The home-audio segment, languishing for the last five years with near static sales, is finally seeing sign of revival with the consumer-electronics majors arming themselves with a range of new products in the past few weeks.
Competition from new entrants like LG and Samsung, coupled with the emergence of the six-channel DVD format as the dominant format, has forced even old and venerable brands in business to go in for price-cuts and re-arm their portfolios.
"We are finally seeing the end of the five-year long recession that the audio market was facing," declares Gunjan Srivastava, director of Audio Marketing at Philips India, one of the traditional and strongest players in the audio market.
The CE-giant, always a favourite with musical afficianados in the country, is in the process of rolling out its by far the most expensive range of home audio products, including a 900 watts rocker next month. "I think we were being plain lazy till now," said Sanjeev Jain, head of audio at LG India, one of the newest entrants to the scene.
LG, along with Samsung, is the only mainstream player to have introduced state-of-the-art technologies like wireless transmission to rear-speaker for its six-speaker range.
"For years together, there were no product innovations, no excitement at all," he adds.
Indeed, like many other segments in the durables industry, the change is being driven by the Koreans while traditional favourites, Sony and Philips are trying to catch up.
Samsung was the first off the mark, launching its "beat-Sony-at-all-costs" range of home-theatres three months ago. With the launch of its comprehensive nine-model six-speaker systems, Samsung has replaced Philips. It has taken the second place among the various choices available to the consumer in the six-speaker systems range.
With the introductions, the company has also raised the bar for the Indian audio market by introducing Indian buyers to features like direct digital input (to allegedly increase the sound quality when hooked up to the USB port of a computer,) and wireless speakers.
More importantly, most of the models, including those with wireless technoloy, carried very middle-class price tags between Rs 12,000 to 30,000.
In response, Sony cut prices of the home-theatre range to very un-Sony like levels (now, you can pick up a 600-watt ''Digital Audio-Video System'' for Rs 15,000 now) and Philips is on the verge of introducing one of the most powerful models in the Indian market - a 900 watt home-theatre. Priced in between the range of Rs 30,000, the model is scheduled to hit the showrooms early next month.
But while the Japanese and Dutch companies are yet to answer the techno-challenge posed by Samsung, its bete-noire from Korea, LG seems to have picked up the gauntlet.After having gone one-up on Samsung by launching two powerful home-threatre models with Karaoke priced at Rs 20,000 and Rs 30,000, the company is now getting ready to level the digital divide.
"Two of our wireless models, one with a 200-watt RMS woofer and four wireless and column speakers, will hit the markets in the coming months," says Jain. The models will catapult LG - untill now, an unglamorous audio brand, which used to rely mainly on price - to the top of the audiopile's glamour list.
Also, it will share with Sony, the prize of being the only mainstream brand to offer a 200-watt woofer or a total output of 1000 watts.
