HomeTech.fm - Episode 335 - Sound United's Brendon Stead plus our CES 2021 Wrap-up

Episode Date: January 15, 2021

The Home Tech Podcast is supported by you. To find out more, go to hometech.fm support. This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, January 15th. From Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson. And from Denver, Colorado, I'm Jason Griffin. How are you doing, Seth? Good, Jason. I imagine it's cold here, so it's got to be colder where you are. And I know in the middle of the country, Texas is freaking out because it's snowing. And they just don't know what to do. And all hell's breaking loose. Yep, exactly.

Yeah, it's not bad here. More importantly, Seth, I've got an update for you. Go on. Okay, you ready for this? I'm ready. It has arrived. It doesn't count. It's not installed yet for the listeners.

Okay, I know we're an audio-only show. I've got a Lutron Caseta dimmer here on my desk. So if you were listening, I think two weeks ago, I mentioned that I was going to get one and install it down here in the office. And we gave me a six month uh target which is about in line with my typical pace here but uh i got on and i ordered it and it's here and i'm hoping to install it this weekend i see we're also an audio show and i can't explain to you i can literally look right over jason's what is that your left hand shoulder and i can see explain to you i can literally look right over jason's what is that your left hand shoulder and i can see the light switch right there yes it's in view so you will know

you will know when it's done it's not installed yet okay but i'm i'm working on this uh procrastination thing it's awesome that is awesome well i'm glad i'm glad it's in um what we don't need to have happen is for robert to pop in and send you some email saying oh no you should do it this way because then it would be another six months before we get going yeah we'll uh we'll try to we'll try to avoid that exactly so yeah uh we've got a great show here. Actually, we've got CES this week. We're going to talk about that, CES Digital. So obviously not an in-person event this year, but there are plenty of good stories, cool gadgets, fun stuff that we're going to jump into there. We also have a guest this week, Brendan Stead. He's the Senior Vice President of Product

Development and Engineering at Sound United and had a great conversation with him. I really enjoyed it. We covered a lot of ground, talked a lot about voice control and user experience and the streaming audio landscape and really a wide-ranging conversation that was far beyond just talking about speakers. So Brendan speaks really eloquently about that. He's got a really interesting background. So enjoyed that conversation very much. Yep. It was good. Good conversation. Jason, what do you say we jump into some CES headlines?

Let's do it. So Seth, we're going to, we're just going to kind of go down a list here of some highlights. We may not hit all of these, but we've, we've aggregated some stories from primarily from CNET. I thought they had some great coverage of it this year and some of these, but we've aggregated some stories primarily from CNET. I thought they had some great coverage of it this year and some of the kind of cool gadgets and devices that are coming out of CES this year. Starting here at the top, Seth, rollable technology, the LG rollable phone. TCL also had some interesting stuff here. The rollable phone, they've got a tablet as well, 7.8-inch tablet, and then one that I thought was really interesting. They called it a 17-inch printed OLED scrolling display.

And there's a picture of somebody sort of rolling this out almost like a scroll. Like a saran wrap. Yeah, or like a saran wrap um so i just don't know i don't know how um practical this technology is but it's really cool really really interesting tech it is neat and it's kind of like reminds me a couple years back we you know we we talked about that it may have been last year i don't know this last this 2020 has just been a year. But I think it's two years ago now, the LG scrollable, like rollable screen that would go down and you could like put it halfway down

and it would show you a smaller version of the TV screen. You could roll it all the way up and you get a bigger TV screen. This seems like it's like a miniaturized version of that. So this could be really neat for like home applications too you know in you know 20 years whenever we get something like this that actually exists in the in the from from home technology vendors like we might have like picture one of these like wall mounted and like it's just shade you can just like bring it down and get more information and then like bring it back up like a roll down shade you can just

bring it back up when you either don't want to see it or um maybe just want to only display like a smaller amount of information and have less wall cover i guess i don't know it could be could be neat yeah yeah definitely like you said it it's uh let's let's pause and remind ourselves that this is ces yes So just because you see it here doesn't mean it's actually ever going to exist in real life. But like you said, we've been seeing iterations and different plays on this rollable OLED technology. And so certainly at some point,

you have to imagine it is going to make its way into the hands of people. Although I think the biggest thing probably holding it back at this point, well, other than potentially cost, of course, would be just like, again, is this really practical? I can't think of a lot of uses for it, but it's really neat. It's interesting technology just to look at and think about. Well, shifting gears from there, Seth, another theme that I picked up in CES coverage this year, which isn't surprising, is it's kind of like cleanliness,

I guess, or clean tech. I'm not sure what you would even really call it. But for example, there's this Grenlite ultraviolet light treatment system. This is advertised specifically as killing pathogens in your car. And it's just a little light. They say the tech's already used. This is used in emergency rooms and commercial vehicles. But this company is working on integrating it into personal vehicles as well. They've got other products. I can't remember, honestly, the name.

It's escaping me, unfortunately. But there was, like, I'll see if I can find it. There was like a, looked like a robot that you would put in say like a classroom or any sort of public gathering space that would go around at night with big lights on it and sort of disinfect the place. Looks like you've got some sort of light there you're holding up. So yeah, these, these kind of sterilizing lights, I think are something we're going to certainly see, see more of moving forward. Yeah. It was a Christmas gift. I don't know how much it was kind of, it doesn't seem to work. Um,

I don't know. It, it, I guess these, it's like a UV based, uh, light thing. You're not supposed to look at it or anything while it's on.

Um, but it works like 95% effective in like 20 seconds. If it's one centimeter away from whatever you're trying to disinfect otherwise it takes you know if it's like a foot away or whatever it could take an hour or two for that yeah it drops off exponentially quite a bit yeah yeah so this little thing i mean it i guess it works i don't know no idea it's called a phone spa is what i got so i can yeah ron in the chat room said his grandma got one for cleaning cell phones. I've seen those around as well.

So I think the cleaning technology. It looks like everybody has one now. I'm like, it must've been a good Christmas gift because everybody has one. So yeah, it's a phone tanning bed. Exactly. It's exactly what it is. It looks just like the lights that are in a tanning bed. So yeah.

Yeah. Vacuums as well. Vacuums as well seem to be a big one samsung has a jetbot 90 ai this is a crazy looking vacuum but one of the things they were touting about this was you know in addition to the high suction power and everything you would expect from uh from one of these vacuums is the ability to go back. I don't know how common this is, but to go back to like a station where it could connect and then it would empty,

um, into the station. Uh, so that was kind of interesting and, but big bulky looking tank looking vacuum. So these things are getting more and more popular. It seems like everybody's got a smart vacuum these days. Yeah. There's we know wise our you're in my favorite company has one uh roborock is another company uh of course irobot has been around from the beginning on these but yeah it

seems like everyone is getting uh into these the roborock s7 came out at ces 2020 and it's a doesn't have the the bucket that that you're that you're referring to where it can kind of like empty itself when it gets full. And then, you know, that that bucket actually like takes all the dirt out of it. But this one, this one's a little bit different. It's got like a sonic mopping element that goes that goes along with it. So it can scrub the floors and it like mops and it vacuums at the same time so 650 for this one coming to amazon march 24th so later this year interesting i i i kind of want one i i used to have one of these vacuums like one of the first generations and

it didn't really do anything but make the cat really nervous um and and get clogged up like it seems like the technology's gotten a lot better uh than that first generation and now it can kind of like map your house out and figure out where it needs to go um but you're gonna pay upwards of like 500 for that technology it's not it's not like the 350 robot vacuum that that one still goes around it just bumps into things until it says your room's that technology it's not it's not like the 350 robot vacuum that that one still goes around it just bumps into things until it says your room's clean and it's like you missed this over here yeah yeah the by the way going back to what i said earlier it's the ubtek adabot is the one that says made specifically for small businesses and classrooms kind of a robot that

scoots around the classroom um presumably at night and disinfects things with the light speaking of robot seth samsung another samsung mentioned here they've got the uh i think they call the handy bot looking for it now this supposedly can like load your dishwasher so that's cool i oh yeah that's the one with the little hand on it i thought that was the robot no that's the one wow okay yeah that's wild that's that's a bit bought handy is what it's called says can put dirty dishes in a dishwasher or pour a bottle of wine presumably they don't mean pour it all over the floor then do you have to clean its hand off like once it's

dirt again i don't know this just seems like it's does it wash his hand i don't i don't well again remember ces it's just a field of dreams and forgotten promises yeah and i did notice that alarm.com had come out with a um a doorbell, which I thought was pretty cool. It kind of flows in with this cleanliness products that are conceived out of maybe the COVID era. It rings when you walk up to it rather than somebody coming up and pressing a button. And instead of a button,

it has like a big no-no sticker on it, right? It says, don't touch this. This is not a doorbell. Yeah, yeah, that's funny. Interesting. Let's see. What else did we have interesting this year? We've got a Samsung bespoke refrigerators. So aesthetically pleasing refrigerators. Apparently you can sort of customize these things. Might, might be an interesting play in the high end. I can definitely see some of the old homes that I used to work in, in in Southern California taking advantage of this. Here's another good one for you, Seth.

Cadillac Air Taxis. GM has plans to join the air taxi business. What is an air taxi? I didn't realize the air taxi business was a thing. Yeah. Okay. That's interesting. So, like, this is, I think of air taxis, I think of, like, maybe something that comes in, you know, lands in an airplane and takes off. Does it take off in front of your house? I don't know. Four rotor personal aircraft powered with a 90 kilowatt EV motor. Speeds up to 56 miles per hour.

Oh, so it's like a drone for a person to get into. This sounds safe. I mean, it's as much drone crash footage that I've seen on YouTube. Yeah, this sounds like it could be fun. So yeah, why not? I feel like they were doing these in Dubai, if I recall correctly. This can't be real.

Like, don't quote me on that. But anyways, fun with CES. Here's another one for you, Seth. The Toto Wellness Toilet. This is a smart toilet that tells you how healthy you are by analyzing your waste. It seems like another job for the Samsung robot, the handy bot. Well, then you definitely got to clean the hand.

Oh, my gosh. Oh, boy. CES, I don't know what to think. I don't know what to think. It does say that this is just a concept, so they admit that right here. It says, a total wellness toilet is meant to help people live healthier lives with diet recommendations by analyzing their personal waste. Okay. Well, let's get out of the toilet and back into the kitchen.

I like this one. This is funny. LG InstaView refrigerator. You know, Samsung came up with the one that kind of matches their frame TVs. This one has a glass window on it, Jason, but here's a new concept. It will light up when you knock on the door. So you walk up to it and you say, hello, Mr. Refrigerator, and the lights turn on. on interesting samsung has i think that i think i remember when i was looking at when i was looking at refrigerators we got a new fridge last year no it would have been 2019 when we got it and yeah that was a thing it was like the glass you could knock on and it would felt very gimmicky to me well this one also has uv light and it will sanitize your drink oh there you go so all the gimmicks in one package i saw one i thought thought was interesting, the Lockley Guard, I think it was called. And this is like a, it's a smart lock, but it's built for sliding doors.

Oh, that's cool. That's very much. That was an interesting idea. I had never really, I don't think I've ever seen one of those before. And it's kind of a novel take on the, you know, the smart lock space, I think, has gotten pretty commoditized at this point. But the Lockley guard is made for sliding doors. So I thought that was kind of cool. And then another one in that same category that I saw was the Den Smart Strike.

It says level up your smart lock. And the idea behind this is like, I guess, that it would integrate with um it's like a door strike so you can integrate it with like i guess like a smart camera or whatever to um control your door strike like a like a door lock control says level up your smart lock uses bluetooth zigbee wi-fi or z-wave mobile devices for remote access to your door um via the app very cool very cool i guess i so this is more like the you know like door strikes that you see on like higher end commercial yeah like commercial but i know that like some of the higher end homes that i worked in in southern california again had had more of this this style where it wasn't just like the smart

deadbolt it was like an actual door strike. So this appears to be an attempt to sort of consumerize that technology. Sure, sure. Interesting, interesting. A couple of new, well, a couple of new, here's a new LED floodlight camera coming from Chinese TV manufacturer, Konka, who debuted a couple of OLED TVs last year at CES. And now they're coming back with,

with a, with 10 smart home products, including LED floodlight camera, video to video doorbells, smart plugs, power strips, and a couple other things. So Konka,

K O N K A, Jason, that's going to have to go on our pronunciation guide i'm sure there you go there you go so i got i got like two more here on my side and then i want to want to talk a little bit about tvs but i think there was one other one you wanted to touch on the infinity game table this looks kind of cool this is like uh you know picture like the old pac-man arcade games you would sit over like the tabletop style games. But this is a nice, of course, like touchscreen interface.

But you can sort of play different like board games and things like that on it. So the Infinity Game Table by Arcade 1-Up. Thought that looked kind of cool. Sort of a unique take on gaming, which I know people being stuck at home are looking for new ways to entertain themselves. So that's one you might go check out. And then another one I thought was kind of interesting was the, it was the Ampere shower power speaker. This is a speaker, Bluetooth speaker for your shower that attaches to the, uh, above the shower head. And it uses the flow of your water to power the speaker.

That's genius. That's genius. So I thought that was kind of cool as well. Yeah. It's a set it and forget it product. Goes in there. It probably has a little impeller or something inside there that will spin around and spin a generator-type device. Just enough to get the couple know, the couple of Watts

needed to charge up whatever battery that's in there. And yeah, that's, that's a great idea. I like it. So that one was kind of cool. So those are my gadgets that I saw this year, some cool stuff going on in TVs, Seth, but I think there was one gadget that you wanted to make sure we touched on. Well, I think there's a couple of first, I got to get you out of the bathroom again. I don't want to keep going back in there and get you back into the kitchen and we got to talk about this uh cold snap ice cream maker because um this this is fun oh indeed this is fun the keurig of ice cream so you you get this thing it weighs 50 pounds um it's uh looks to be like maybe a thousand dollar ice cream machine you set it on your countertop and you can make ice cream and other tasty frozen treats like

frozen margaritas, mango passion fruit smoothies, and then chocolate ice cream as well. It basically, all this stuff comes in pods, just like, like it would with your Keurig coffee machine, except it makes ice cream.

Interesting. I'm in, I'm in, I don't care. Cold snap countertop ice cream maker. I don't understand how ice cream comes out of a pot. Well, it's just, I think you stick the pot in, and then it takes 60 to 90 seconds for the machine to, like,

cool it down, basically, enough to where it's not. I mean, this isn't hard to do. I don't know. Have you seen these Coke machines that exist out there that, like, make. I have. Coke into ice within, like, two seconds. have you seen these coke machines that that exist out there that like make i have the coke into ice within like two seconds have you seen that yep they can basically they could they're probably using somewhat similar technology to make whatever liquid they have inside these pods turn into ice cream and then uh yeah you get ice cream in 60 seconds i'm i'm good i'm this is this is you're sold this is gonna it into my, it's not available until 2022. Oh, well, maybe next year.

Maybe. Yeah. Yeah. Don't hold your breath. But Jason, I think the show stealer for all home technology at CES 2021 has to be the Chamberlain MyQ dog door. The pet portal. This is unbelievable. An accompanying video that we have to,

we'll go ahead and put this over in our chat. The video's gold. You got to go watch this video. The pet portal is a pet door that has to be installed by a professional is what the video says. This thing costs three thousand dollars and it has a bluetooth sensor that that gets embedded into your dog's collar so your dog has a little uh yeah i guess or cat could be a cat door too it's a little bit big for

for a cat but uh your dog will can walk up to it and, uh, basically, um, open the door itself, I guess. I, I, this is so funny. Yeah, it's pretty wild. They, so in the video, they specifically point out that there, you do have the ability to turn it on so that it's like automatic. So if the dog just walks up to the door, it'll, uh, it'll open, but there's also the ability to have it like when the dog, when your dog walks up to the door, it sends you a notification on your phone. Obviously having it be an automatic mode could be problematic. You know, if somebody gets their hands on that, on that leash and just walks up to the door, they're in the house. But I would think when you're home, you could turn that automatic

mode on. That would be nice. And the dog can just let themselves in and out. And then when you're away, you got to make sure you remember to turn that off or have that somehow automated. So it's kind of a neat idea. I mean, it is, I think you mentioned $3,000 is professionally installed product. So when I first saw the headline of a, of like a smart door opener, I presumed this would be, it's kind of an inexpensive, basic thing. I don't know what I thought it would do, but yeah, it looks like it's a pretty specialized deal. You got to have some skin in the game in order to get this, but kind of an interesting idea, I guess, for pet owners who are out and about. Most of us are stuck at home these days, so maybe less demand on that front. But if you're, you know, if you're stuck at work and you want to be able to let the dog in and out, this is, this kind of a nice thing that's more secure than

just a, you know, basic doggy door. Doggy door. Yeah. It's got a camera on it. And so, yeah, you can take a picture and send a picture of your, it's basically a doggy garage door from MyQ because it's Chamberlain MyQ that's making this and um it's got a doggy doorbell too so when your your pupper comes up and says i want to come in uh it sends you a picture so and you can so when's when's the uh control four driver coming seth yeah that's exactly where's the control four driver oh my gosh my gosh yeah My gosh. Yeah. I paid $3,000 for this dog door and I can't open it with my control system. Yeah. Yeah.

And actually Rashid mentioned one sort of shifting gears here. One that I'm glad Rashid you mentioned because I almost forgot to hit it. It did have it on our list here. The Lutron outdoor plug. So they've got like a Caseta outdoor switch or plug here that, you know, it looks kind of interesting, a nice addition to your smart lighting if you've got lighting outside. Christmas lights or anything. Yeah, Lutron outdoor plug, $80 smart outlets built to connect wirelessly to your phone. So it looks kind of like just a mini, it almost looks like a little mini power strip, sort of, right? It's got the pigtails on either end of it.

And weatherproof, obviously. So patio lights, holiday lights, water pumps, things like that. Nice addition to the lineup. You could have gotten this and just plugged it into a lamp there in your room and you probably wouldn't have to install that switch. Oh, I'm pulling the Robert thing. This is going to get you. See, you had to do it. You had to do it.

Yeah, exactly. So yeah, this looks like, again, a nice addition to the Lutron family. Yep, looks pretty good. So there's kind of your crash course in gadgets. We wanted to touch on TVs real quick. I'm going to hit these kind of quickly because we do want to get into our interview here with Brendan, but it wouldn't be CES if we didn't talk a little bit about what's

going on in the world of TVs. So we'll run down the list here from kind of the big names, Samsung, Sony, LG, and touch on TCL as well. Starting at the top, we mentioned this last week, Samsung really focused on micro LED. They're kind of touting that they've got that same technology that was used in the wall. So the really massive display that they used to show at all the trade shows, and they've brought this down into a single piece, you know, not, not a modular, but a single piece unit. I believe these were up in like the 88, 90, a hundred inch range. Yeah yeah i think we talked about 110 inch a couple yeah 110 inch um still going to be very expensive but interesting to see that technology coming down

market a little bit and then also the neo q led q led 8k so this is their led is here everything is 8k now right that's right that's right and they're touting this as kind of being close to OLED in terms of black levels, but much brighter bright. So that's kind of the, in a nutshell, the big thing with this Neo QLED technology that Samsung is touting this year. Man, it would be great if we could see these, you know, like in person somewhere. Yeah, you talk about a tough technology to showcase online, right? The gadgets and things like that. Not, not quite as hard, but with TVs there, you're right. It's really no replacement. It's never going to look better than your computer screen or whatever you're looking at. That's right. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Moving on to Sony, Sony, Sony, moving on to Sony sony they're the bravia uh master series z9j is kind of the flagship this year they've sony has not embraced the mini led technology like we're seeing from samsung and lg but sony's really known you know i'd say they're known for their processor technology and they've got this new cognitive processor XR, which is their latest and greatest processor. So really rich colors, great black levels, incredible brightness. Everything you would expect from Sony is what we're hearing in terms of a really, really high quality TV. So that Bravia Master Series Z9J is kind of the flagship. And then they've got the Master Series A90J. So this is the OLED TV and they figured out how to brighten these up is what

they're touting. LG is touting the same thing. We'll talk about that in just a second here. One of the other things that Sony's talking about is the acoustic surface audio technology. So a great sounding TV. Candidly, Seth, I'm not sure how important that is because like, I just don't know how many people who buy this sort of TV are using the built-in speakers on the TV. Yeah. I'm sure there's a sizable portion, but I don't know. I wonder what percentage of these people are using external speakers instead. Right.

It kind of comes down to, you remember the Sony a couple years back, a couple years back, like five or six years back, had like the big speakers on the side i forget this was before oled or anything this was this was well before that it was kind of like their it was an xbr but it had like these largest speakers on each side yeah um and i i had a friend buy one of those and he was basically like i live in an apartment in san francisco you know money was kind of no object but like he just bought it and it was basically like i'm going to use this as my sound system too so it was kind of like a two-in-one right for him so i they have their use cases i suppose yeah yeah definitely moving on from there a quick quick LG rundown, kind of their flagship, the Gallery Series G1 OLED TV. This, again, similar to Sony, they're touting higher brightness. As a side note, Sony uses LG OLED panels like most TV brands. So LG really is kind of owns the backend, some of the

infrastructure, so to speak, when it comes to these panels. According to one review I read, said the Gallery Series has never looked more gorgeous. This is what they're calling their new EVO, EVO, EVO panel technology. So again, the big focus this year that we're seeing from both Sony and LG when it comes to OLED is getting those bright levels up. OLED's really been known for the deep, deep black levels.

So you see Sony and LG touting brighter technology on their OLED. And then conversely, you see Samsung with their LED technology really pushing to get those darker blacks that OLED is inherently good at. Yeah, and you can actually see the difference between those two panels. Basically, Sony was doing the processing and LG's just doing, like, get the pixels on the screen. Although they do their own processing too, but Sony's really focused on making their product

just a little bit different than anybody else's from going the processing route. I don't have to tell that to integrators. We all kind of know that, but it's actually something you can visibly see when you're looking. Both pictures look amazing when you go and look at the different brands, but man but man, you can, you can tell the difference between

Sony and LG pretty quickly. Yeah. Yep. Agreed. And then TCL got, uh, you know, some acclaim this year, again, sort of one article I read here reading from digital trends said TCL expect them to again, be a leading provider. They had the quote game-changingly good 6 Series back in 2018. And the article talks about how really since then they've been on a roll and are rapidly becoming one of the TV makers to watch. Not just a budget TV maker, they make some really good panels. So they're bringing the 8K micro LED into the 6 Series. And then they've got what they're calling OD Zero, which is a new micro LED backlight technology. They're not saying which TVs that will be included in,

so we're a little bit limited in terms of what we know about that. But again, TCL really is kind of making an increasingly strong name for themselves in the TV space. And I've got a couple of these at my house, as listeners to the show know, and I really like them. I think they're, they're great panels and I didn't buy the high end ones. I've got more of their bargain TVs, but talk about a bang for your buck panel. They, they make some really good sets. Yep. Yep. And this is one of those, this is one of those brands you just kind of have to watch. I've, we've seen them get more and more popular year over year. And I think including like Roku inside the TV too, it's kind of like a no brainer for me.

Anytime anybody ever asked me what kind of TV they should get. Um, I'm like just for like a throat, like a throwaway TV, but like a guest bedroom TV or some, you know, TV that they want to put in like an exercise room or something like that. I point them in this direction because with Roku built in,

you can pretty much put any, anything on it. You don't even need to Apple TV. Cause like the Apple TV appsoku built in, you can pretty much put anything on it. You don't even need an Apple TV because the Apple TV app's now built into Roku. So you can get anything and everything loaded up on Roku right on the TV. It's kind of just a brain-dead operation type thing. It's pretty easy.

Plug and play as it gets. That's really kind of where I push that TV to people that, that, that ask me, you know, what should I get? Um, you know, if they're not looking to put in some kind of like fancy home theater or fancy, you know, go for video performance and step up into like Samsung LG or, or Sony. Right. Yeah. That's exactly what I've got down here in my office is that TCL with the built-in Roku. And that's, that's exactly what I've got down here in my office is that TCL with the built-in Roku. And that's exactly what I use on other TVs in the house. We've got Apple TVs set up, but we use the Roku down here.

And like you said, plug and play, really simple. Didn't need to buy any additional hardware. And Roku's a solid interface, in my opinion. So it's a great option. Well, that'll do it for our quick kind of CES crash course. A very unique year with this being our first ever all-digital, not-in-person CES event. We can only hope the next year. Wait a minute. Every CES for me has been not-in-person, and I still don't feel like I miss much from it.

Well, you're right. You're right, and me as well. Our the collective, right? Not having 100,000 people gathering in Vegas for CES this year, it certainly had a different feel to it, even from a distance. I almost forgot it was happening. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Kind of some other stuff that's been going on recently

that I've been paying a little bit of mind to as well but yeah the uh yeah i i'm glad to see that companies are still announcing stuff and and hopefully you know like with tcl and these kind of companies like tcl we i remember we usually talk about them and then probably i want to see with everybody like mid year we start seeing their products announced. Like I want to say Sony is a little bit earlier. Samsung TCL, like may, maybe,

um, we start seeing the products come out and we get to talk about them all over again and see what, you know, pricing and everything they attach to like pricing and models and, and TV screen sizes and all that stuff. So, um,

it would be an interesting year with like the, the whole COVID thing still around and how manufacturers are going to be tightening up. And it'll still be an interesting year to see how this stuff gets pushed out to everybody. You know, this year, while we're kind of hopefully cleaning up this COVID mess and moving on. Yeah. But it's still going to be kind of a strange market, I'm pretty sure, moving into 2021. Yeah, absolutely. All right. Well, all the links and topics we've discussed here on this episode can be found on our show notes at hometech.fm slash 335. While you're there, don't forget to

sign up for our weekly newsletter. We'll send you show reminders and other occasional updates about all the great things going on here in the world of home tech. Once again, that link is hometech.fm slash 335. And don't forget, you can join us live here in the chat room starting Wednesday, starting sometime between 7, 7.30 PM Eastern. You can find out more on how to do that at hometech.fm slash live. All right, Seth. Well, without any further delay, let's go ahead and jump straight into our interview here with Brendan Stead, again, the Senior Vice President of Product Development and Engineering at Sound United. We hope you enjoy. Hey, Brendan, welcome to the show. How are you? Doing very well, thank you. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, we appreciate you taking the time to join us, and we look forward to jumping in. We're going to cover a lot of ground with regard to Sound United and some of your really unique perspectives on the landscape here today. But before we dive into that, we always like to start with a quick sort of personal introduction. So for any of our listeners who may not be familiar with you and your work, would you give us sort of a high-level background and introduction to our listeners? Sure. So my name is Brendan Stead. I'm the head of product development and engineering for Sound United currently. We'll talk a little bit more about Sound United later.

I'm a degreed physicist, and I've been in the audio industry since 1994, working for various companies. And an interesting personal fact is I was born in Zimbabwe, and I immigrated to the U.S. as a senior in high school. Oh, wow. Very cool. Didn't know that. Well, speaking of your childhood, I know that from my research in preparing for this show that your passion for audio has roots pretty deeply embedded in your life that go back to well before your career. Talk to us about that a little bit. Yeah. So my grandfather was a finish carpenter and an audiophile, and his hobby was building loudspeakers. So I had built multiple sets of loudspeakers with him before I was even 12 years old. I had no idea it would turn into a career, but I'm happy that it did.

Excellent. And connect the dots for us a little bit. You studied as a physicist. What kind of got you into doing this as a profession? So when I graduated, I worked on really advanced research for DARPA and the military establishment. We worked in detections. But when the peace dividend happened after the Berlin Wall kind of came down, investments kind of dried up by the government entities. So I ended up quite by accident taking a job at a small audio company that you would know now as Ultimate Ears slash Logitech. And, you know, I built speakers. I understood all the acoustical techniques and phenomenon.

And so I thought I would just go into audio until my true love, the tech industry came back, but I got bit by the audio bug and I've been there ever since. Yeah. And it seems like you've found a nice merger of your passions for audio and technology based on the work you're doing today. So let's transition and talk about that and use sort of Sound United as a kind of a transition mechanism to get into that. Tell us a little bit about who Sound United is as a company and the footprint that you guys have today. Sound United is not a consumer-facing brand. It's our parent company.

We call ourselves the collector of the world's premium audio brands. We are a house of brands. So we are a brand house of brands with multiple. So they include the latest acquisition, which is Bowers and Wilkins, the British loudspeaker company. Also, Denon, Marantz, Definitive Technology, Polk Audio, Boston Acoustics and Class A. So Class A is a very, very high end tweaky brand from canada um so what we do is we bring these brands together and leverage our engineering scale to share

digital platforms but still maintain all of the things that we need to differentiate from a consumer experience uh and a sound quality perspective. Very interesting. Yeah, in my shortish career, I guess in a couple of years, I've touched a number of these brands along the way. And it's really cool to see them all kind of under one house to be able to leverage, like you said, the engineering and everything, all the ideas get brought together under one roof. I guess, tell us what that looks like.

What's a typical day look like for you at Sound United? That's a difficult question to answer because for me, it seems like every day is different. So we have a very strong product development process and operating calendar, which I manage. And I have very experienced leaders that report into me that are supposed to kind of manage the day to day. And so what that does is frees me up

to be able to work on a crisis response, mergers and acquisitions and strategy and planning. So depending on where we're at, like the last couple of weeks have been super focused on integrating the Bowers and Wilkins engineering team into our broader team. This month, I'm gonna be working on product roadmaps for the following year.

But generally, if I'm doing my job properly, my day should be boring. I shouldn't be having to jump in and firefight all the time, but I have that preserved bandwidth so I'm available to rush in if needed. interview that you are deeply involved, at least from an outward-facing standpoint, in kind of talking about voice control and what role sort of Sound United plays in that. So give us the high level as we jump into that. What sort of role do you see Sound United playing as the technology of voice control

continues to expand its footprint in the connected home? Sure. technology of voice control continues to expand its footprint in the connected home sure so let me rewind 110 years and kind of talk about what's driven changes in the audio industry and so big changes happen when there's a format change so we originally made um then on um gramophones and you know thank goodness we learned to do something different along the way right and then the lp came along and it was a change in format it had much higher quality played longer and you had to make that move so we fast forward to the day you can see the formats are all online streaming and we've gone through the whole bluetooth phase and the ipod docking and cassettes

and cds and all that the other thing that drives change is control mechanisms so our original project products you have to go physically touch them to make them do something like you had to put on the gramophone and drop the needle. And then at some point, we came up with infrared remote control, we did the whole, you know, universal remotes, then apps and now voice. So control surface changes dramatically impacts the audio business, and then physical interfaces like, you know, RS-232 or USB or HDMI, all of these different ways to connect products together. In all three of those areas, we see changes. For us, voice is just one more of those. And the reason that I believe we've

been in business so long is that we're very good at finding out what the next relevant change to our business is going to be and then drive a leadership position. So we were very early in voice and we've implemented APIs from Apple, Google, and Amazon. And today we have pretty much any of our IoT products can be controlled by voice, either through a first-party mic or an embedded microphone. Got it. And I want to stay on that topic and dive in a little bit deeper. You mentioned there that you guys were very early in terms of voice control. I've heard you speak a little bit online about some of your perspectives as it pertains to working with the majors, Google, Apple,

those sorts of companies of the world. Take us behind the scenes a little bit, particularly maybe with a lens towards the early days of voice control and some of the lessons and experiences that you've had in terms of working with those large companies. Well, they're all very different companies. Google is more of an engineering company. From my outside view, I know they're all about search, but they were founded by members of the technical world. Amazon is more of a retailer or a merchant.

And everyone knows who Apple is, which is a combination of all of that. So we found that, you know, based on their backgrounds, we have different levels of challenges. So like with our friends at Amazon, they tend to be too aggressive on schedules, so they don't know how long it takes to make a product. Whereas Google is not as good as at merchandising them and then with apple the one challenge and and the big respect i have for apple is their control of security so there's by policy we can't handle a voice and connect that into the apple ecosystem so we can only work with apple using either an iphone microphone or a HomePod or whatever. So whereas with the other guys and also international folks now, we work in two ways.

One is that we directly handle the voice. You know, we stream it up to the cloud. The other one is that there's a cloud-to-cloud interface where a first-party microphone can control us like as an endpoint. We call that an endpoint. So we don't handle the voice, but we can still play back. Yeah, it seems like, I mean, if you kind of go back, you were talking about how the transitions into new medias, it seems like all of these integrations with these companies

came on at different times, and they all had a different idea of what or how how something would be done i guess and and they're large enough companies it doesn't seem like i mean it seems like they they've they've been able to kind of settle down on um maybe what voice is but not exactly what voice does. Like it's still, so we use this analogy here on the podcast a lot where the voice control of today seems like the old DOS prompts of yesteryear, where you had to physically type in, you know, copy this exact folder. And if you didn't get that incontention right in hit enter, it just wouldn't do it. And, and the voice of the future may be something a little bit better where you know you have gui right now you look on your computer and

you have a full graphical user and you just drag and drop and that's that's really where we we hope we look and we hope that these companies and have figured out that you know in the future maybe voice will be able to move that direction yeah i couldn't agree more and if you think about how this all started you know it was almost an accident that the Amazon Echo kicked this door down. You know, that team had been working on the Amazon phone. They launched the phone. It was a commercial disaster. But part of that team had been working on voice and somebody came up with the idea and they kind of stuck it all together and hit an absolute home run and basically revolutionized the industry. And they didn't have at that time, like a full suite of voice designers, you know, so there's companies who've been in, you know, voice recognition for automotive and what have you for a while. So everyone, you know, is now starting to focus more on that. But the syntax problem is huge. But it is improving. So I,

you know, this is an example that I use. I was sitting in a meeting and I was kind of bored. And I didn't, I was looking at my wife's contact and it said salutation. So I just selected it. Didn't really think about it. And when I get in my truck to go home, I say, you know, call Barbara Stead. And my truck calls Barbara Stead. And then that day I got in my truck and I said, call Barbara Stead and says, I don't have that contact. I'm like, what? Then I remembered I put in the salutation. Then I said, call Mrs. Barbara Stead.

And I called my wife. Like, that's ridiculous. You know, I should be able to say, call my wife or call Barb, you know, call Mrs. Barberstead and I called my wife. It's like, that's ridiculous. You know, I should be able to say, call my wife or call Barb, you know, call home. It should be like human interface where, you know, there's this, these hidden Markov models that decide what my intent is and just do the right thing with very little instruction. Right. Right. Like I call my wife. I'm the only, only one that calls my wife at a particular time every day. You know, I pick up my phone. I'm the only one that calls my wife at a particular time every day. You know, I pick up my phone. I'm, you know, I'm driving back

from picking my daughter up at daycare. And like you said, it's my intention to call my wife and I'll yell into the phone, you know, call Erica. And it says, I don't know who that is. It's like, no, it's literally almost the only contact I have on my phone. Like you should be able to figure this out. But yeah.

Well, it's now improved. So if I say it's a, if I, I can't do it because it'll do it. But if I say, Hey, whatever, call Barb, it'll say, darling, Mrs. Barb is dead on the cell. Yeah. So, but I didn't do that until like a couple of months ago. Yeah. And these things are always changing and it's tough for consumers, you know, at the end who just get these magic devices, magic phones, to know that, you know, something like, like I would, I would be surprised if anybody had done that, what you did and, and put,

you know, I don't think I would have put two and two together that I had changed the contact. And for some reason down in the deep bowels of machine learning, Siri decided not to interact with that contact anymore, because I wasn't saying, Mrs., you know, like that, that's, that's something I don't think most consumers would understand or do. So yeah, syntax and getting all this stuff lined up is still a big problem to figuring out that intention that that people want to do. So the other thing I would add to that is that intention that, that people want to do. So the other thing I would add to that is that if you think about your human interactions, like when we talk to each other about complex things,

what do we do? We, we, we like to stand near a whiteboard and draw drawer stuff on the board. Right. And so speech is not our only interface as humans. And there are often times where speech is inadequate. Like I can't teach you algebra with just my voice, right? We need to have that multimodal thing. So voice is good. It's linked to that syntax thing.

If you know what to ask for and it's available, then it works fine. But if you're searching and you don't know what the capabilities are, lists are way better or icons even. So being able to swipe through a list and be reading a bunch of movies and then say, play this, touch that movie on the TV, then it's kind of a multimodal interface where you have the best of both worlds. And I think that's a frontier that's not been explored very well. I've not seen any evidence of that yet. Yeah, I think that's a really

interesting idea. And I actually wanted to ask you about that specifically, the idea that the future is multimodal. Riff on that general idea a little bit more and where you see opportunities for companies to improve in terms of adopting that sort of mindset with product development? Right. So, you know, we talked about the drivers of change. One of the big drivers of change in our business now is formatting and that people are streaming a lot more. And, you know, there's much more home entertainment being consumed than before. And I think that consumers, interesting stat, I read a stat that pre-pandemic, the average household North American number of subscription services was like 2.2 or something like that.

And now it's like 5.6. So you think about that. People are streaming, and that's limited to audio and video content streamers. So I think consumers are trying to get access to entertainment and be able to present that in a way that's sensical. So if you think about sitting in your chair or your living room and trying to find new Netflix series to watch, how do you get that in a way where, you know, I don't want to have to type in that crazy alpha numeric stuff. I want to be able to do a voice search where I can, or even a voice search.

It could be nice to have like a iPhone or iPad or laptop screen where I can just kind of scroll through content real quick. And, and then when I see something just tap on it and say, play it in the kitchen. That's another thing that we always talked about here when it, when it came to voice and because it's so new, it's not, it just hasn't been around for a while. Just kind of loop back and touch on that. There's no like voice

API, if you will. Like there's no, there's nothing that you could put on uh one of your products that is a that is an api that just it takes the microphone in and hands it off to a service to to do whatever um and like you said it could be complicated again by how other companies have approached this like apple says well no the microphone's got to be on our device the sound has got to go through us but again like if i have a comcast remote with a with a microphone on it um and then i go get a fancy logitech remote with a microphone on it like it would be nice if that logitech remote microphone talked to my comcast

box and there really hasn't been you know a huge push and that i've seen at least to standardize how those interactions work. You know, I think since it's all new, we're still trying to figure out the voice processing part of it and, and get all these cool little features and whiz bang features of like searching for Netflix over anything, low level API around an API. Yeah. Well, I think that the, the APIs do exist within walled gardens. So there is, like you could say,

Apple HomeKit could be that. You could do that use case if you implemented HomeKit. Would you be able to afford to put that in a microphone with a wifi connection into a remote? It remains to be seen. And then Amazon's got two APIs, the endpoints and the direct handling as does Google, but they don't interoperate with each other.

So it's not like we don't have the USB or an HDMI standard. And I think as an industry, it would be totally awesome if we had a device to device API standard like USB. Because right now, the way they all work is it's all through the cloud and through routers, so you have to have Wi-Fi connectivity. But if there was something like a, you know, that costed something like a Bluetooth transceiver,

it was able to stream voice and figure out how to do the decoding. That would be cool. But the one thing that still has to happen is that you have to have the text to speech and then the intent generation. And that typically happens in the cloud. So I think that's the current challenge, but it will be way easier if all the big tech giants lined up behind a single standard.

Yeah, that would be great. I do want to kind of bring us back to that streaming. You started talking about streaming and how it's become more and more important for customers in their homes. How has that, you know, this is one of those transitions, how has that affected the way that you design and bring on products at Sound United when it comes to how people interact with the streaming service, whether they be like high-definition audio or even video products? So we saw this coming years ago, and we invested in what we call our HEOS IoT system.

And it's basically our – it involves a hardware module that has a big, burly processor on it and Wi-Fi connectivity and USB and Bluetooth and all that stuff. There's embedded software that runs on the devices, there's apps, and then there's the cloud-based infrastructure which does cloud-to-cloud and cloud-to-device. So basically what we've done over the last couple of years is we've been since 2014, we launched the first product. We've been now year by year implementing it in all of our different categories like mini systems and hi-fi and AVRs and soundbars. So pretty much everything that we have that has a Wi-Fi connection is able to stream pretty much anything.

And our job is to provide ultimate consumer choice. We don't want to force somebody on a platform or a specific service. So we try to just be like Switzerland and get along with everybody. Now that's very difficult because some of the folks don't want us to support the others and they want exclusivity. So there's a lot of that going on.

And then for the big three we've got in the U.S., there's a bunch of them in China and Korea and Taiwan that are different. So it's even more fractured if you consider the entire world. That's really interesting. I'd love to zoom in on that just a little bit. How do you guys navigate that? I know it's a very broad question, but you're trying to sort of balance between providing ultimate consumer choice on one hand and keep good and, in many cases, very important business partnerships happy on the other. Talk a little bit about how you walk that tightrope.

Right. So we have to be flexible there. So we have done bespoke products. So there's a product called the Polk Assist, and that works only with Google Voice Assistant. So that's a targeted individual play that we go after a specific set of consumers. So obviously you exclude everyone that doesn't use Google voice. Uh, and then we have the pull command bar, uh, which is, was the first Alexa embedded bar, um, that's only for Amazon. Um, so we do that, but then in, in bigger things like audio video receivers, you know, the job of an audio video receiver is to connect anything to anything and provide power amplification.

So in those, we want to operate with everybody. So if you look at our AVRs today, we don't have Google Cast. And that's not a technical thing. You know, we basically invited everybody and, you know, anyone that wants to be part of our AVR and home entertainment ecosystems, we're totally willing to work with them. And then it's up to the consumer. But I can do a demo right now where I could say, hey, Alexa, play Bob Molly in the living room. Your device is registered. And it works. That's the new Denon Home, which which will be turning on avs pretty soon so that's a

pre-production unit um yeah yeah no that that's great um and i've heard you talk about that really that that role of the of the av receiver and and being that central hub that sort of switzerland that you talked about to take some of that angst and decision fatigue away from clients and allow just a very transparent and seamless experience. So it's really interesting. Shifting gears a little bit, you know, you just mentioned Alexa and your device turned on there.

The device is registered. And apologies for that. There was a mute button for the mic. That's not taking it. Yeah, there you go. There you go. But it kind of reminds me of actually, incidentally, helps us shift into another topic here, proximity awareness. So this is an area where, as the home continues to fill up with more and more of these microphones and they're surrounding us and they've got, you know, overlapping functionality, maybe in different rooms of the house, it's increasingly

important for these devices to be intelligent about where we're standing when we issue a command. Talk a little bit about the idea of proximity awareness as it relates to both engineering and providing a great customer experience? So when I talk about this, I often refer to dinner table conversation. So if I'm with a group of my friends and, you know, I happen to be a sailor, my best buddy is a hardcore rugby fan. The other guy plays golf a lot and the other guy's a cook. When we sit around and talk to each other you know like I won't ask the cook who won the spring box game in South Africa yesterday I'll

ask my rugby friend because I'm contextually aware and that's something we're very good as at humans is when we get to know people we learn their strengths and their weaknesses and our conversations tend to be topical and there's different levels of experts that are around. And I think for product systems, having that awareness of the tastes and preferences of an individual is very interesting. And so it's not only proximity awareness with the identification of the specific consumer, you know, privacy issues notwithstanding. I think that it's kind of fun, but I'd like to be able to walk into the room and be able to say, you know, play my favorite tracks and have the system do it. It's a simplistic thing, but that i like all of my information all of my use patterns and

history to follow me around so that when i interact with a product or a car or my office i don't have to like reset everything it's just everything that i have and own and use is just immediately at my fingertips so i think that and you know, I've talked to a lot of the younger folks in our organizations and they expect that. They don't have the privacy concerns that the older generations have. They just want the system to know what they are going to ask and be ready to answer it or even just can figure out to go. Here's a small example of that. I like cooking as well and I go buy Vons every night and pick up whatever I'm going to make for dinner. And whenever I get into my truck at work, it knows I'm going to Vons and it tells me how many minutes it's going to take to get to Vons,

right? It doesn't tell me how long it's going to take me to get home because it's learned my pattern. So I think proximity awareness has some really interesting use cases in front of it. Yeah, absolutely. Well, we are starting to run up against our time a little bit, but before we wrap up, I did want to ask you, going back to streaming a little bit here high definition streaming this is an area that that we're seeing some increasing growth and there's been this kind of ongoing meta conversation in the industry about the this maybe tension between convenience and quality and the idea that why not have both right and give us your take on high definition streaming and the impact that that's going to have on the, on the broader streaming landscape. Uh, so, uh, there's high definition streaming in both audio and video. Um, and, and one of my greatest frustrations is the low quality

of video that comes through the cable service providers. And that's been fixed. I watched Soul last night on Netflix and I was just stunned with the clarity of the pictures. I mean, I was standing in front of the TV looking at the pixels and my wife is like, get out the way, man. I'm like, have you seen this video quality? It's like gnarly.

It's like really, really good. And then similarly with audio, I think it's going to be the same deal. I know a lot about what's going on there behind the scenes with the service providers. And I'm not going to talk a lot about that, but just to say I'm very encouraged that bandwidths are increasing, the cost of bandwidth is going down. And in the audio space, we make $10,000, $15,000 amplifiers. We don't want some compressed 320K stream

going through those products. And we're big advocates of high definition audio streaming. There is one thing in the industry that I don't like, and that is that the industry has classified CD quality as high definition, whereas inside of the engineering organizations and audio companies, 16-bit is not high definition. 24-bit is what we consider to be high def, and we're evangelizing that concept as well. But I'm very excited about the future of the quality and convenience of both audio and video content

well that's that's encouraging to hear wow yeah i now that you said that i i hear that all the time cd quality um audio and yeah it's it's it's better than like i i guess compressed mp3 audio although that can be pretty good too if it's engineered right but yeah going back to like red book audio for for uh for for quality um compared to what you can get streaming it'd be it's pretty awesome what they can do these days uh with the compression algorithms that they have um well uh like jason said we're kind of running up against our time i i want to thank you uh brendan for coming on the show and spending some time chatting with us about what's going on it Sound United. What's big and next and new for Sound United in 2021?

What are you looking forward to moving into the new year? Well, it's been an interesting year, obviously, with all that's going on. It's been a tale of two cities. If you make cruise ships or airplanes or convention centers, you're not doing well. If you make things that improve the home and entertainment, we are doing well. So our business is actually strong. And we're trying to look at what do we do post-COVID as people, you know, I think our lives are going to be forever changed. And so what kind of new projects can we make?

And we're looking a lot at, you know, how can we improve the home office experience as well? But we're going to be doing a lot of really cool streaming products and really focusing on bringing all of our brands into the audio streaming space. So you'll see some of them currently don't have that, but over this year we'll be doing a ton of that. Excellent. Well, totally agree with you. I do think that things will change coming out of COVID when we finally get there and really excited to see what you guys continue doing even outside of that context. I'm a

fan of the portfolio and as Seth and I both longtime home technology folks and former integrators, we're both very familiar with many of those lines and the quality and what you guys bring to the industry. So we really appreciate you taking the time to come on the show, Brendan. If any of our listeners wanted to find out more about any of the topics that we've covered or just to connect with you, what would be the best way for them to do that? Brendanstead at gmail.com works or Brendan at Sound United. Those are the two email addresses. Also, I'm on LinkedIn if anyone wants to hook up there.

All right. Great. Well, Brendan, thanks again for coming on. We appreciate it. You're welcome. I enjoyed it. Thanks. Have a good day, guys. All right. Well, that's it for our interview with Brendan. And again, like I said at the top, I really enjoyed the breadth of that conversation. I,

I think he's got some really interesting perspectives on, on voice control and just the industry in general, the trends in streaming. Um, thought, thought it was great. Really enjoyed having Brendan on. Yeah.

It was, it was a fun, fun to talk to, uh, and to get kind of a manufacturer's, uh, uh, view of kind of where things are headed.

Kind of talk about the high level stuff and some of the low level stuff that goes into making, you know, putting the product together, technology products together in the year 2021. So it was a fun conversation. Indeed. All right, Seth. Well, I think you've got a pick of the week this week. I do. I do. Yeah. So I've been kind of on the prowl for a new router for my house. And I've been looking around and literally everyone has always said, you know, get PFSense. And I looked at it and I'm like, it's like an open source software type thing. It looks like there's some drama related to like the project and the parent company that kind of owns the code and that kind of thing. So there's been a bunch of split offs between PFSense and a bunch of other projects that have gone on.

Because with open software, like open source software, you can always split the code and run your own direction with it. If you feel like the maintainers of that code are doing something that you don't want to and it looks like that's happened a couple times um so i always kind of like put it you know back in the back and like oh this is some nerdy geeky thing um so i finally i finally just broke down and and and got a pf sense router and i put i think i got the 3100 which is kind of matches up with what i have for what I have here for my Internet speeds. Basically, I kind of match what the firewall could do, the performance specs and everything. And man, it's a really good product. Actually, pleasantly surprised with the interface and how well it works and how much better my internet's actually been. Uh, since I plugged in, I swapped

out with the, uh, the Unify USG, which is, you know, it's a fair enough router in and of itself. I think it's a little performance constrained. Um, but it, it, it definitely does most of what I need to do on a daily basis. And it integrates really well with the unify interface um but i've had problems with it i've had to reboot it you know that kind of thing um over time so i was kind of always on the edge of looking for something new and uh you know most in the community in the security community kind of point to this particular product pf sense and netgate and say you know go take a look at this with with this you can actually you don't have to buy one of their routers like i think they start at like 179 for like yeah a dsl version which you you don't want like i think the the for most people starting up in in that like the 3100

range would probably be the best like especially if you have like gigabit ethernet coming to your house um but it's you you can make your. You can go on Amazon and buy a $250 like barebone computer, pop a memory chip into it and stick it in in in your, you know, in the closet there. And it's your new router modem gateway type thing. So it's it's actually a really cool product. The stuff is way better than i than i thought it was going to be like it's what better put together and kind of just playing around like on their forums and seeing like their developers talk like they're kind of sassy they they they won't do features just because it's like the new shiny object uh they will um they will they will wait

till something is like um it won't crash basically they'll wait till something is like, it won't crash basically. They'll wait till something is well tested and works well. So I was kind of impressed by that too. So it's nice to see somebody have that attitude out in the technology world. Yeah, no, it's cool. It looks like they got a lot of different models here. So a bunch of different price points

and Eddie in the chat room said don't see i don't see jason griffin doing this uh it's true that's true uh it's not gonna happen i'm happy with my euro here but no this looks cool this looks like a nice product for somebody who's looking for something a little more uh robust and something that you can kind of get in and and turn the knobs on more it looks like a great option yeah it's pretty like uh rashid said it's stable uh yeah it's it's it's it's definitely made to be stable uh it's built on uh one of the nix flavors like it's not linux it's something else that's like uh pretty stable and and they, they have a bunch of plugins too. Like, so if you don't have the feature you're looking for, um, like maybe UPS monitoring or you want some fancy graphs,

like there's these plugins that they support that can be plugged in and, and you can add additional information or additional features that you didn't have before, like content blocking and that kind of thing could be directly on the router. Yeah, free BSD is what it is. Yeah, cool. Good stuff. Thanks, Ron. All right, well, good find there, Seth.

If you're listening and you have any feedback, questions, comments, picks of the week, or ideas for a show topic or guest, give us a shout. We'd love to hear from you. Our email address is feedback at hometech.fm. Again, that is feedback at hometech.fm. And we want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports the show, but especially those who are able to

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So if you value what we do here at the podcast, please take a minute to go leave us a positive review. We would really appreciate it. Well, Jason, that wraps up another week and kind of our CES coverage, weird CES coverage this year. All being virtual, like you said, and it's virtual every year for us,

but it's still a different feel. Like it's just weird. Indeed. Yeah. Very different year and just doesn't quite have the same feel to it, but I'm glad that companies are still using it as an opportunity to push products forward. And even if some of these products never see the light of day, it's always fun to see what companies are thinking about and what the future might look like someday. So I enjoyed being able to cover that and really enjoyed having Brendan on the show as well. Jam-packed week.

Jam-packed week. Well, it's time for a restful weekend, right? You're going to take a break and kick your feet back up and grab an iced tea. You can't sit on your porch, probably. It's probably pretty cold. Sit in front of the fire. Probably not.

But yeah, we'll have our feet kicked up somewhere. Sounds like a great idea. Well, Jason, have a great weekend. And thanks, everybody, for listening there and joining us in the chat. All right. Sounds good. Take care, Seth.