After exiting the US brick and mortar car audio industry in March, Clarion remains in the marine audio market and announced a second marine distributor, Land ‘N’ Sea Distributing, who will sell to marine dealers in the US and Canada.
As announced earlier, Petra remains the exclusive marine audio distributor for 12 volt retailers.
Separately, we asked Clarion Canada how car audio sales were faring in that country since March. Roland Stebner, director of sales & marketing for Clarion Canada said it saw a surge of interest last spring from Clarion dealers in the US looking to buy product from Clarion Canada. Unfortunately, that isn’t permitted under current rules, he said.
Clarion Canada sells through about 400 storefronts. A few of them have sold Clarion’s Full Digital Sound Components system (FDS), which is a radically new, completely digital system from the deck to the point “until the cone of the speaker moves” which received a lot of attention at CES in January.
Stebener said of the FDS system, “It’s not a mainstream product that someone can easily stick in their car. It’s one of those products that requires a brick and mortar retailer that really knows what he is doing.” In other words, it’s not really suited to Internet sales to DIY’ers.
There’s a new line of Clarion amplifiers with built in digital signal processing (DSP) due in January for Canadian retailers called the XC7. Dealers can hook them up to a PC or mobile device to set up parameters like time alignment and crossover points. Stebner called the amplifiers “very high end product at an affordable price.” The compact Class D amps include an 1100 watt RMS monoblock and 5-channel rated at 90 x 4 watts and 500 watts. There’s also a four channel that’s about 120 watts per channel, DSP controlled that lets you bridge channels 3 and 4 for a subwoofer, he said.
A Clarion spokesman said of Clarion, “They are still producing new product. They have a robust product line coming up.”
In March, Clarion said it would sell only to three online retailers in the US: Amazon, Sonic Electronix and Crutchfield, and that it would continue to sell to all retailers in Canada.
Regarding the new marine announcement, Land ’N’ Sea Distributing, has been catering to the marine, RV and powersports industry for over 40 years.
“So how are your sales?” “Let me tell you about all our new products….”
So clarion never gave a definitive answer and just deflected changing the subject…..