By George McClure
All photos courtesy of Coastal Source
Coastal Source products employ innovative designs to solve real-world problems, enduring intense environmental testing to yield the most reliable outdoor audio and lighting systems available today. With more than 60 years of hands-on experience, the company creates pioneering solutions that help families share fun, memorable moments in their own great outdoors.
Peter Sepesi
Like all our speakers, whether it’s in a smaller, more intimate space, or a big outdoor area, we want it to be engaging, not just background sound. Everything is high performance, because that’s what we’re known for. So that whole product line was just born out of demand by our customers saying, we love high performance, now we need to get it into the hardscape.
Here’s a conversation I recently had with Coastal Source Director of Sales Peter Sepesi.
George McClure: Coastal Source is a family-run business, right?
Peter Sepesi: It’s interesting in that we’re actually owned by two families. The D’Ascanio family is based in the Florida Keys down in Marathon, which is where our R&D facility is. They are a custom luxury home builder. What’s unique about their model is that they build resort-style homes and they do everything – they clear the land, they’re the architects, they’re the interior designers, they’re the A/V contractor, and the electricians. So, they take high-net-worth clients who are building their second or third homes and give them the soup-to-nuts treatment, going through the complete design. When the home is done, the refrigerator is full, the wine is in the fridge, and the artwork is on the wall.
George: Completely turnkey.
Peter: Yes. So, they were building a home for the Zimmerman family from New Jersey, and they became good friends. Our Founder, Franco D’Ascanio, designed and installed a really nice landscape lighting system – using a different vendor, of course, as Coastal Source didn’t exist yet. Shortly after the construction of the home that product started to rust. Harold Zimmerman goes to Franco and asks what’s going on? They both thought, hey, let’s go back to the manufacturer, right? But the manufacturer did not honor the warranty.
Meanwhile, Franco and his son, Franco Jr., had this business plan about designing products specifically to withstand harsh environments. It turned out Harold was an expert in distribution, and Franco and his family in engineering. They put the two together, a business plan was formed, and that’s really how Coastal Source came to be. It was from seeing a need for products that can exist in harsh environments and a company willing to back them up.
George: That’s a great story. And then when did they branch out into audio?
Peter: That came a few years later. We really started out on the lighting side. As a small business, the first couple years were all about engineering rather than putting product out on the market. Really taking the material sciences approach to it, understanding that it’s really not just the coast – there are high levels of pH and corrosion everywhere in the country. So, what are the core materials we’re going to use? What does that look like? Again, we started with lighting, and it was three or four years later, once the lighting product started to hit the market, that audio began. Audio had always been a passion for Franco – he had a stereo store when he was younger. We’re an outdoor living company, so audio and lighting are just the components really, of the outdoor space.
George: So, your R&D facility is in Marathon, Florida; where’s the manufacturing done?
Peter: It’s a little bit of a mix. Down in Marathon, in the Keys, we have a facility that’s wonderful for testing, because it’s in a very aggressive environment. But it’s not great for distribution, as you can imagine. So, we have a large warehouse in Southern New Jersey, just outside of Philadelphia. From there we do light manufacturing — our outdoor audio products are assembled there. From a sourcing standpoint, we get some things that come from the U.S., and some from Italy and other places overseas.
George: Being partially based in Florida, you’ve obviously developed products that can withstand a lot of moisture, but can they withstand extreme low temperatures, as well?
Peter: Yes, absolutely. While our market is primarily the United States, we’re also in Canada. Franco, our Founder, has family in Canada and has an audio distribution company there, so we’ve been selling in that space for years. We have products in various ski resorts, and we actually find dealing with the cold a bit easier than dealing with extreme heat. With electronics and thermal issues, typically hot is worse. Even though with our name you sometimes only think of coastal environments, we’re very much used in some really challenging colder environments, as well. It’s fun when dealers send us photos of one of our larger speakers and the snow is so high, you just see the top.
George: Tell us a little bit about your different outdoor audio products.
Peter: Sure. Currently in our bollard lineup of landscape-style speakers, we’ve got four subwoofers and five satellites, including a line-source model, and most of them work together in a modular fashion. We do everything from scratch. We don’t have any product that we’re just taking off the shelf and modifying it slightly. Everything is developed from the ground up. The outside material that we use for our bollards is rotomolded composite, which is very durable, and the color is baked throughout. So, if it gets hit by a weed-whacker or other maintenance happening outside, you’re not going to have chipped paint on speakers.
They really blend into the landscape very well — they’re a dark brown color as they start to weather, a little bit dusty, and they blend well in mulch beds. The angled baffle looks great from a design standpoint, it’s great for us audio guys who believe in time alignment of drivers, and it’s also a natural slope for moisture to run off of. Of course, all the drivers are weatherized, and the grill has multiple layers on it. It’s really uncommon that we get a lot of moisture behind our grill.
In addition to the bollards, we have Contour, which can be hidden in a landscape, installed in a hardscape, or even mounted under a soffit. And when a client needs sound focused in a particular direction, there’s the Modulus Bullet Speaker, which has a passive bass radiator for enhanced low frequencies.
George: And, of course, there’s the Razor series, which garnered Best Product in our 2023 Performance Home Awards.
Peter: Yes, that’s our newest architectural line, which was really just built on demand from our dealers and clients saying, “We love your stuff in the landscape, we want it on the lanai, on the patio, in the summer kitchen, the roof deck – all these spaces.” So that whole product line was just born out of demand by our customers saying, we love high performance, now we need to get it into the hardscape.
The Razor line has custom-designed ultra-shallow drivers that offer great performance from a slim enclosure, and there are three sizes and eight models to choose from. Like all our speakers, whether it’s in a smaller, more intimate space, or a big outdoor area, we want it to be engaging, not just background sound. We don’t believe in having a thousand models — we want to have just the right family mix where you can do everything from kind of an intimate outdoor fireplace area to installations where we’ve got 30, 50 bollards in some grand backyards. And again, everything is high performance, because that’s what we’re known for.
George: Do you guys do amps and electronics, too?
Peter: That’s a great question, because we are very big fans of the system approach. Years ago, we wanted to seek out the best partner, and we ended up with Powersoft, who make some of the finest touring and fixed installation amps out on the market. We use their amps with our firmware on them, and we’ve developed unique DSP (digital signal processing) profiles for all of our products. No one wants to spend time tuning their system – they want to get right to it and enjoy the music. With our system approach, even if you’ve got a bunch of bollards in the landscape and maybe Razors on the hardscape, with the DSP information pre-loaded to make them sound their best, it’s really plug-and-play. The electronics are already programmed, and the cables just twist together.
George: Speaking of cables, tell us about the Coastal Connector.
Peter: For both our audio and lighting products we have a common cabling system that really mates everything together. When I mentioned the issues of things lasting outdoors, as you can imagine, whether it be audio, lighting, video, I mean, you name it, typically the connection is the failure point – especially when Mother Nature gets involved. So, the backbone of audio and lighting for us is our Coastal Connection system. That is installed on every project that goes out.
It’s a patented, tool-less connection, so you basically screw it together with your hands. It’s IP-68 rated, so it’s airtight and watertight. So, the wiring path for your outdoor lighting, from your transformer, which is located on the outside of the house, to the very last light fixture, which could be down by the dock or by your pool, it’s airtight and watertight for that entire journey through the yard. And the same thing is true for our audio systems, as well.
George: Let’s get into the lighting a little bit.
Peter: We’ve got a complete lineup to handle any residential and commercial application – uplighting, downlighting, path-lighting. Our Niche series of micro-fixtures, for example, is very popular in the designer community, because designers and clients always want to see the effect, not the fixture. So, when you come home at night, you see your home all beautifully lit up, but you can’t see where the fixtures are. That’s ideally the goal.
To describe the uniqueness of our products, again, I like to mention our tagline: “Defy the Elements.” Of course, It’s more than a tagline – it’s a culture for us at Coastal Source. So, when you look at what our fixtures are made of, when you put that fixture in a client’s hand, or in a builder’s or an architect’s, they’re immediately impressed by the build quality of it. It’s one thing to have a great warranty and all, but it’s another thing when you can recognize the precision of the machining of the product. All of our lighting products are a hundred percent brass, right down to even the stake that goes in the ground.
George: That’s impressive.
Peter: We just don’t believe in cutting corners. When you look at the lens on our fixtures, it’s built like a submarine lens versus some or our competitors, who just kind of glue the lens in. So, in some applications you’ve got the sun out during the day and it’s very warm, but gets cool very quickly at night. When the fixture heats up and cools down like that it’s going to suck in moisture, either through a hole in the glass where the seal fails, or through the connection – it’ll wick through the cable. So, we use our brass fixture as a heat sink. We do the same thing with our Razor speakers – that extruded aluminum enclosure is a heat sink for the drivers. We thermocouple the drivers to that. When you can design completely from scratch, when you’re not taking off the shelf components, these are things we have control of.
George: Well, there’s something to be said about specializing in the outdoor space as you guys do. I really think that’s a great differentiator for your company.
Peter: It’s a focus which we are going to continue to own. You know, we’ve had some dealers and clients ask if we were going to look at making indoor products, but we just love the outdoors. Our area at CEDIA Expo was named Destination Outdoors, and we called it that because clients are building destinations in their backyards. They are creating these amazing environments where they’re basically taking everything that they want and moving it all outdoors, including audio, TV, heaters, fans, you name it. We’ve even done some fun multi-channel setups for outdoor home theaters. So, to us, there’s a huge opportunity in the outdoors, and we want to keep our focus right there in all of our products.
George: Not just outdoor stuff — high-performance outdoor stuff.
Peter: Absolutely – that’s what we’re known for. When you think about these clients, they’re exposed to high-end audio all the time. When you look at the sound systems in the cars that they drive, or when they go to the airport now, they’re not using $10 headphones, they’re using $400, $500 headphones or more. When they go to the movie theater, I mean, the systems are incredible. So even folks that maybe aren’t thinking about it are exposed to this great audio all the time. When they go to their backyard oasis for their time to let their hair down after the workday’s done, why would they want something mediocre?
George McClure is a Senior Editor for Technology Designer magazine and the Technology Insider Group. Previously, he was the General Manager of Fidelity Communications and most recently, a Marketing Manager for Denver-bsed ListenUp.
