Innovator Profile
Born Out of a Specific Need
Juke Audio Offers More Affordable Eight-Zone Amplifier for Powering Architectural Speakers By Jeremy Glowacki Like so many entrepreneurial endeavors, Juke Audio was born out of a need to solve a technical challenge. Back in 2015, father and son company founders Brad and Colton Forth had moved into a new house with distributed audio ceiling speakers and in-wall speakers, but nothing to power them. They explored available amplifier options that would be easy to install and could connect to wireless streaming music sources from a mobile phone or tablet. “We didn’t really see anything that fit the bill,” Colton Forth said. “So, my father, who had been an electrical engineer before moving into finance later in his career, designed what would eventually become a prototype for Juke. Initially, it was only used to power the speakers in our own house.” As time went by and more and more people inquired about what was driving the music coming out of the ceiling speakers in the Forth home, Brad and Colton realized that there could be broader interest in what they had created. “It didn’t even have a name because it was just for our own use,” Forth recalled. After Colton graduated from the University of Southern California, he set aside his music manager/agent career objectives, sticking with the hot hand to begin commercializing Juke Audio with his dad and firmware
26
INNOVATION & TECH TODAY | FALL 2021
engineer, Yutong Gu, Forth’s fellow Trojan, who graduated with top honors and a Master’s degree from the University’s Viterbi School of Engineering. The first commercialized product, called the Juke-8, arrived in November 2019 with a lot of improvement to what the “prototype” had included. Listed at $1,399, it is an eight-zone (16-channel) amplifier for powering architectural speakers throughout an entire home or building. The product also serves as a receiver and allows up to four people to stream simultaneously to any combination of rooms via Wi-Fi. There is no app, but rather a web interface that can be accessed by a device that is on the same Wi-Fi network as the Juke-8. You utilize the Juke interface to allocate any of the four streaming inputs that Juke has built in.
Colton Forth
