Deciding to take matters into its own hands, Boca Tech & Automation is expanding its role as a custom integration company to enter the furniture manufacturing market through the introduction of its Soundwhere product line.

Ron Lennox, vice president, business development, Boca Tech & Automation, explains the company has spent the past few years working with a local custom furniture manufacturer to develop a product line that conceals home technology.

Lennox says the newly launched Soundwhere product line offers homeowners a choice of several products. Four of the products are designed to hang on a wall with a display mounted directly to products. The latest addition to the product line he continues is more of a console-type of product that allows TVs to sit on or hang above the unit.

Beyond the goal of offering this newly developed line of furniture products, Boca Tech & Automation is working towards the capability of offering the product line to fellow dealers to help other integrators capitalize on the opportunities within the furniture category.

Boca Tech & Automation Soundwhere Project Takes a Life of its Own

Admittedly Lennox says initially the company had no intention to create of a line of furniture products. Boca Tech’s motivation he says was based seeing design trends that didn’t align with its overall objectives.

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“The first was we hate the look of the basic soundbar under a TV and the only way to make that even worse is to have the ugly soundbar under the TV and a subwoofer sitting on the floor.  It is the exact opposite of everything we strive to do.  The second reason, and thing that sent us down the path of an actual piece of furniture is that once you have a designer friendly good-looking way to hide the speakers and mount the display you still need to put the equipment someplace, and that place needs power, network, ventilation, and easy access,” states Lennox.

“This is routinely placed in a remote location adding the need for racks and wire runs.  Suddenly putting a TV on the wall in the den or master bedroom in a beautiful way has just become complicated and more costly to the client.  Finally, due to the market in our area we have been doing more and more retro installations. Not that there are a lot of old houses in Boca Raton — it is that buying a multi-million-dollar home and retrofitting it has become very popular.  Beyond that the biggest home builders in the area do not want to let any outside AV specialist into their homes during construction.  So, we are doing retrofit installations on brand new builds daily.  We needed to find a way to put a large TV or even a theater in virtually any room, inside wall or outside wall, in a finished house.”

Other scenarios Lennox notes that Boca Tech & Automation routinely runs into include condominium installations where property owners desire 120-inch screen systems and these systems must ride in elevators to arrive at job sites. Searching the industry, he says the company could not find the solutions it needed. 

Ultimately Boca Tech found a local cabinet maker that happened to be looking for a partner to work on customized AV furniture they had developed with an integrated speaker and subwoofer package. After meeting with the local cabinet maker, Lennox says his team was sold on the capabilities of the furniture builder to refine the Soundwhere products.

Another motivating factor for Boca Tech & Automation to fully realize the Soundwhere products is the lost opportunities the furniture and cabinet category answers for integrators. Lennox concedes there are plenty of furniture products and solutions available to dealers — and many dealers already utilize custom cabinet solutions from partnerships with local furniture makers.

Furniture Can Fill Gap for Custom Integrators

The Florida integrator’s ’s newly developed product line offers integrators a choice of solutions that are more tailored to the residential technology market than most of the products currently available to dealers, he asserts.

“There are it turns out many ways and places that a system like the Soundwhere cabinets make sense,” he comments.  “When we hung the first unit in our showroom it was a big gamble. 

“We took up a complete demo room [our Family Room display area] and spent a lot of time and money to get it [Soundwhere cabinets] in and set up the way we thought it should be done. It turned out to be an instant hit and we started selling them within weeks of installing it. I should probably also note here that at least half of the units we have executed have been customized by our cabinet designer, the clients, and their designers. People have really embraced the idea of making a television a part of the room and the décor and not a black thing on the wall.”

Elaborating on the process the company undertook to arrive upon the Soundwhere product line, Lennox recalls that Boca Tech did not approach the cabinets from a product perspective. Lennox says the approach started with how could the company develop a product that complemented a room design.

Sound quality was also prioritized by the company, and the product had to stand alone if the customer required that type of furniture and AV system installation.

Applying its experience as an integration company, Boca Tech & Automation also knew the cabinet products needed to house all the AV components, and the cabinets needed proper ventilation to ensure their performance and reliability.

Bringing all these design factors together, Lennox stresses the noteworthy elements of the cabinets is the completed products perform at a high level and the blend into home spaces unobtrusively. Focusing on the audio performance of the Soundwhere product line Lennox admits the idea wasn’t Boca Tech’s, but through the company’s experience as an integration firm, it helped the cabinet maker to refine concept.

“The Soundwhere speaker system is an interesting part of the picture. First … we did not develop it. The cabinet maker we are working with has an engineer on their staff that is an audio nut and he had worked for several years to develop and patent the speaker system.  What we did was work with what they had already done and enhanced the design and execution to improve the total system quality.  The drivers are sourced from a major speaker manufacturer who I shall keep nameless at this time,” remembers Lennox.

“The 3.1 question is a good one. So, the first point of these is that they are ready to install and set up as a standalone product.  And to be frank a 3.1 can in fact be plenty of sound for the TV in a den or master bedroom installation. But of course, we needed to be able to easily go farther than that. Our largest unit which features a Samsung ultra-short throw [UST] projector and a Stewart Balon Series ALR [ambient light rejecting] screen is set up in the showroom in a Dolby Atmos style 5.2.4 configuration. 

“This system has no side speakers because we wanted to show it in a room that is very much like the ones we see every day in the real world, but still show that it can sound fantastic. We always want to offer the ability to expand the system to a more immersive sound system if the client and the room can use it. Thus, the Soundwhere UST was designed as a starter home theater that can integrate easily into virtually any room, even a non-dedicated room, and provide the starting point of a complete theater system.”

Boca Tech & Automation is in the process of finishing the development of a few smaller-format systems that once completed will be available to integrators across the U.S. for resale.

“We are planning to offer them to other dealers around the country that can sell and install a system at this level. The feedback we have gotten from the dealers we have shown it to has been extremely positive. One issue with these it that a dealer will really need to be capable of putting one of the units on display in their showroom to be successful with them,” adds Lennox.

“This is something that you need to be able to see and hear to fully understand and want to buy. It will also probably require a little bit of practice for some dealers to embrace the idea of a whole system-based sales concept. Many feel like they have to explain every little detail to their clients, and they can if the situation requires it. But this was developed to be much easier to deal with than that.”

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