Home-control supplier Control4 has begun offering many Denon audio products through its online dealer store to authorized Control4 dealers in the U.S.
The available products include Denon Heos wireless multiroom-audio products, A/V receivers, turntables and Blu-ray players. Control4 dealers can order these products through the store along with Control4’s own home-automation products.
The partnership of the two major suppliers could boost Denon’s sales volume, although an unspecified number of Control4 dealers already sell Denon products. Denon’s also sells through AVAD, which makes also makes Denon products available to custom installers.
The number of active Control4 dealers in North America rose to 2,703 at the end of the third quarter from the year-ago 2,566, Control4’s financial documents show.
The Denon and Heos products join products from 30 other brands available on the site to Control4 installers.
The idea, a Control4 spokesman told TWICE, “is to have the most frequently installed and requested partners in the CI channel under the Control4 umbrella for streamlined ordering capabilities by our dealer network — everything that it takes for an integrator to complete a job, from the pre-wire and networking, all the way though the finishing touches.”
Denon’s distribution already includes the custom-install channel on which Control 4 is focused, and Denon’s products already integrate with Control 4’s home-control systems. That’s because Denon’s products incorporate Control4’s Simple Device Discovery Protocol (SDDP) technology and because Denon participates in Control4’s driver-certification program.
“Enriching our dealer channel through our relationship with the Denon brand of high-demand products creates a one-stop shop for dealers to source the products they need to complete a project of any size,” said Noel Gouff, Control4’s senior director of business development.
“Control4’s dedication to the CI channel is one of the many reasons why our relationship has naturally evolved into Denon products being offered directly to their dealer network with no extra steps along the way,” said Paul Belanger, CI business team leader for Denon parent D&M.
The Denon products available to Control4 dealers largely complement Control4’s line of lighting, security, A/V-control systems and A/V distribution systems, including wired and wireless multiroom-audio components. Some overlap exists in multiroom audio. Control4 offers a wireless amplifier/streamer to extend its wired multiroom-audio system to rooms where wires can’t be run. Denon offers a similar product, but Control4 doesn’t offer wireless tabletop speakers as Denon does in its Heos line. In another overlap, Denon offers a wired multiroom four-zone preamp/amp, which incorporates Heos technology, to distribute music around the house to wired in-wall and in-ceiling speakers.
Control4 agrees that there is some overlap between its products and some of the other-brand products available through its site. “We manufacture our own A/V switching devices and amplifiers, but we also sell popular third-party A/V receivers that accomplish the same things because we want to give our dealers the most choice for their customers,” the spokesman said. Many customers, he continued, “prefer the tone of a certain type of brand of speaker, and when given the opportunity, will want that rich and full sound that only that brand of speaker can give them, so they go with a more discreetly-installed wired Control4 solution for music distribution. Others will want something [wireless tabletop speakers] that stands out more and just accomplishes the task at hand: getting their favorite music in every room. So, we do not see this as competitive to our own offerings, but more complementary.”
