Nortek’s Core Brands demonstrated at CES extended uses of...

Nortek’s Core Brands demonstrated at CES extended uses of its SKAA-based wireless music technology to show that its recently launched Korus powered speaker system is “more than a music experience,” Rob Halligan, vice president of group strategy and marketing, told Consumer Electronics Daily. Korus began shipping in Q4 to accounts including Best Buy’s Magnolia Home Theater stores, Crutchfield and Amazon, and it wants now to show that the system’s 40-millisecond latency makes it suited for gaming and video applications, Halligan said. Nortek is hoping to fit Korus in the space between single-speaker audio solutions and a whole-home system, Halligan said, calling it the “85 percent of the market that won’t buy a 32-zone audio system.” With a 60-foot range through walls, the SKAA-based system fits a niche that fits homes with small zones and no Wi-Fi network, offering network independence and multiple media uses, Halligan said. He identified cable cord-cutters as potential customers who want good sound through streaming video services. The Korus V600 packs five speakers in front for vocals and two side-firing speakers that “position instruments around you,” he said. The system doesn’t include Dolby or DTS decoding, but Halligan cited the company’s relationship with DTS that it announced at CEDIA, where Nortek said it would “look at DTS as one of the solutions we would support for multi-room solution.” No product announcement is being made now, but Halligan indicated a product from that partnership would reach the market this year. Halligan said Nortek was pleased with Q4 sales given that “we were late” to the market for the holiday sales season. Now the company is hoping to broaden the reach of the system by “showing examples of where Korus can go.” At CES, Nortek is showing Korus’s “capabilities” rather than new products and said a product announcement for a portable Bluetooth-enabled product will come in “in short order.” An expansion of Korus for the TV is also a “natural extension” given the company’s entrenched position in the in-wall speaker market, he said. Nortek will leverage other protocols as necessary to develop products based on use cases, Halligan said. He alluded to an “ultraportable Bluetooth speaker” in the works that would use Bluetooth at the beach and the SKAA wireless protocol at home with a tablet. Nortek launched Korus based on SKAA, but “other protocols are not out of the question at all,” he said. The company is taking an agnostic approach and doesn’t want to build a “walled garden,” he said. Korus is using sound quality as its differentiator, and Halligan compared the current Bluetooth speaker market to the headphone market where “lower-priced product collapsed” leaving consumers looking for a higher quality solution that Korus hopes to fill.