Residential Tech Talks

This week, Dave Nauber joins us from Connecticut, where he is director of brand for Sound United’s Classe Audio product line. Founded in 1980, Classé Audio manufactures a suite of high-fidelity amplifiers, pre-amplifier processors, and integrated amplifiers for movie and music enthusiasts. Prior to the brand’s acquisition from Bowers and Wilkins, Dave was the president of Classe Audio, having earn...

This week, Jason Griffing joins us from Littleton, Colorado, where he is director of product at OneVision Resources. Jason and Jeremy have known each other for a while, first as fellow guests on AV Nation’s Resi Week podcast while Jason was director of business development for the custom integration company Harrison Home Systems. Then he moved on from there and through the ranks at OneVision, the...

This week, Ryan McDaniel joins us from Westfield, IN, where he is president of the custom integration firm, OneTouch Automation. This week’s conversation covers Ryan’s new, whole-home demonstration space, which includes a really beautiful second-floor dedicated home theater featuring a Star Trek-style sliding door. The two friends also discuss why Ryan decided to become American Lighting Associati...

This week, Ted Green joins us from Metuchen, NJ, where he is president of the The Stratecon Group, a strategic marketing company for the consumer electronics industry. Ted’s career spans more than 30 years, all in the CE business. His work has taken him from mass merchant & specialty retailing…to manufacturing, distribution, and... now strategic marketing and journalism. He may be best known for h...

This week, David Selinger joins us from Pleasanton, CA, where he is CEO of home security startup Deep Sentinel. Selly was an early Amazon employee and also co-founder and CTO of Redfin, the online real estate marketplace. In all, he has been a co-founder, early employee, or an advisor at more than 20 Silicon Valley start-ups. His latest home security venture combines predictive artificial intellig...

This week, Frank Sterns joins us from Southern California, where he is president of the Polk Audio and Definitive Technology brands for Sound United. Frank is back to discuss why recent product launches have been significant in the evolution of these highly respected loudspeaker brands, and he also shares some early industry predictions for 2022. Today’s episode of Residential Tech Talks is brough...

This week, Chris Lehnen joins us from Portland, Oregon to talk about iRoom IO, the Apple-certified manufacturer of premium in-wall, on-wall, and table-top docking stations and smart control solutions for iPads. Founded in Salzburg, Austria by Mark Hoffer back in 2010, iRoom products now offer features like motorized opening and closing and control functionality independent of the iPad, as well as...

This week, Samantha Ventura joins us from Indianapolis, where she is senior vice president of education and training at CEDIA, the global association for the home technology industry. Though she has had a profound impact on the CEDIA community for the past three and a half years, Samantha will soon be taking a step back from the industry and corporate life to focus on writing and lecturing. Before...

This week, Nick Berry joins the podcast from Las Vegas, where he is CEO of Origin Acoustics. Origin is the loudspeaker company co-founded back in 2014 by Jeremy Burkhardt, the former CEO of the beloved audio brand SpeakerCraft. Nick might be best described as the Yin to Jeremy’s Yang, but they’re both equally savvy businesspeople and motivational leaders who are highly respected for what they brin...

This week, Bill Skaer joins us from Dallas, Texas, where he is CEO of Bill Skaer Home Theater and Technology. Bill is one of the pioneers of the CEDIA, custom integration community, and he currently serves on the trade association’s global board of directors. Bill’s dedication to the industry has earned him both a CEDIA Fellow and CEDIA Lifetime Achievement Award and he’s one of the friendliest pe...

On this week’s podcast is Aaron Emigh joins us from San Mateo, California, where he is CEO of Brilliant, the company he co-founded in 2015 as a mass-market solution for home control and home automation. You may know Brilliant as the company with the sleek all-in-one on-wall user interface, with side-by-side touchscreen and touch slider lighting dimmers that can be installed anywhere that there’s a...

On this week’s podcast is Jeremy Glowacki’s very good friend John Sciacca, co-owner of Custom Theater and Audio in Myrtle Beach, SC, returns to the podcast for a lengthy chat. This time, the two pals talk less about their mutual Taylor Swift and Disney parks fandom and more about Kaleidescape, Sony’s soundbars, and CEDIA Expo 2021 cancellation drama. Find out how John took matters into his own han...

On this week’s podcast is Jeremy Glowacki’s long-time friend Pete Baker, managing director of the Baker International Group. The BIG Corp. is a global sales rep and business development agency, providing support to some of the finest brands in consumer electronics. Prior to his current gig, Pete was a custom integration business owner and then VP of sales and marketing at Remote Technologies Inc.,...

On this week’s podcast is Kat Wheeler, a regional sales manager for Snap One, based in Columbus, OH, who also self-published what she calls a “tech mystery novel” titled, There is No Cloud. It’s a book that centers around people and products that will probably be familiar to anyone who has worked in the residential tech industry for a while. On the podcast, we learn what led her into writing her f...

On this week’s podcast is Jorey Ramer, the CEO of a company called Super, that provides subscription care of home appliances and home systems. It’s in a category of services called insurtech that takes the more familiar home warranty to the next level with the addition of preventative care capabilities and the use of a consumer-friendly app and web interface. A service provider like Super isn’t th...

On this week’s podcast, Anna Demeo discusses the recent news that her company, Racepoint Energy, has been acquired by smart home innovator, Savant, and renamed Savant Power. Racepoint Energy was founded in 2015 by Savant’s current chairman and CEO Bob Madonna during a time when he had stepped away from running Savant’s day-to-day operations, turning his attention toward innovating smart electrical...

On this week’s podcast, Silicon Labs’ and Z-Wave Alliance’s Mitchell Klein and Building 36’s Mariusz Malkowski on help unpack everything you need to know about Matter, the new name for the interoperable, secure connectivity standard for the future of the smart home. The Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA), formerly known as the Zigbee Alliance, recently announced the name change. This new techno...

On this week’s podcast, Peter Aylett joins us from his home in England to talk about his work on industry standards and recommended best practices, his career as a custom integrator in the UK and Middle East, and his current role as partner with Maurizio Conti at HTE, an Italy-based turnkey room design company for home cinemas and mastering studios. Peter is a 30-year veteran of the residential te...

On this week’s podcast, we are joined by two very important members of the CEDIA Expo 2021 planning team. Jason McGraw, vice president of CEDIA Expo at the show’s management and ownership company, Emerald, gives us a more high-level view of the return of the in-person event September 1-3, 2021. Samantha Ventura, senior VP of education and training at CEDIA, provides some guidance about what we sho...

On this week’s podcast, Tony Liebel joins us from New York City where he is CEO of tech startup Buzr. The company’s product, called Buzr Pro, was designed to replace outdated apartment access systems by only requiring the user to install the Buzr Pro smart device hardware into the individual apartment or condo wall unit. Tony and his co-founder Jeremy Walker met at Cornell Tech, where they began t...

In this episode, Melissa Andresko joins us from Coopersburg, Pennsylvania, at the headquarters of Lutron, where she is chief corporate brand ambassador. Lutron, as most people know, is one of the pioneers and leaders of the lighting control category. The company’s founder, Joel Spira, in 1959, invented the first solid state lighting dimmer that could replace a light switch in a standard residentia...

In this episode, Manuel Schoenfeld joins Residential Tech Today Executive Editor Jeremy Glowacki from Brooklyn, NY, where he is founder and CEO of PowerX. Launched in 2020, PowerX is an environmental tech start up with the goal of providing homeowners with knowledge and control of their utility usage. PowerX sensors collect data about a home’s electricity, heat, and water use at a rate of more tha...

In this episode, Joey Kolchinsky joins Residential Tech Today Executive Editor Jeremy Glowacki from Boston, where he is founder and CEO of OneVision Resources. OneVision’s virtual customer service platform enables relatively small businesses to compete like much larger companies while maintaining the feel of a local bespoke enterprise. Now the company is launching new offerings designed to fill in...

In this episode, Residential Tech Today Executive Editor Jeremy Glowacki chats with Patrick Gall, head of channel development for Orro, a relatively new smart switch brand looking to tackle middle market. The last time they saw each other in person was two years ago at Fenway Park in Boston, when PG was helping develop the custom integration channel for the Sonos audio brand. Orro is a very stylis...

In this episode, Residential Tech Today Executive Editor Jeremy Glowacki chats with Tony Grimani who was on holiday with his wife and young son in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Tony was one of Jeremy’s favorite columnists during his days as editor at Residential Systems magazine. He wrote broadly about the home theater category, which was apt, given his career at Dolby and Lucasfilm THX, and as owner o...