Strategy in TECH...
On Monday, a federal holiday, VOXX International’s Premium Audio Company (PAC) announced that Oscar Bernardo, its Chief Operating Officer, left the company on December 31, 2022. The company says – in this kind of strange, after-the-fact announcement – that Bernardo left to relaunch the Mirage speaker brand. Mirage is owned by VOXX International, which acquired it in 2006.
Well it’s the time of Auld Lang Syne as we say farewell to 2022 and look forward with anxious anticipation for 2023. It was a consequential year of stories for our industry in 2022, and we’ll go over the top stories on Strata-gee this year.
Hop on I-70 and head East out of Indianapolis for around forty-five minutes or so and you’ll arrive in Spiceland, a quiet, rural village of under 1,000 people that with its brick church, quaint bandstand in the park, and a picturesque running stream, feels as country-style homey as you could imagine. What brought me to Spiceland? I came to visit the town’s largest employer and Henry County’s (named for patriot Patrick Henry) second-largest employer – Draper, a manufacturer of leading projection screens and roller shades.
In a decision announced last week, U.S. District Court Judge James V. Selna has granted a motion for reconsideration by Outlaw Audio that included a restraining order preventing OSD Audio “from falsely representing” a certain feature of one of its products. This decision is a result of legal action taking place between direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands Santos Elecs. Inc. dba OSD Audio and Outlaw Audio LLC.
Residential construction of new homes – known as housing starts – continues to register monthly declines as a combination of still-high home prices along with rapidly rising mortgage rates results in collapsing home affordability. While economists continue to debate if and when the U.S. economy enters a recession – it’s clear that housing overall, and the home building segment specifically – is already there.
Draper, Inc., a leading manufacturer of shades and projection screens, announced this week that it is continuing to turn up the heat on the residential channel by appointing a sales team focused solely on the residential market. This new team will zero in on resi with the company’s extensive line of shading, projection screens, and other AV-related gear.
Parasound is a unique company. A long-time specialty segment stalwart, the company has been delighting audio enthusiasts for more than forty years! That is no small achievement when you consider the twists and turns of the specialty segment over that time frame.
And the credit for that success is largely due to the commitment to quality – and, frankly, just the bulldog temerity – of founder and CEO Richard Schram. So it is a development worthy of note that, yesterday, Schram announced his retirement from the company and its sale to a new owner.
In a dramatic move that represents a tremendous investment in consumer marketing, Savant Systems, Inc. (Savant) is piloting a second New York City showroom concept in Manhattan’s trendy SOHO district called, appropriately enough, Savant SOHO Smart Home Gallery. This new space joins the company’s long-running Flagship Experience Center, which is also in SOHO.
In what may turn out to be the best test yet of Masimo’s long-term plans for Sound United, the company announced today that it is launching an expansion of HEOS, the wireless home system initially developed by the company’s Denon division as part of a whole-home wireless music system. When Masimo acquired Sound United back in February of this year, Denon’s “cloud-connected home ecosystem” was one of the items it specifically mentioned as what attracted them to make the acquisition.
With today’s announcement, the company says that the launch of this “…expansion of the HEOS platform [will] provide a robust and always-on connection to the Masimo Health secure cloud.”
Can headphone design really be inspired by a rad-looking “supercar”? Apparently, as high-end, high-performance speaker maker Bowers & Wilkins (B&W), a division of Sound United, announced today a special McLaren Edition of their flagship Px8 reference-grade, over-ear, wireless, noise-canceling headphones.
The company said it created the special model to celebrate its 5-year relationship with luxury, high-performance car manufacturer McLaren Automotive.
