Control4 has forked out US$9.6M in cash to buy the Triad speaker brand.
The move into audio comes as the Company comes under pressure from several Companies offering IP and networked home connectivity.
Control4 chairman and CEO Martin Plaehn joined Triad Speakers founder Larry Pexton to announce the acquisition last night. He said that the deal “came together very fast.”
“The acquisition enables Control4 to immediately deepen its entertainment offerings and to develop new integrated-audio experiences for the future, according to Plaehn.
“It’s a big piece of our growing business,” he said. “When we launched the EA Series controllers a year ago, we put very high-quality digital audio converters and decoders in those products. We’ve continued to work with other companies in the digital audio and multi-room space, and felt that when we look over the horizon to what we can build two years out, three years out, four years out, at the mid to high end of the connected home experience… we felt that having acoustical engineering expertise and high-quality custom product creation expertise in-house was really important.”
Triad is a US manufacturer of speakers, their operation is built around manufacturing a range of built-to-order audio speakers for home theatres, family rooms, whole-home or multi-room audio.
Control4 executives claim that the acquisition is a strategic addition to the Control4 entertainment portfolio, which includes the fully programmable Control4 EA-series controllers with native high-resolution streaming music services, its family of multi-room audio matrix switches and amplifiers, and its family of ultra-HD 4K video matrix switches with audio down-mixing capabilities.
Plaehn added that there’s a big portion of the market that is not well served by “commodity products” and that Control4 wants to be an “elite provider” of technology in that entertainment space. “We built core competence within Control4, and Triad has a longstanding reputation for acoustical engineering,” he said. “We want to harness that and connect it with our [engineering].”