Autonomic Adjusts Pricing Model, Tweak Music Playback Features

High-end multi-room audio company Autonomic Controls has gotten “more aggressive" with pricing by packaging amplifiers and servers together in an effort to be more competitive with Sonos, CEO Michael de Nigris told Consumer Electronics Daily at a CE Week event at Stereo Exchange in New York. Autonomic is maintaining a focus on the custom integrator channel, where it can justify higher prices for a wired audio system, but de Nigris conceded “some pressure from Sonos.” As Autonomic has adjusted its product line, packages are priced at 60-65 percent of individually priced gear, de Nigris said, when customers buy an eight-room system. Autonomic gear starts at $4,000, but can leverage to a close-to Sonos price of $500 per room with a 16-room system, he said.

Still, de Nigris took the opportunity to sell against Sonos, which leads other multi-room companies by far in mainstream and custom circles. According to de Nigris, a number of the custom dealers that use Sonos do so as a source device for its 20-plus music services and then integrate Sonos into a more reliable wired audio system. “A wired system is still going to work in 10 years,” de Nigris said. “There’s no chance that a system that’s on a Wi-Fi network, is still going to be working in 10 years,” he said, citing typical technology cycles for routers, PCs and networks. “Wired is a very stable system,” he said.

Amid the growing congestion in the wireless multi-room audio segment, Autonomic is comfortable with its niche in the custom channel, de Nigris said. The company has a two-pronged approach focusing on high-resolution audio distribution up to 192 kHz/32-bits -- which it can accomplish via its wired approach -- and on its user convenience features such as TuneBridge. The line is also price-protected, offering dealers 40-plus point margins, he said.

The latter has become a source of licensing revenue for Autonomic, which licenses its TuneBridge technology to NuVo Legrand and Savant for their music systems. More announcements are to come, as TuneBridge has become a major focus in Autonomic’s research and development efforts, de Nigris said. TuneBridge “blurs the lines” between different streaming and subscription services and the music that customers store on servers, he said. He gave the example of a customer buying a single music track from iTunes, which then is categorized by itself on Autonomic’s Mirage Media Server according to the artist’s name. Autonomic’s TuneBridge software allows users to search for other music by that artist via streaming services such as Pandora, Slacker, Rhapsody and Spotify. When a user clicks the “search for this artist” button on the interface, “the entire discography comes up,” de Nigris said.

A similar feature allows consumers to hear a song on FM radio and then have a Pandora station set up around the song’s artist. Next, Autonomic wants to “refine the experience,” de Nigris said, by giving customers the ability to have a mixed queue with music from a service, such as Spotify, and an Autonomic server and be able to save both to one playlist. “We're bringing it all together so that you're just listening to music you enjoy and it doesn’t matter where it’s coming from,” he said.

De Nigris didn’t discount the possibility that Autonomic would license TuneBridge more broadly. Savant is already a licensee, and that company is expanding the reach of its product offerings to lower-priced offerings. “It’s conceivable” the company might move in that direction with “maybe a feature-reduced version” of TuneBridge, he said.

Autonomic’s future plans include an expansion of its embedded streaming music services. Autonomic systems currently can stream Sirius XM, Rhapsody, Spotify, Pandora, Slacker, Napster and TuneIn. Among Autonomic’s customers, the most popular services are Sirius for traditional radio, Pandora for custom radio and Rhapsody for “virtual library” subscription music, de Nigris said. The latter category is heating up, with Spotify “nipping at the heels” of Rhapsody and rumors of popular European music service Deezer heading to the U.S. “Watch out for Deezer,” he said, because of the company’s claimed high-res bit-rate of 320 kbps that has generated a lot of buzz among Autonomic dealers, who can upsell customers on speakers if the quality of distributed audio improves.

Meanwhile, Google announced last week that Deezer has been added to the list of music apps available for Chromecast.