Simplifying Architectural Audio with Juke Audio

Nick Boever:

Colton, thanks for joining me today.

Colton Forth:

No doubt. Happy to be here.

Nick Boever:

Why don’t you get started by telling us a little bit about Juke Audio for those who haven’t heard of it before?

Colton Forth:

Certainly. We are based in Southern California right here in Manhattan Beach for anyone who’s familiar with it. We have been working on Juke dating back to early 2018, but first came to market Thanksgiving of 2019, so about two and a half years now in the market with pretty much to this one product line with two variations. That product is what we branded a multi-room streaming amplifier. This device really serves as an all-in-one solution for any homeowner/builder/installer that’s looking for a simple, sleek and modern solution for powering pre-wired architectural speakers across an entire home, and then allowing for simple wireless streaming and wireless control from their cell phones and tablets to all of those speakers.

Nick Boever:

Nice. What made you want to develop this product in the first place?

Colton Forth:

Yeah, certainly. Dating back to me in high school and even into college, I was very much into music, audio engineering, and producing. As I got into college at the University of Southern California, I got into their Marshall School of Business program there where I was learning the ins and outs of business administration. When it came time for graduation in 2018, I was really looking to harness my passion for music with some of the business skills that I had picked up.

My father, he is actually a electrical engineered by background, so we got to talking about really the different products that were available in the marketplace. He was renovating his home at the time and had a few installers come by and give him quotes north of $10,000 to do something that he ultimately does, which is, for anyone, no matter who you are, definitely a large chunk of money. A lot of it seemed to be over-engineered, had a lot of bells and whistles that maybe weren’t exactly pertinent to what we needed. Really, all that we wanted was a solution to stream from the phone, as I said, to these pre-wired architectural speakers.

This is right around the time that Sonos was really starting to take off. Everyone was starting to shift to that paradigm of doing everything streaming wirelessly, but that really hadn’t infiltrated the built-in audio world, the old legacy systems that had the in-wall and in-ceiling speakers. So we wanted to bring both of those worlds together, harness the wireless streaming that people were now growing accustomed to and we’ve seen a continued rise in, but then bring that to the architectural audio setting.

Hence was born the initial concept and idea for Juke Audio as we saw a complete void in the marketplace there for something that did that, especially at reasonable price points. After about a year of R&D, as I said, we came to market with the unit in November, 2019. So it checked the box for me of scratching that itch of wanting to get back into music. It scratched the itch for Brad, my father, of getting back into electrical engineering which he had been away from for about 20 years and then also filled the void in the marketplace for what we, at the time, was not sure how well it’d be received. But now fast forward three years, and it’s clear that many people out in the country had the same scenario that Brad had when talking to installers and they were just looking for something simple, a little cheaper. We’re happy we’ve come to the market with this product now to meet those needs for those people.

Nick Boever:

Yeah, I know. I’m really glad that you guys were able to come up with something like that. I’m a little… I shouldn’t say I’m a little surprised because it seemed like that now with the perfusion of, like you said, Sonos and all those streaming services, you think to yourself, it’s like, “God, why isn’t this out there? Why isn’t this more of a standard in a lot of cases?” I also have to feel as though you guys probably had, I don’t know, maybe a little bit of serendipitous timing with November, 2019, where everybody was going to be spending a lot more time indoors.

Colton Forth:

Yeah, definitely. I think we unintentionally, to the most degree, timed that up pretty well. Then obviously shortly after that, well, about a year after that, we came to the COVID times as well where people were spending a lot of time indoors. Sorry, I guess actually only a few months after. Apologies. To your point, a lot of people spending time indoors, and with that, everyone was looking to upgrade their older audio systems. Juke lends itself very well to do-it-yourselfers who maybe don’t really have too much of an understanding for audio. We give them a solution that’s simple enough for even those people to understand and do it themselves. They’re spending so much time at home anyway. It made a lot of sense for them to go and make sure their audio system was up to par.

Nick Boever:

Now, when you mentioned do-it-yourself, or is there still an electrical component to it where you’re working around with the electronics, or is it you don’t have to deal with the grid at all?

Colton Forth:

I think that there’s two common scenarios for how Juke gets incorporated, one of which lends itself a little bit more to the DIY side of things. That is when you do have a legacy system already in place, so probably a house built in the early 2000s typically and may already have in-wall, in-ceiling, and outdoor speakers across the house that are home-run back to a central spot. All those systems used to be reliant on the in-wall controls and the in-wall volume panels and all that type of stuff. Because back then, this was really not as prevalent. You couldn’t do as much with the phone as you can now.

In those scenarios, it’s really as simple as just replacing the old system that’s in your cabinet and running those wires directly into the Juke. Then all of those controls can then be done wirelessly from your phone over the WiFi network. In those instances, it’ll take you less than 30 minutes to unhook something and then hook it right back into Juke. The wiring’s in place. The speakers are in place. So it’s very much simple for any typical homeowner really.

Then obviously there’s the component of putting this into construction or remodels where the wiring’s not already in place so the speakers are not already in place. By no means, do we really think running wiring through the crawlspace in the attic is a DIY activity, as most people might be a little taken aback by that, understandably so. So for those type of situations, Juke still definitely has a component to it that is reliant on the home builder, the electrical contractor, the low-voltage and AV installer. So that’s the second part of the equation for us.

Nick Boever:

One of the things that caught my eyes, actually, when I was going over the product specifications on the website for everything was that you were talking earlier how it’s a lot easier to install. It’s a lot cheaper to install. But from the looks of things, it’s also a lot cheaper to run once it’s installed. Is that correct?

Colton Forth:

Yeah, definitely. Energy efficiency is certainly one of our strong suits and value-adds to the equation. As I mentioned, these legacy systems that Juke is often served as a upgrade from, when you go there and you see what’s being replaced, you’ll see 30, 40 pounds of equipment that’s been ripped out of rack and put down onto the ground. It’s usually two or three components all replaced by one Juke at seven pounds about the size of a textbook. The engineering behind it is innovative. It’s sleek. It’s beautiful. With it being so small, the energy that it requires to run is hovering around almost zero energy consumption when it’s in idle. As a result, you can leave the device on day in and day out. It doesn’t require you to go and turn it off at night or anything like that. You can keep this thing running day in and day out and really not see any increase to your energy bill and electric bill at the end of the month. So it definitely helps out in that regard as well.

Nick Boever:

Wow. That is very impressive. Now, we were talking about the installs earlier, and you had mentioned with the DIY, it’s as simple as you take the stuff out and then you just plug it right in. For integrators, anybody in that channel that is installing this fresh in a home, what’s the install process look like for that?

Colton Forth:

Yeah, definitely. That just really requires you to have all the wiring for these speakers home-run back to a central location where the Juke is going to be. Whether those be the in-ceiling, the in-wall, the outdoor speakers, just have them run back to usually a AV equipment closet or underneath a staircase, something kind of out of sight, out of mind, typically a location where you’ll have your internet equipment as well. Another big component of Juke is everything about it is network-based, so the way that the phones communicate to the Juke, the way that the tablets communicate to the Juke is over the WiFi network as it’s much better ranged than, say, Bluetooth, for example.

But with that, you obviously need to get the Juke onto your WiFi. The preferred way to do that is with ethernet. So if you are in an opportunity where you can install Juke fresh into a new build, you’d make sure you want to run those wirings for the speakers to the same location your internet router’s going to be, so then, therefore, you can do a hardwired ethernet connection from Juke into that router. If that’s not possible, you can get Juke onto the network wirelessly with WiFi as well. Those are really the only two steps as far as the installation goes for these installers and builders. So it’s a very straightforward and quick process for them as well. It’s not the 30-minute timeframe that I talked about for the DIYers who already have a system in place, but in comparison to other options out on the market, this is a half-day project while others maybe would be a multiple-day project to install a whole home audio system like this.

Nick Boever:

Now, when it comes to the speakers that Juke works with, is it you can just plug in any speakers and it’s ready to go? Is there a set number of partners that you work with that work really well with Juke?

Colton Forth:

Yeah, definitely. There’s two typical speakers, 70-volt systems, and then ohm speakers. The 70-volt is more geared towards the commercial world, and the 8-ohm speakers are more in the residential world. So we play to the latter half there. As long as it’s a 16-ohm, 8-ohm, 4-ohm speaker, that is what can connect to Juke. So we’re pretty agnostic in terms of what we can work with. We work with pretty much every major brand at this point, whether we work with them directly or our end users just decided to pair those speakers with Juke, it’s happened, so Klipsch, Polk, MSC. You name it, we’ve probably had it paired with Juke before.

We work very well with really all speakers, but key parameters to note when you are purchasing speakers to pair with Juke, one of which would be most people just look at wattage, but they don’t really consider the sensitivity rating. Sensitivity is actually just as much of a key parameter in the level of output you’re going to get as the wattages. What you’re looking for there is something on the high end. What that means is about anything 88 decibels or north of that, if you can get into the low 90s especially, that has very good effects with Juke. There’s quite a few ceiling speakers out there that do that. Then additionally, stepping from 8-ohms down to 4-ohm speakers, that nearly gets twice the output that an 8-ohm speaker does. So if that is an option for you, that’s typically in an outdoor setting you’ll see that, I would recommend doing that, especially if it’s a larger outdoor space. Again, Juke works very well with any type of speaker as long as it’s geared towards the residential side and not a 70-volt speaker system.

Nick Boever:

Just talking about the outdoor setting, because I was under the impression that it was just exclusively architectural speakers that it works with. But you’re saying that if somebody wanted to do, say, like an outdoor space with a nice speaker set up up there, they’d be able to do that with Juke as well.

Colton Forth:

Yeah, correct. As long as that wiring is run back to that closet where the other wiring’s been run to, like I had mentioned, it can totally work. What does that look like? It’s typically maybe a rock speaker that’s sort of hidden into a garden, or it’s a wall-mounted speaker with a mounting bracket, or it’s even a ceiling speaker under a trellis or something like that. As long as the wirings run back, it can be outdoors. That’s pretty common for Juke as well. You’ll have your five or six zones inside the house, and then maybe you’ll have your one outdoor area where you’ll have four speakers typically run back to Juke, and you can play across the indoor and outdoor zones in any combination you want.

Nick Boever:

Very nice. Now for the control portion of it, from my understanding, you have the app on your phone. You’re basically able to go through and pick which zones you want to set it to. When it comes to setting up the different zones on the app, what’s the average timeframe for that, or is it just instantaneous depending upon how you set it up in the hardware?

Colton Forth:

One of the beauties of Juke is that it has four sources. Some people might brand them as inputs, whatever you want to refer to them as. Out of the box, all four of those are preset to wireless inputs for streaming from your phone. The most immediate benefit that people usually equate that with, and we do say ourselves, is that it’ll allow multiple people to connect that once and stream different audio from different devices to different rooms at the same time. So it comes in handy if you’re a family or multiple people in the household.

But the second benefit of it is you can actually assign different zone combinations to those four inputs and then leave them on in perpetuity in a way that you don’t even have to go to the Juke interface. All you have to do is connect in your AirPlay menu, your Spotify menu and connect to those preset zone combinations. So at that point, it’s instantaneous. You can just open your streaming app of choice and begin playing without even needing to open the Juke app.

That really connects back to one of our value propositions, which is to make everything as simple as possible. As much as we love you to see that Juke logo on the screen, we’re very much aware of the fact that, what is the simplest? Making you, as a user, have to learn nothing. Just use that same streaming app you use, connect in your AirPlay menu the same way you connect to any other device, and as far as you’re concerned, Juke is just running in the background facilitating it, but not forcing the user into learning a new user interface, not learning any new functionalities, just doing it the way they would do it if they were listening to music in their car, in their gym and so on. So that’s the beauty of it. When the engineering is so solid that you don’t even interact with the product, that’s when you really are capturing what the customer needs.

Nick Boever:

I feel like that’s also something that’s just like… There are certain things where people are willing to deal with an additional interface, especially if it’s a more complex setup. But I think with the way things are with streaming nowadays, it’s so easy in so many cases to just pair up with a Bluetooth device, say, and it just immediately runs. You can control everything from the music streaming app that you’re using. So it makes sense that a professional, great solution has that same user experience.

Colton Forth:

Yeah, exactly. Anyone knows how to connect to a portable Bluetooth speaker and begin playing, and that’s as simple as it comes. Now, obviously when you talk about trying to dictate which zones are being played to and doing it over WiFi rather than Bluetooth, there’s some complexities that are added to that. But with Juke, we’ve done a great job of minimizing those complexities to a point that we’re dealing with it on the back end, and as far as the user experience goes, it’s really no different than just playing to one individual Bluetooth portable speaker at least in terms of the complexity of it.

Nick Boever:

Now, there was this one thing that I was thinking about, and this is coming more over from different other control setups. Say, for lighting, you have these scheduling setups that you can do for different lights. So in my head, I’m picturing this kind of scenario where somebody comes home from work, the lights turn on. It’s at a nice relaxing color temperature. Then the music starts playing when they enter in. Is that a functionality that’s there currently where you can set schedules for the music, or is that just all in my head?

Colton Forth:

Well, it’s not fully in your head, although it’s not something we have out yet. That is certainly something we’ve talked about internally and planning on implementing to some degree along with some other features. So I think that would be a great benefit to add. The next year for us is really software enhancements to the current hardware we already have out. That’s one of the beauties at Juke is that we can push over-the-air firmware updates to all of our units. So the product that somebody purchased in November, 2019, is even today the same product that somebody purchased last week because the firmware updates keep coming. With that being said, that’s something that we’ve certainly talked about and we intend to roll out some enhancements to allow for customization like that.

Nick Boever:

Very nice. I guess one last question when it comes to the control aspect of everything is that there is this big emphasis on different zones, being able to control each zone separately. But I am assuming there is at least some way where, say, somebody was having a massive house party and they wanted to have every speaker in the house playing the same music. Is there a way to do that where you just send one command through all of the different zones?

Colton Forth:

Yeah, certainly. What I touched on before of having four inputs, that comes into play when you have multiple people trying to connect at once and listen to different zones, but there’s nothing limiting you from turning every single zone on for one singular input. So I could take my iPhone and I could play to every single zone in the house and a quick tap of all the different buttons, or even one of the zones, or one of the inputs rather is preset as whole house. You connect in an AirPlay menu and you see “whole house.” You hit that, and it goes to every single speaker. So we certainly have a party mode.

Nick Boever:

Very nice. One other thing that I wanted to touch upon before we close out here was that when I first got introduced to you, we were kind of talking about a variety of different things. One of the things that you were talking about was how you were working with construction firms now to make it easier or make it more standard to have these low-voltage interfaces in homes at the base of construction so that it’s just… Say they don’t want to necessarily add Juke in during construction, but it’s a lot easier to add it in at later dates. How’s that coming along?

Colton Forth:

Yeah, definitely. What I was touching on before of having to run the wiring, that’s obviously a lot easier to do when the house is still in a framing stage where the drywall hasn’t gone up. Obviously, the goal there is to make sure that these construction companies and firms are running pre-wire for these speakers so the homeowner can be in a position to implement Juke later if they choose to.

We’re tackling that in a multifaceted way. We have a dealer program, which low-voltage installers can come and sign up with us and become a vetted and registered partner with us, and they can go out and position Juke to these builders themselves. Then we also have a direct builder program as well, where if you’re a builder and you’re doing a little subdivision or whatever it might be, you can come talk with us. We’ll consult on the best way to go about doing it, give you recommendations on speakers, maybe even package some speakers in with Juke. Then builders often will take those packages and present them to their clients or eventual home buyers of that property and lay the option out to them to be able to put Juke in a way that’s efficient. So it’s really just a matter of being ahead of the game before the walls go up and making sure the house is in a position to accommodate something like this.

Nick Boever:

I’ve been hearing that a lot with people working in motorized shading because it’s obviously a lot easier to have the wiring in place already to install the motorized shading than to, say, you come in, you put in the shades, and then you have to run a cable all the way down to, what’s it, a wall outlet in order to power it. What’s the progress been like on that? Have you had a whole lot of pushback, or have you been gradually making inroads with it?

Colton Forth:

Hey, it’s definitely a tough, tough beast to tackle, but there’s definitely a lot of houses out there being built as well. For us, I’d say we’ve made good progress in terms of the size of our company at least. We have about 150 dealers now representing Juke across the country, with at least one in every single state, which is something we’re quite proud of and. By dealer, I mean, electrician, AV, audio/visual integrator, etc., so we are definitely represented there.

All of them work with clients one-off, but they also have direct ins with builders as well. Some builders, this is kind of a low priority on a long list of items that they have, so they like to outsource this type of work. So we have good inroads into builders through those 150 dealers. But then we also have probably 20 to 25 direct relationships with small tier builders who are doing a dozen or so homes a year. So to our levels, I would say that we’re doing well since we last spoke, and I’m happy with where we’re at. You can look for 2023 for us to continue our efforts and growth there as we look to expand.

Nick Boever:

Very nice. I feel as though with all that you mentioned, it definitely sounds like you guys are making good progress, especially nowadays with the housing shortages where a lot of cases it may seem as though of home builders are like, “Don’t need to add any bells and whistles. We just need to get these houses up and built.” So the fact that you’re able to get in there and be there on the ground floor, like you said, is really, really great.

Colton Forth:

Definitely. We’re excited about it. Every time a Juke goes into a new house and the builder sends us over some pictures or even just a nice email of their client enjoying it, it makes us happy, and we’re going to continue to do so.

Nick Boever:

Well, it was great getting a chance to talk with you and learn more about Juke and what you guys are doing in the home technologies sphere. It’s always great to hear about these different types of topics, just because I feel like more and more people are introducing technology into the home, and the way it kind of evolves around that increased adoption is really exciting to see.

Colton Forth:

It’s exciting times. There’s a lot of really innovative companies and products that are coming into the market, and I feel confident about what we’ve put into the market for the home audio space. Bringing it back to what we were talking about at the beginning of this conversation, harnessing the people’s desire for wireless streaming, yet bringing it to an architectural setting with great aesthetic appeal of not seeing any wires and also great reliability with all the speakers hardwired back to a central unit. There’s a lot of pros to that in comparison to some of the smart speakers that just plug in to outlets across the house. So we’re very excited about what we put forth and extremely pleased with the reaction of the market.