Fenn, Ex-Best Buy, Leads Navvo Into Lossless Streaming As It Vies Against Sonos

The Navvo Group has recently begun shipping its Voco AV streaming players designed for standalone and multi-room applications. The company showed the products at CES (CED Jan 9 p7) and had planned to begin shipping product in February, CEO Wade Fenn told us. But while an Android app has been ready, the iPhone version just became available, he said.

Fenn, a former high-ranking Best Buy executive, says he has a broad plan for the devices as he positions his company against Sonos, but for now is selling the products direct from his company’s website. The company recently received positive feedback from custom installers at the Nationwide Marketing Group meeting, he said, and it will be at the CEDIA Expo next month in Denver showcasing its products.

Fenn describes Voco players as combi units comprising a controller, application, firmware that runs “on a piece of hardware” and “hardware output devices.” Like Sonos, Voco products control multiple zones of music, he said. Fenn calls Voco “audio for video,” noting that its integration with YouTube “sets it apart from all the basic audio streamers.” Voco is voice-enabled through voice-control software from Nuance and VoiceBox and while “we don’t force you to use it, when it comes to searching eclectic things like YouTube videos, it’s very handy,” he said. The voice software has been tweaked for the application, Fenn said. When users ask for Guns N’ Roses, they aren’t directed to a flower shop or the Chinese movie Guns and Roses, he said.

Voco streaming boxes double as Wi-Fi hotspots, allowing users to have music in places they couldn’t have it before, Fenn said. With each added box, consumers expand their Wi-Fi network, he said. No bridge is required -- a Sonos requirement for its mesh-network system -- and users can access their music via the Voco app when they're out of range of their Wi-Fi network, he said.

Unlike Sonos, Voco doesn’t offer a wide range of music services. While Sonos offers Spotify, SiriusXM, MOG and iHeartRadio, among many others, Voco lists TuneIn Radio, Pandora, U.K.-based Sky.FM and Jazz FM. Users can get Spotify through a tethered connection from a smartphone or tablet or via a Voco Bluetooth dongle, Fenn said. Spotify “tends not to talk to people unless they have a lot of market momentum,” Fenn said, so that’s not an imminent addition, although Voco hopes to add SiriusXM in the future. He doesn’t see the system ever offering more than 10 channels. Instead, he hopes to move more into video once the audio channels are in place, he said. “Imagine pics of my baby streaming from my device to the TV,” he said. “That to me is more important than the 15th audio service."

Voco’s most recent partnership is with Murfie, a music streaming service that delivers lossless music from the cloud. Murfie sells a limited amount of music but its primary model currently is as a cloud-based vault to store users’ CDs. Customers ship CDs to Murfie for $1 per disc and the company physically stores -- and then stores in the cloud -- the content of CD in a copy-protected format that’s only available to the owner of the disc. Owners can choose to stream the music in either lossy or lossless versions via Murfie software to a Web browser, Voco or Sonos system or to Android or iOS devices, said Preston Austin, Murfie co-founder.

Currently, only Voco users can stream lossless music from Murfie, Austin told us. Sonos users can stream Murfie feeds in MP3 and in the future “if Sonos increases its capabilities, we would increase ours to match,” Austin said. Murfie customers tend to be jazz or classical enthusiasts with “a really good ear” who can perceive loss even in a 320k MP3 and want to “hear exactly what was on their CD,” he said. Voco can get “all of their data to them so they can be confident that they haven’t sacrificed anything in the streaming experience for the CDs that they own,” he said. Austin calls the concept “sending your collection to the future.” Users still have ownership and access to their music and can also buy used or new CDs from Murfie and build a collection that way, he said. “You and only you are able to stream that one disc,” he said. Part of Murfie’s business model is to sell the plastic jewel cases that house the CDs to recyclers, Austin said.