Sherbourn Fills Out Lineup With Control4 Options, Plans Speaker Line

Ranging in price from $549 to $3,499, the company’s preamp/tuner, amplifiers, receivers and processors are marketed as “high-quality” and “value” electronics, Laufman said. The gear will be designed in the U.S. and built in China, he said. Select Sherbourn models can accept the optional Control4 HC-200, a $500 add-on that offers a pathway to home automation. The home automation feature is aimed at home theater control but could easily expand to other areas of the home, Laufman said. The two product lines complement each other as value brands, he said. “Control4’s growth curve and reach are going to be greater than any of us realizes in the next five years,” he said.

Sherbourn is targeting the custom market at a time when average sales tickets have come down from stratospheric pre-recession levels. “It’s great to have ultra-high-end products if you can do it,” Laufman said. “If you really want to be relevant, you have to have a more realistic approach and price points that are more reflective of the real value of the product,” he said. Integrators will be able to sell a “very competent” Sherbourn processor/amp combo “for under five grand,” he said. Margins will be 40 points, he said.

One of the ways Sherbourn plans to add value is via an upgrade path, Laufman said. “Trying to get a guy to spend $10,000-$15,000 for a processor that’s going to be obsolete in two years is a tough sell,” he said. The company even ran into that conundrum trying to sell a $2,000 processor under its Emotiva brand, a mainstream direct-only brand sold on the Internet. Laufman noted there are currently expensive, high-end processors on the market that “aren’t 3D-capable, don’t have HDMI 1.4 and lack a live graphical user interface,” he said. Sherbourn’s plan is to employ a “highly modular” processing architecture that will enable subsystems to be swapped and upgraded. The audio and video processing paths have to be upgradeable because they're “constantly moving targets,” he said.

To keep the upgrades cost-effective, Sherbourn will leverage technologies over the Sherbourn and Emotiva brands. The “system architecture of the two brands is very, very similar, but the implementation and features of the products are very different,” he said. “What you do after the decoding is a whole new game."

Sherbourn is positioning its lineup as commercial-grade with output power and build quality that’s “more robust than mass-market” counterparts, Laufman said. Convection-cooling versus fans ensure components “aren’t stressed,” he said. The company offers a five-year warranty to back it up. The company is also plugging in forward-looking features including compatibility with the Rhapsody streaming music service. “Streaming is where it’s at,” Laufman said. “These days people are trading off absolute performance for convenience.”

Sherbourn is also planning in-wall home theater speakers and subwoofers that would allow dealers to offer a “blended” package marketed as a complete home theater system. Margins for the complete system would be “about 50 points,” Laufman said. The home theater speakers are due in the June, according to operations manager Fred Hartman. “Our goal is to offer a complete end-to-end solution to custom installers at a much more attractive price than is currently available,” Hartman said. Sherbourn has 350 active dealers in the U.S. and about 25 international distributors, Hartman said.