EGC Electric: Sonos Ranks as Top Music System Among Home Systems Professionals

Thursday 15 June 2017

Sonos Ranks as Top Music System Among Home Systems Professionals

It’s become increasingly easy to find smart home products. Smart light switches, thermostats, complete automation systems, music systems like Sonos, and more are available at your local home improvement store, on line at places like Amazon.com, and at the showrooms of professional home systems integrators. This ease of acquisition, unfortunately, often breeds confusion. What brands should I buy? Should I go with this or that? More than anyone, professional home systems integrators are the most knowledgeable of a product’s viability and usefulness to homeowners. After all, they are the people who spend their days configuring and installing technology systems into homes. They know first-hand which systems work well and make their clients happy.

Recently, CEPro magazine completed its annual CE Pro 100 Brand Analysis Study, which provides a glimpse into the brands that integrators are using to succeed. These companies, by virtue of their revenues, can be considered among the most successful firms. The growth rate in 2016 vs. 2015 was a whopping 24 percent. That is compared to 9.1 percent growth among the rest of the custom integration community.

One of the highest ranking smart home brands among home systems integrators is Sonos. The Santa Barbara, Calif.-based Sonos, known for completely upending the norm in the multiroom audio market with its wireless innovation, is now the leading brand used by the industry’s largest integrators in soundbars and subwoofers.

That goes hand-in-hand with its No. 1 position in the Wireless Audio category, and No. 2 position in the Multiroom A/V Distribution category. The company even comes in third in the general Floorstanding Loudspeaker category, third in Streaming Media Devices, and fourth in Audio Amplifiers.

Let’s dig in to the data for a moment. Here are Sonos’ penetration numbers:

Wireless Audio — #1 overall with more than three out of four CE Pro 100 companies using Sonos (76 percent). It should be noted, however, that this usage rate represents and 11 percent decline compared to 2015. Brands like HEOS, Bose and Control4 made strong headway.

Multiroom A/V Distribution Systems — #2 overall (behind Control4) with a 48 percent penetration rate. This means that home systems integrators are putting in a lot of wireless multiroom audio systems these days, in addition to hardwired options.

Soundbars — #1 overall with a 60 percent marketshare. This is a 13 percent increase over last year.

Subwoofers — #1 overall with a 37 percent share. This is the first year this category has been broken out and it was a bit of a surprise to see Sonos in the lead. The conclusion is that dealers are putting in a lot of single-room Sonos systems combining the soundbar with a subwoofer.

Media Servers/Streaming Devices — #3 with 28 percent marketshare, behind leaders Kaleidescape and Autonomic, both of which stream video as well as audio. If the category had been broken down by audio-only streaming devices, Autonomic would lead.

Floorstanding Loudspeakers — #3 with 24 percent penetration, behind leaders Klipsch and B&W. Again, this reaffirms that integrators are installing nearly as many wireless audio speakers as they are high-performance audio systems.