Audyssey’s SoMA Inspiration

South of Market, SF—It’s late in the afternoon and the streets of this San Francisco neighborhood brim with an eclectic mix of individuals who are, once again, reinventing a modern urban landscape. Nine-to-fivers filter into watering hole hotspots for happy hour concoctions. Up and down the street, new restaurants buzz with managers penciling in reservations for the dinner rush and, at a random sidewalk, outside of a coffee shop, one can overhear a gallery owner, bike messengers and skater kids wax poetic about how the area is always going to have a “scene.”

Remarkably, the district (where this publication started some 24 years ago) has managed to retain the same transient energy that was here before the local architecture went “eco friendly,” the birth of the dot.com craze, the largest concentration of design firms in the world, and a handful of restaurants, bars, clubs and galleries blossomed onto the national stage.

For the cutting edge audio company Audyssey, known for audio technologies and a loyal following of audiophile home theater enthusiasts, SoMA carries a voice that is almost pitch perfect with the brand. The sights and sounds of this neighborhood reflect an urban innovation—one that combines a sleek aesthetic design and the possibility of developing technologies that let people re-think how they hear the day-to-day world around them.

While the critical praise that defines their signature MultEQ technology (it has the ability to automatically equalize and calibrate rooms) might sound like tech-laced lingo, essentially, all one really needs to know is that Audyssey can transform the simple act of listening to a song into an interactive experience.

Speaking from their main office in LA, VP of Marketing Robb Mason says, “In the past, Audyssey has always focused on high-fidelity technology and while there are a million ways to talk about the science of what we do, what we really want is to communicate with someone who is coming from the same place as us, which at its core is a love of music. We found the easiest way to do this is to just be ourselves.” He adds, “Everyone at the company lives in urban environments, and are young, diverse and open. That’s really what led us to the idea of drawing parallels between our new audio dock and the South of Market neighborhood.”

In a day and age when audiophiles are fast becoming iPodiophiles, it is fitting that the new launch of their new Audyssey Audio Dock: South of Market Edition, finds a unique niche in the ever-sprawling iPhone/iPod speaker market. At just five inches wide and nine inches deep, the audio dock can connect directly to a computer through USB and will not only sync any attached iPhones or iPods, but also stream music through any computer and A2DP Bluetooth-enabled device (Blackberry, Android, etc.) wirelessly and sync to iTunes. Knowing that the dock’s manageable size lends itself to office space, Audyssey has included microphones so one can make VoIP, or conference, calls (with a remote control if one wants).

As the current call with Mason draws to an end, he says, “Something like this dock really just fits with where we are coming from. Our technologies have always strived to solve problems caused by room acoustics, small speakers and inconsistent volume levels for people who are not in the market for a $50,000 sound system.” He adds, “The people behind the creativity of the SoMA district have a discerning taste and are really the inspiration for this new audio dock.”

– Patrick Knowles