To commemorate its 15th anniversary, Coastal Source held an event at the Apollo/Saturn V rocket center at Kennedy Space Center in Merrit Island, Fla., to look at the company’s past, present, and the future. Select members of the press were joined by numerous members of the Coastal Source family, as well as top distribution and installation partners from around the country, to make up 250 valued partners invited to have dinner literally sitting under a 363-foot Saturn V rocket, which was designed with the sole purpose of taking man to the moon, and which remains one of the most complex instruments ever built.
The Kennedy Space Center might seem an odd choice of venue to have a gathering, however, company president, Jeff Poggi, said, “This [location] pays homage to the people and machines that made the improbable possible, and the future seems bigger than we ever dated to dream. As we celebrate here…under the gigantic Saturn V, the largest rocket ever flown, we’re reminded of a time when the nation stood united behind a dream and reflect upon our own community: our Coastal Source Family.”
The company’s defining motto is “defy the elements.” Poggi said, “Nothing is more ‘defying the elements’ than outer space. Kennedy celebrates all the key things that are important to Coastal Source.”
Looking back on the company’s 15 years in business, it has garnered 13 patents with three more pending, along with several awards, including brand of year for landscape speakers and awards for best customer service. The company now boasts more than 1000 dealers across the country with around 50,000 installs completed.
Just as the Saturn missions were an amazing team effort requiring 400,000 people to get man to the moon and back, Coastal Source’s success is also a team effort. Chairman and co-founder Harold Zimmermann voiced, “Success is a team effort between company employees, distributors, and dealer partners.”
Looking back on the company’s founding in 2009, Zimmermann said the company was born out of all the failures of existing outdoor lighting and audio systems in estate home installations due to all the harsh outdoor conditions like salt water, salt air, hurricanes, fertilizers, etc., with companies using off-the-shelf components not designed for those locations. And it was the relationship between himself and then-contractor (now Coastal Source CEO and co-founder) Franco D’Ascanio that led to the company’s creation.
D’Ascanio said that while traditional outdoor systems use components and wiring that can lead to failure, “Every component of every Coastal Source system is custom designed, engineered, and built from scratch for higher performance, the smallest size possible, and must defy the elements.”
The highlight of the evening was the announcement of the company’s next-generation lighting and audio products, including EVO and its second-generation, modular Bollard 1000 Series speakers.
New EVO System
The heart of the new EVO system is solid brass EVO modules that D’Asconio says are superior in every meaningful way to previous designs, with higher output, wider beam angle, better optics, and structurally significantly stronger.
The new EVO light engine will come in three configurations: standard, high power, and tunable. The high-power LED will deliver the light output of an MR16 bulb in a 50 percent smaller fixture, enabling lighting designers to place fixtures more discreetly where they can remain hidden. The tunable module will allow homeowners and landscaping professionals white color tuning and brightness adjustment via an app to craft the perfect lighting environment. With custom direct connect components, modules and hats can mix and match to create over 200 area lights.
Bollard 1000 Series
The new 1000 Series speakers have an elliptical shape, allowing them to be one-third bigger by internal volume while only being an inch wider. The larger volume and new cross section produce much deeper bass response, delivering better, cleaner, and tighter bass. The new design also allows for a better heatsink design, which allows for 33 percent more power handling compared to previous models.
D’Ascanio knew that replacing existing speakers that dealers love meant the new models had to be much better, and he claimed the new 1000 Series have better fidelity, frequency response, and dynamic range, and that all of the models in the new 1000 Series are superior.
The new series includes a subwoofer that uses quad, force-cancelling drivers in an acoustic suspension, along with a full-range, low-profile bollard speaker that incorporates a 6.5-inch coax with a 2-inch ribbon tweeter and three passive 6.5-inch radiators for meaningful bass. It also includes a mini-sub for times when you can’t bury and a satellite with angled top designed that is designed to be used with a subwoofer all the time. Other models are designed for decks and patios where you can’t bury a speaker. Another new model is the Vault, which carries the same industrial design and form factor, but offers a place to install electronics like WAPs, transformers, or amplifiers in a waterproof housing with the same look as regular speaker.
For more flexibility and improved performance, you can remove the grille and stack any product on top of any other (except for the satellite with angled top). For example, reversing two bollard speakers and putting one on top of the other firing in different directions creates a bipole speaker that serves two different areas in an elegant package. As an example, they had a “rocket speaker” assembled from standard bollard modules that included a subwoofer stacked with six bollard speakers, creating a line-source stack, and a satellite on top.
The 1000 Series also uses a new UniConnect cabling system, which is faster to install and works harmoniously with existing Coastal Source patented Plug+Play cables, amps, and speakers.
“Coastal Source was founded on the belief that outdoor spaces deserve the same attention, respect, and design considerations as indoor spaces,” D’Ascanio said. “Our history is rooted in harsh outdoor environments, and our entire focus is on developing rugged, high-performance outdoor audio and lighting products that can take whatever Mother Nature throws at them. For 15 years we’ve shown professional AV installers and landscape professionals that it is indeed possible, practical, and profitable to offer their customers Coastal Source solutions that Defy the Elements. We look forward to building upon this record of achievement going forward.”
The countdown is underway for the new products, and EVO will launch in Q3 with the Bollard 1000 Series taking off in Q4.
For more information, visit https://coastalsource.com.
