Custom Electronics Veteran Taking Gefen Into Do-It-Yourself Retail

Gefen, a longtime supplier of the pieces and parts that connect devices in a networked AV system, is now expanding into home automation with its own solution, Randy Wilson, marketing director, told Consumer Electronics Daily at CE Week. The GAVA (Gefen Audio/Video Automation) system will be a lower cost alternative for custom installers than high-end custom systems from home control superpowers Crestron and AMX. Gefen’s simpler system will compete with URC’s Total Home Control, among others, Wilson said.

Wilson is a longtime specialty AV retailer and ex-CEDIA board member who shuttered Woodland Hills, Calif.-based Wilson Home Theater Systems last year after having done “everything I wanted to do.” He joined Gefen as a consultant six months ago before transitioning to the full-time marketing post. Now Wilson is using his custom and retail background to help Gefen -- a supplier of nuts-and-bolts products such as switchers, extenders and video scalers for the custom electronics market -- make a move into the do-it-yourself retail market, he said.

Responding to why Gefen wants to enter retail now, Wilson said, “Why not?” Wireless audio has changed the picture for whole-house audio, evidenced by Sonos’s success in both the custom and retail channels, Wilson said. With networked audio systems now simple enough for consumers to do themselves, “what do they need custom for?” he said. At CE Week, Gefen showed a bookshelf speaker and receiver package for $999 with an outboard $129 digital-to-analog converter. Gefen is positioning the 2.1-channel setup as a playback system for music stored on a PC or for videogame audio playback, he said. The system is in distribution now and the company is in the process of creating a retail channel to sell it, Wilson said.

Wilson also has designs on selling the GAVA system at retail, Wilson said. Connected devices in the home are becoming more complicated and consumers need “a simple way to control them,” he said. Control systems in the IP-based world no longer require extensive programming of the type that launched the high-end residential home control market that Crestron and AMX dominated for years, he noted. GAVA is a “simple solution” that will be sold as a do-it-yourself product eventually, Wilson said. The biggest challenge for the home control market “is getting the network to work,” he said. “The control part was easy."

GAVA currently controls lighting and drapes via Lutron’s Clear Connect RF technology that’s the backbone of the lighting control company’s lighting and shade systems, Wilson said. He showed us a wall switch with a button that could turn a TV on and off along with the lights. The switch could be programmed to initiate a macro that also turns on a receiver and a disc player and sets the TV to the correct input, he said.

The GAVA multi-room system is expandable and will be Z-Wave-ready by September when the company plans to show Z-Wave-enabled webcams and thermostats for the GAVA platform. Out of the $999 box, which includes software and licenses, GAVA enables users to control the media on their mobile devices, create music playlists from iTunes libraries, automate window shades and put lighting scenes on a schedule, according to literature.

For years, traditional home control companies relied on products from Gefen for connectivity, Wilson said. Gefen “needed a front end to tie all the products together” to be able to offer its dealers a way to sell a simple control system, he said. GAVA is that front end, and now consumers and dealers can make a GAVA system as “complicated as they want,” Wilson said.