Sonos a US start up 5 years ago has today rolled out new wireless devices for the home that allow music to be distributed to any room at up to 2X the wireless range of previous models. They have also slashed prices by up to $100 a device.
The Company that has grown its business by 50% during the past year has defied the slowdown in the home audio market which according to global research has shrunk between 5 and 7%. They have also hired up to 80 additional engineers during the past 12 months and are tipped to take Bose head on with new sound gear including speakers and additional sound systems.
Distributed in Australia by Playback Systems the Sonos offerings are only sold by the specialist Hi Fi reseller much to the angst of stores like Harvey Norman and JB Hi Fi.
Tipped by SmartHouse and ChannelNews 2 months ago the new Sonos ZonePlayer 120 and the Sonos ZonePlayer 90 will allow user to access content from any room over a simple wireless network and connect speakers to the amplified ZP120.
The non-amplified ZP90 can be connected to a home theater or stereo, allowing customers to make use of the audio equipment they already own. The cost of the new systems are for the 120 $899 and the 90 $649. This is $100 cheaper than previous pricing.
The new version is half the size of its predecessor, 10 percent more powerful and has twice the wireless range.
The wireless multi-room music system company has been around for six years.
The Sonos ZP120 is also a D 55-watts-per-channel amplifier and has bettered the previous model’s range by virtue of SonosNet 2.0, the company’s latest wireless mesh network technology. Combined with state-of-the-art MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple Output) wireless technology, it uses three antennas to send and receive music from a Mac or PC-based collection or stream online music sources through a home.
“We’re a fast-growing company in a slow-growing market,” observed co-founder Thomas S. Cullen told E Gear when making the announcement, noting that the decrease in new-home builds has helped Sonos continue on a 50-percent-per-year sales-increase curve; the company has shipped 350,000 systems to date. “Most buyers might start with three rooms and then they buy more zones,” he said, citing data that show a third of Sonos buyers will add another zone within a month of the initial purchase. “And custom installers might do six zones or more, at first,” he added. “A third of all our households have four or more zones, and the average is climbing, because they can use Sonos systems without even opening a wall. But mostly, our customers are happy; they register an 85 to 90 percent satisfaction rate, and listen to twice as much music as before they bought our product.”
The Sonos customer demographics, said Cullen, are now predominantly male with household incomes in the $100,000 range – but buyers are not “tech” customers, per se. “We estimate that the potential market is 100 percent bigger than our installed base,” he said. Furthermore, he averred, Sonos can make market inroads at all market levels – and without infringing on the high-end service aspect of custom integrators’ business.
