Our website home page starts with one single word at the top: simple. And while it may be a simple word (pun intended!), it’s a very meaningful one, too.

When I look at the landscape of established speaker companies today, I see a lot of brands that are competing on cutting edge acoustics while marketing intense audio lifestyles. It’s hard for me to imagine that the average household is living the kind of life on a daily basis that those speaker ads show: having huge, loud beach parties on what I presume to be a weekday morning by how uncrowded the rest of the beach looks, sitting on the couch on a sunny weekend getting immersed in music for hours and doing nothing else, or setting up your home with a futuristic-looking speaker being the centerpiece on every table in every room without clashing with your home decor. Don’t get me wrong, I certainly think these products are incredibly well-designed and aesthetically beautiful, but I can’t help but feel that they are designed to sell you a lifestyle rather than designed for your lifestyle.

The reason I started Dio was to build something different from these other brands. And, as much as I love geeking out about the Dio Node’s technology, what I really am starting here is a brand: one that stands for simplicity, convenience, and meeting the needs of your current lifestyle and home. I shared in my last post how our Dio mission is to make listening easy. What that means to me in practice is to make Dio your friendly neighborhood speaker company, one that gives you a hassle-free, highly reliable experience in the home while fitting in with all of your home decor everywhere.

And, of course, this brand identity is really what has bled into all of the decisions we’ve made with our product, technology, and feature set. Here are just a couple examples of how we’ve been thinking about our speakers that’s so different from other solutions on the market:

1. <1 minute set-up: One of the biggest issues with whole home audio systems is that they can be a daunting to set up, requiring you to enable or disable a host of custom features, download extra apps, and press buttons on your router. We set a standard to have under 1 minute to set up your new Dio Node speaker on your home, with just a 2-step process!
2. No app required: Some people have been shocked to hear that we don’t require an app to use our speakers – like at all. Sure, you can put your Dio speakers on the Apple Home app to enable Siri on your phone and access other fancy home automation features if you want, but the core experience of playing your music to multiple speakers and turning those speakers on and off with a tap doesn’t require you to download any new app on your phone. Curious how that works? Just check out our How to Use page!
3. Interoperability: While other major speaker brands typically find ways to lock you into their ecosystem, our approach has been to give you as much choice as possible to purchase additional speakers from other brands. Dio can be used alongside 100+ other speaker models from 45+ other brands (including all the major ones).
4. No microphones, but voice assistant still optional: Instead of making you pay for an expensive array of microphones built into your speakers alongside additional processing power just to enable a voice assistant, we decided to just give you the optional choice of using Siri on your iPhone to control our speakers. But if you don’t want that, you can still control Dio speakers completely with just a couple taps.
5. Cute but neutral color and look: And, of course, beyond the internal workings of Dio, I personally gave a lot of thought to how we should look within your home. Unlike the current flashy, premium whole home audio setups on the market that demand to be displayed front and center in your living room, our goal was to be something that you didn’t have to rearrange any part of your home to accommodate. Our neutral gray color was designed specially to fit in with the whites, blacks, and woods of your home decor while our 4×4″ square form factor can be tucked into any corner or displayed beautifully on a shelf (just check the cover image of this post for an example!). We don’t even brandish our logo on the front of our speaker – all by design to allow our speakers to fit in wherever you want them!

These are just five examples of how we think about simplicity in our product in a way that’s so different from what the rest of the industry does. I hope you’ll see this as a reason to support us further!