Skip to content

Support

Electrofonic is an iOS 18+ iPhone app that controls multi-zone audio amplifiers over your own network. Email support@electrofonic.co and a person will read it. Including your iPhone model, your iOS version, and your amplifier model gets you a useful answer faster.

Trying the app without an amplifier

Electrofonic has a built-in demo amplifier. It is offered on the first-run setup screen as Enter Demo Mode, and afterwards it is a switch in Settings. Either way the app runs against a simulated amplifier and every control works exactly as it does against real hardware. No network connection and no amplifier are needed.

Setting up for the first time

The app walks you through it — there is no address to find first. The opening screen asks for Local Network permission, which iOS requires before any app can reach your amplifier, then sweeps the network and lists every compatible amplifier that answered. That takes about ten seconds. Choose yours, and the app connects and remembers the address; you will not be asked for it again. A short tour of zones, sources, and groups follows.

The same screen offers Manual Setup, for typing an address in yourself, and Enter Demo Mode. If the search comes back empty it says which range it actually searched, and offers both of those alongside trying again.

Setup is offered again whenever no amplifier is configured — after Reset all settings, for instance — so dismissing it does not lock you out of it. To re-read the tour on its own, open Settings → How it works.

The app can't find my amplifier

Once you are past setup, the same two routes live under Settings → Amplifier. Auto sweeps your network for you — tap Locate amplifier and the app probes every address on the network, listing each amplifier that answers. Manual is for typing the address in yourself, either as an IP address or as a hostname such as amp.local; tap the field's label to switch between the two. If neither finds it, check:

  • Your iPhone is on the same network as the amplifier. A guest network, or a VPN that routes all traffic, will both break the connection. A sweep covers one range of addresses at a time and tells you which one it covered — on a network larger than that, an amplifier outside the range has to be entered by hand.
  • The address and port are right. These come from your amplifier's own network settings — usually a fixed address you assigned on your router.
  • Local Network permission is granted. iOS asks once, on the first connection or scan. If it was denied, the app cannot reach anything on your network and no error will explain why. Re-grant it in the iOS Settings app, under Electrofonic → Local Network.
  • Nothing else is already connected. Most of these amplifiers accept a single control connection at a time.

Which amplifiers work

Electrofonic speaks a serial control protocol carried over your network, and works with amplifiers that implement it. If you are not sure whether yours does, email us the model and we will tell you.

How zone groups work

A group is a set of zones that share one volume and one mute. Long-press any zone on the Controls screen and choose New Group — the app makes a group of that one zone and offers you a name for it there and then. Long-press another zone and choose Add to Group to bring it in. Everything else lives on the same long-press menu: removing a zone, renaming, merging one group into another, moving a row up or down, and ungrouping. There is nothing to drag and no editing mode to enter.

The rules that matter day to day:

  • Only volume and mute are shared. Each zone keeps its own source, bass, treble, balance, power, and maximum volume, and each is still one tap away on its own screen.
  • The group fader is proportional, not absolute. It reads as a percentage in which each zone's own maximum volume is that zone's 100%. Moving it nudges every zone by the same amount, so the balance you already struck between them survives. At 100% each zone sits at its own ceiling — a zone capped at 20 and a zone capped at 38 arrive there together.
  • Grouping never changes what the zones were doing. Making a group, merging two, or adding a zone leaves every volume, source, and power state exactly as it was. If the zones end up disagreeing about power or mute, the app offers once to bring them into line, and does nothing at all if you dismiss it.
  • The fader only moves zones it can reach. The amplifier refuses a volume change for a zone that is powered off or muted, so those zones are skipped rather than written to, and the percentage you see is the average over the zones the fader can actually move. Power one back on and it resumes at its own stored level.
  • Group power acts on every zone regardless of what each was doing: all on when any are off, all off when every one is on. It stays available even when the fader is greyed out, so a fully powered-down group can always be woken from its own row.

Groups and your row order are stored on your iPhone and survive relaunching the app. A group survives down to a single zone, keeping its name; it disappears only when its last zone leaves. If the amplifier stops reporting one of a group's zones, the group keeps working with the rest and that zone rejoins when it comes back.

Setting a maximum volume for a zone

Open Settings and set Maximum volume for any zone. That value is a hard ceiling, not a suggestion: the zone's volume slider stops there, a mark on the track shows where it is, and the range beyond it is greyed out. Lowering the maximum below where the zone is currently playing turns that zone down to the new ceiling straight away.

The ceiling holds no matter who raised the volume. If a keypad on the wall pushes a zone above its maximum, Electrofonic sees it on the next poll and brings the zone back down. Each zone's maximum starts at the amplifier's own hardware maximum — so until you change one, nothing is limited — and it stays that zone's own setting even when the zone is in a group.

Zones you haven't wired

A six-zone amplifier has six zones whether or not there are speakers on all of them. If a run was never pulled, open Settings, find the zone, and turn In use off. The zone drops off the Controls screen, stops being counted, and stops being reached by All On, Mute All, or party mode.

Nothing is deleted. The zone keeps its name, its maximum volume, and its place in any group, and it stays listed in Settings — turn In use back on and it returns to the Controls screen where it was, in the group it belonged to. Electrofonic turns the zone off once when you mark it unused, then leaves it alone.

Voice control and Shortcuts

Every control has a Siri phrase behind it, and it works whether or not the app is open. End the sentence with the app's name — on Electrofonic, or on the amp — and Siri asks which zone when the phrase has not already said:

  • Mute a zone on Electrofonic, and Unmute.
  • Turn on a zone on Electrofonic, and Turn off.
  • Turn down on Electrofonic, and Turn up — or name a level: Low, Medium, High, Maximum.
  • Play Turntable on Electrofonic — any source, under the name you gave it.
  • Party time on Electrofonic, and Party over. Started by voice, a party takes its source and its level from the first zone on your Controls screen, and Siri tells you which zone that was.

Answer with a zone, a group, or the whole house — everything, the house, all zones. Siri knows the names you chose and follows a rename. What it says back names the zones it actually reached, and says so when it changed nothing: a zone that is off, a zone already at the ceiling you set, a name it does not recognise.

One phrasing iOS keeps for itself: asking for the volume. Any request that sounds like a loudness change reaches your iPhone's own volume before an app is offered it, so "turn down the volume on Electrofonic" moves the phone's volume rather than the kitchen's. That is how iOS routes speech, not a setting — the short forms above are the ones that arrive. A shortcut you name yourself is the way around it, because that phrase is yours alone.

In the Shortcuts app, Electrofonic adds five actions — Mute or Unmute, Turn On or Off, Change Volume, Play a Source, and Start or End a Party. Chain them with anything else on your phone, give the result a name, and run it by voice, from the Home Screen, from a widget, or with the Action button.

Privacy and data

The app has no account, no sign-in, and no Electrofonic server. Your amplifier's address, your zone names, and your settings live on your device. The app does send anonymous product analytics, which you can turn off in Settings. The privacy policy is the full account.

Reporting a bug

Email support@electrofonic.co. What helps most: what you did, what you expected, what happened instead, and whether it reproduces in demo mode — that last one tells us immediately whether the problem is in the app or on the wire.