Streaming audio has become a wildly popular feature for a lot of people, despite its occasional drawbacks in quality. Combine this with multiroom audio being one of the most desirable home technology amenities currently available, and you have an environment in which a company like Juke Audio, led by Colton Forth, can thrive.

Having started Juke Audio back in 2019, Forth’s prior roles largely encompassed sales and marketing positions within the entertainment industry. These roles saw him working for brands such as Rostrum Records and Live Nation, as well as the Los Angeles Sports & Entertainment Commission.

For Forth, Juke has provided a perfect avenue for him, blending his love of music with his talent and passion for selling and marketing tech products. For integrators, Juke has provided a groundbreaking product to sell to customers. And for those customers, Juke has enabled an entirely new home experience.

CE Pro recently sat down with Forth to talk about his experiences working with Juke Audio for the past five years, his thoughts on the whole-house audio market, and offer up his opinion on the best way to do multiroom audio.

CE Pro: How healthy would you say is the whole-house audio market?

Forth: Despite the economy slowing a bit, along with new residential construction, we feel the whole-house audio market remains in a good state.

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There has just been a bit more of a conscious effort on finding cost-effective solutions than maybe there was prior. However, homeowners and builders alike remain keen on implementing whole-house audio products to increase value in their home and overall satisfaction. 

CE Pro: How has Juke Audio fared in the industry as a relatively new company? 

Forth: Launching in 2019, Juke Audio was born less than a year before the pandemic. Therefore, we did not have much data to benchmark our results against, however the market adoption in the first two years of our product launching was certainly more than we had initially expected. 

With more people staying at home during that time, we feel the pandemic might have actually benefited our growth as more consumers were focused on home improvements. Our product serves as a simple retrofit of existing wired multiroom audio systems that a lot of homeowners across the country have seen grow antiquated. 

CE Pro: Can you summarize the company’s unique approach to your solutions?

Forth: We believe that multiroom or whole house audio is still best done through a wired solution. When it comes to the aesthetic of no visible wires, sound quality from insulated speakers, and reliability of wired connections, it’s clear that it’s the optimal method.

However, the majority of solutions on the market for wired multiroom audio are expensive and complicated, usually requiring multiple pieces of hardware and difficult configurations. 

We’re changing that paradigm by bringing a cost-effective and simple to use wired whole house audio solution to the market in the form of our multiroom streaming amplifier; an all-in-one product used for powering, wirelessly controlling, and streaming to wired speakers across up to eight rooms. 

CE Pro: How have dealers and homeowners reacted to Juke Audio’s product line?

Forth: I think just like with any introduction of a new product or company there was the usual phase of skepticism. However, we met that head on and continued to show strong results through higher customer satisfaction levels through all our channels. 

We also listened to dealer/user feedback over the past few years to continue iterating our product via over-the-air firmware updates to further enhance our product functionality via software. Now, we have a large dealer network and customer install base, with many more exciting plans on the horizon. 

CE Pro: How do you recommend dealers explain the feature highlights to clients?

Forth: There are a few key points. The first being ease of use, as we allow users to stream natively within the apps they already know and love (Apple Music, Spotify, Pandora, etc.) directly to Juke. This means there is no additional user interface to learn. After the device is configured in the Juke app, there is very little need or reliance on the user going there to do control. 

The second point would be flexibility of the device. Whether you have one member in the house looking to stream to every single zone at once, or four users in the house looking to listen to different things from their own devices in their own rooms at the same time, the Juke can accommodate that too. 

And finally, the cost-effectiveness. Comparable solutions require the stacking of multiple boxes to achieve what our eight-zone streaming capable amplifiers do, which allows us to offer our product at a lower cost and reach higher customer satisfaction. As a dealer installing our product, that leads to increased customer referrals for other installs. 

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