‘Broadest Coverage’

Pioneer Pushes Wireless Streaming From Smartphones in Latest Round of CE Offerings

June 28, 2012 by Rebecca Day and Jeff Berman|Top News

Pioneer announced at CE Week Tuesday night in New York that it’s the first CE company to incorporate two new wireless technologies into its products. The first is HTC Connect, which allows consumers to stream music files from an HTC smartphone to 2012 Pioneer and Elite networked receivers and a new line of Pioneer single-chassis wireless music systems due out this summer. The second is what Pioneer calls Wireless Direct, a feature included in the chipset BridgeCo supplies to Pioneer and others that also incorporates DLNA, AirPlay and streaming services, Russ Johnston, vice president for the home electronics division, told us. The “brand new” Wireless Direct feature, based on Wi-Fi, will appear in the market first on Pioneer’s XW-SMA1 ($299), XW-SMA3 ($399) and XW-SMA4 ($399) wireless speakers, and will serve as an independent Wi-Fi access point, allowing users to stream music in a peer-to-peer relationship from their smartphones to the wireless speakers when a Wi-Fi or home network isn’t available, Johnston said. The latter feature will be “broadly distributed” in the market, but not under the Wireless Direct name that’s proprietary to Pioneer, Johnston said.

Earlier this week HTC announced its version of AirPlay, called HTC Connect, which will launch in Pioneer speaker systems and networked AV receivers, the first CE products to be HTC Connect-certified, Pioneer said. Pioneer products are already iOS-compatible, and Johnston touted the addition of 15 Android HTC devices that give Pioneer the “broadcast coverage of smartphone streaming” playback capability on the market. Pioneer chose the Wi-Fi based HTC method over Bluetooth wireless connectivity because of sound quality and range, Johnston said. Wi-Fi enables streaming of uncompressed file formats, unlike Bluetooth, and it has a range of 100 feet compared with Bluetooth’s 30 feet, he said.

HTC One X and One S smartphones are slated to receive HTC Connect certification in Q3, and Pioneer will issue a firmware update in Q3 that will make its 15 compatible products HTC Connect-ready. Pioneer’s alliance with HTC is recognition of the smartphone as the primary music source for a broad segment of the market, Johnston said. The HTC Connect technology allows users to stream audio content while simultaneously making calls, browsing the Internet, texting, or playing games on their smartphones, Johnston said.

The line of wireless music systems, including amplifiers and speakers, were designed by Pioneer professional TAD designer Andrew Jones, engineer of Pioneer’s $70,000-a-pair TAD speakers. In addition to AirPlay, HTC Connect, and Wireless Direct, the single-cabinet wireless XW-SMA1 ($299), XW-SMA3 ($399) and XW-SMA4 ($399) speaker systems also support DLNA 1.5 for wireless streaming from compatible products. The water-resistant stereo XW-SMA3, packing the same dual 3-inch drivers and 3/4-inch soft dome tweeter as the basic model XW-SMA1, is designed for home and portable use, the latter enabled by a rechargeable lithium ion battery that operates for 4 hours at maximum volume and 6 hours at half volume on a single charge. The XW-SMA4 is AC-powered only for home use and incorporates five speakers including dual 3-inch speakers, a dedicated 4-inch bass driver and dual 3/4-inch soft dome tweeters, according to literature.

CE Week Notebook

Atlantic Technology’s H-PAS PowerBar 235, first shown at CEDIA Expo last year, will ship this September at $300 higher than originally planned, Atlantic Technology President Peter Tribeman told us at CE Week. He said the company tweaked the product since first showing it at CEDIA last year by adding decoding for DTS. Research showed that 70 percent of Blu-ray titles come with DTS-HD Master Audio, Tribeman said. So the company added decoding capability via a Trident SoC that down mixes the multi-channel audio stream to two channels for playback through the H-PAS soundbar, which uses sophisticated algorithms to provide directional cues for the sound, he said. Tribeman attributed the $300 price increase to more amplifier power (80 watts total) and “really high royalties” for Dolby and DTS technology, which he said are high for small-volume manufacturers like Atlantic. “The big guys pay a tenth of what we pay” for Dolby and DTS licenses, he said, adding that companies with 500,000 or a million-unit volumes can “cut deals we can only dream about.” Tribeman said dealers were supportive of the higher MSRP because “at $500-$600, they said we were giving it away.” The $899 price point allows dealers to have “good margin” and gives the company “breathing and promotional room,” Tribeman said. Central to the PB 235 is H-PAS technology, which Atlantic developed with Phil Clements of Solus/Clements Loudspeakers. H-PAS uses “chambers, galleries, traps and vents” that are said to deliver acoustical performance comparable to that of much larger speakers, without the need for a subwoofer, Atlantic said. Despite 4-inch woofers and 3/4-inch soft-dome tweeters, bass response goes down to 47 Hz, which Tribeman said is far below that of most soundbars, even those with subwoofers. Some soundbar/subwoofer systems on the market require subwoofers to play at higher frequencies because of frequency limitations of the drivers in soundbars, resulting in an “acoustical hole” that’s “right in the middle of where the male voice” falls in the frequency spectrum, he said. That leads to a sense of “artificiality,” he said. Atlantic is also working on a flat speaker for placement under a TV pedestal similar to the design of ZVox system, that uses the depth of a cabinet to reproduce fuller range sound than what’s available with flat-panel TV speakers, Tribeman said.

The videogame category remains “robust” for Fry’s Electronics, but has become increasingly “price driven,” President Randy Fry told us. Consumers are demanding that retailers throw in free games and other products with game hardware systems, so Fry’s has been forced to offer the same sort of bundles that rivals like Best Buy and GameStop regularly advertise in their circulars, he said. Unlike the U.S. market as a whole, the PS Vita is selling better at Fry’s than the 3DS is, he also said, telling us sales of Sony’s new handheld system have been “brisk.” Vita sales are “much stronger” than those of the 3DS, which has suffered from a lack of strong game titles, he said. Fry attributed the difference in his company’s 3DS and Vita sales patterns from the rest of the market to differences in Fry’s customer demographics. He called Nintendo’s coming Wii U console a “great product,” downplaying the importance of what its price will end up being. “Apple’s taught us” that consumers don’t always care about price if a product is strong, he said. Fry said he heard that Microsoft will eventually offer its $99 Xbox 360 console program to all retailers and told us he'd like to carry it also. Microsoft declined to comment. Early this week, Microsoft extended that program to “participating” U.S. GameStop stores and all U.S. Best Buy stores (CED June 27 p7). Under the program, consumers can buy a 4-GB 360 console bundled with the Kinect sensor for $99, but must sign up for a two-year Xbox Live Gold contract in which they have to pay $14.99 a month. Consumers have become comfortable with that cellphone-like program in which they sign a service contract in exchange for getting a device at a low cost, Fry said.

Monster Cable bowed a line of Imaging Science Foundation (ISF) high speed HDMI cables that it said are the “world’s first smart cables.” They were engineered to “provide consumers and custom integrators with the assurance of maximum picture and audio quality when used with any of today’s advanced” HD components, including those offering HD 3D and even 4K capability, it said. They will ship in about a month in three speeds, CEO Noel Lee told us. Those SKUs include the ISF 2000 (21 Gbps) in lengths from 5- to 75-feet at $150-$350, ISF 1250 (17.8 Gbps) in lengths of 5- to 75-feet at $100-$225 and ISF 750 (14.3 Gbps) in lengths ranging from 5- to 16-feet at $60-$200. The cables solve one of “the most pressing issues in today’s HDMI universe, namely, making sure that the HDTV content from sources such as Blu-ray players and satellite receivers is actually being sent over the HDMI cable properly” to TVs, Monster said. As soon as the user connects the cable to a device, the person will immediately see whether or not the signal is being conveyed in SD, HD or 4K resolution, Lee said in a news briefing. Monster is also shifting the existing 21-Gbps “Hyper Speed” cables at $200 and up to the ISF-branded line, he said. Monster had No. 1 market share in $100 and up headphones in the U.S. from October into the first half of 2012, at more than 50 percent, Lee also told us, citing NPD data. Its growth in the category has been achieved through the popularity of its Beats by Dr. Dre line. The company’s previously announced Inspiration line of headphones went on sale Wednesday at J&R Music World and all Apple stores globally, Lee told us. Other unspecified retailers also will soon start carrying them, and unspecified “major” U.S. retailers will add them in September, he said. Monster bowed a new version of its iSport headphones, the iSport USA, at CE Week. They will be available in only a “very limited production run at “very few retailers,” Lee said. They ship in two weeks at $179.95, he told us. Monster also bowed the $219.95 Bluetooth wireless ClarityHD Micro speaker at CE Week, saying it will ship to “major national and global retailers” starting Sunday. Best Buy will be the first retailer to carry it and more retailers will add it globally over the summer, said Lee. The wireless, portable speaker category is “pretty robust” now and the available devices are inferior to what Monster will field, he said. The product is targeted at consumers 25 and up, just like the Inspiration headphones, including “upscale travelers,” he said.

The headphone market continues to grow at a fast rate, said Robert Heiblim, principal at professional consulting company BlueSalve. But he said companies must have a strong plan to differentiate their products from the hundreds that are already on store shelves. Monster CEO Noel Lee agreed, saying a big “mistake” is “chasing what’s already been done.” Long before the recent headphone boom, the top-selling headphone for about 10 years was the replacement for Sony Walkman devices, he said.

Sony for the first time showed an HD wearable video camera it’s developing that it said “answers the demand for premium point-of-view and action sports filming devices.” The device will ship this fall, it said. But Drew Temple, product information manager-digital imaging, said it was strictly a “concept” product for now and pricing wasn’t available yet. It’s “new territory for us,” he said, telling us it’s targeted at consumers with an “active lifestyle” that includes activities such as skateboarding and base jumping. A device like this “couldn’t be done in the past” because it would have been too bulky, he said. The device provides another way for Sony to differentiate itself from rivals, he said. The camera will feature SteadyShot image stabilization technology and its “small, lightweight body” will house an Exmor R CMOS image sensor for superior low light shooting and an ultra-wide angle Carl Zeiss Tessar lens, Sony said. The camera will be able to capture “full HD quality video in extreme environments,” it said.

RCA expanded its streaming soundbar concept at CE Week, with a 37-inch version due in October at $249. The RTS736W joins a 30-inch model currently sold at Walmart for $99. Distribution hasn’t been set for the 37-inch model, which offers 5.1-channel surround sound and comes with a wireless sub and rear-channel speaker, said Stephen Jorge, vice president of U.S. retail sales for Alco Electronics, which sells RCA-brand products. The 140-watt system packs Dolby decoding technology but not DTS, Jorge told us. Video streaming services available through the Wi-Fi-enabled soundbar include Netflix, Vudu, Hulu Plus and Pandora, he said. The wireless sub works over the 2.4-GHz band and employs error correction circuitry to prevent interference with other household products that operate in the same band, Jorge said.