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Lenbrook Launches Bluesound Brand

Bluesound, the new Lenbrook Industries brand, has rolled out its first wireless multi-room audio products, which are positioned as a step up from Sonos wireless-audio systems in performance and price.

Bluesound, the new Lenbrook Industries brand, has rolled out its first wireless multi-room audio products, which are positioned as a step up from Sonos wireless-audio systems in performance and price.

Bluesound chief brand officer John Banks (left) and Lenbrook America president/CEO Dean Miller with some of Bluesound’s wireless-music products, all controlled from an Android or iOS app.

Lenbrook, which markets audio components and speakers under the NAD and PSB brands, is also pursuing a more limited distribution strategy than Sonos, targeting only about 100 A/V specialists, plus a potential entry into Magnolia Home Theater and Magnolia Design Center stores. The Bluesound lineup of five products has already been rolled out to about 40 A/V specialists in the U.S., almost all of them NAD or PSB dealers. After International CES, the company will expand the rollout to about 100 specialists and possibly Magnolia, which already sells NAD and PSB headphones but not NAD or PSB audio components.

Current Bluesound dealers include Crutchfield and its online store. Authorized brick-and-mortar retailers will also be able to sell the products on their web sites, but the products won’t be sold through third-party online stores, said Dean Miller, Lenbrook America president/CEO.

The lineup was developed by an engineering team that included many of Lenbrooks’ NAD and PSB engineers, and the company is promoting the new brand’s connection to the NAD and PSB brands’ hi-fi heritage. “We don’t hide our roots and affiliation because the affiliation lends credibility to the brand’s performance message,” said John Banks, Bluesound’s chief brand officer, during a press briefing.

The brand, however, is targeted to music enthusiasts that have not grown up with the types of audio components made by companies such as NAD but are interested in higher performance audio, said Banks. “The 17-inch format doesn’t necessarily resonate with them,” he said.

“We’re targeting a music enthusiast who likes the convenience of wireless and will pay a couple of hundred dollars more for performance,” Banks continued. Product development began a little more than three years ago with a mission “to create a music ecosystem that could resonate with a broad audience of music enthusiasts, not just audiophiles,” he added.

The products, which use Apple and Android mobile devices as system controllers, consist of three wireless streaming music players that stream music over a home network via 802.11b/g/n or via wired Ethernet from a networked PC, Mac or network-attached storage (NAS) drive, none of which needs to run Bluesound software or use DLNA technology. The streaming devices can also stream music from the brand’s Vault, which combines a wired streamer with CD ripper and 1TB of storage for music files ripped in the MP3 and lossless FLAC formats. The Vault is targeted to users who want the convenience of simple CD ripping and to users whose music library is on a laptop that might not always be at home.

All of the products also incorporate TuneIn app, which streams music from radio stations throughout the world, and the Rdio music service. Additional music services will be rolled out in the future. The Vault also streams from a networked computer.

The products run on a proprietary Linux-based OS.

Apple and Android mobile devices can be used only as system controllers, not as music sources that stream music directly to the components via Wi-Fi. However, when a USB-connected Bluetooth dongle is plugged into the Bluesound streamers, users will be able to stream mobile-device-stored music to the Bluetooth-connected component, which then retransmits the music via Wi-Fi around the house to the other Bluesound streamers. Likewise, music services streamed through a user’s mobile device can also be reproduced throughout the house.

Local sources plugged into the streamers’ optical inputs can also be transmitted via Wi-Fi throughout the house.

Up to eight songs can be streamed simultaneously from a PC or Vault to up to eight Wi-Fi-connected streamers, depending on a user’s network and network congestion. In tests, the company has streamed up to 12 tracks simultaneously to up to 32 streamers connected via wired Ethernet.

The Bluesound products consist of the $699 Power Node streamer/amplifier, $449 Node streamer without amplifier for connection to existing sound systems, $699 Pulse active biamplified tabletop speaker/streamer, and the $999 Vault streamer/ripper, which also lacks amplifier. The brand also offers the $999 Duo 2.1 speaker system. It can be used with the Power Node, which features an EQ switch to optimize playback through the Duo.

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