-house audio system. When Windows Vista ships this year, however, many of those issues will be solved, enhancing the ability of integrators to tack whole-house audio onto the sale of shiny new Vista PCs.

More MCE PC makers are accommodating multizone audio. For example, HP, which has sold more MCEs than any other PC maker, has fixed its key multizone limitation with the new z565 Digital Entertainment Center (DEC). The z565 offers fixed-volume RCA outputs so users can control stereo volume for multizone applications independent of surround-sound volume -- something earlier DECs could not do.

A lack of interfaces has inhibited the integration of MCEs into whole-house audio systems. With Vista, Microsoft is releasing two key development tools to solve this problem: Pika and Sideshow.

Streaming media over IP networks, especially wireless ones, can be problematic because of bandwidth and quality-of-service (QoS) issues. The Vista version of MCE solves many of these problems, with solutions that optimize bandwidth for multiple, simultaneous streams. The synchronization of audio streams across multiple zones is not currently a feature of Vista, but that feature will likely be in future versions of Vista Media Center.