Before you try to sell outdoor audio, here are three important pieces of advice to follow.
Avoid the “Do You Want Speakers Outside?” Approach
A common, and dispiriting question asked to clients is, “Do you want speakers outside?” This question, though well-intentioned, minimizes the client’s experience, and pigeonholes the landscape audio system as an inexpensive add-on to the house music system.
Landscape architects don’t say, “Do you want appliances outside?” Instead, they create a new category altogether, asking, “Do you want an outdoor kitchen?” Framing the question is important. Because an outdoor kitchen is a glorious, exciting prospect… ‘appliances outdoors’ is not.
So, the best way to frame a landscape audio system is to ask the big questions. “Would you like your pool area bathed in music?” “Would you like a club-like experience on your patio?” “Would you like an outdoor theater?”
Think Like a Landscape Architect
Wealthy clients have landscape architects—and you can bet these designers are fussy about aesthetics. So choose landscape audio speakers and their placement with the eye of a designer. Which means, keep everything hidden. Don’t hang anything that looks like a speaker off the house. Don’t place “landscape light” style speakers—with their pedestrian aesthetics—near a client’s expensive lighting fixtures. Hide subwoofers under decks, behind foliage, or ideally underground.
Related: 10 Subwoofers to Put Oomph in the Outdoors
Forget about Stereo
There’s no place for a stereo image outdoors. Choosing which side of the yard is ‘right’ and which is ‘left’ is silly. Instead, create a monophonic ‘music everywhere’ system, like Disneyland does, with daisy-chained 70V speakers. 70V transformers have a bad rap, and deservedly so, since they saturate and degrade sonic performance. But at Bay Audio, we developed the first lossless audiophile 70V outdoor transformer for our Park Stevens speakers, preserving high fidelity throughout the entire frequency spectrum.
