Innholdsfortegnelse for September - October 2019 i Residential Tech Today

Savant didn’t start out as an audio company. When it was founded in 2005, the Massachusetts-based company was known more for its home automation and device control acumen, only more recently broadening into such areas as solar power management and audio and video distribution. Savant’s acquisition in 2017 of respected loudspeaker manufacturer, Artison, and partnerships with established technology platforms such as AVB and WiSA are further solidifying the company’s audio technology position, leading to its latest new product launch, a three-channel “surround soundbar” that will decode Dolby and DTS (via Toslink cable) and connect a subwoofer and rear-surround speakers using the WiSa wireless audio protocol (although the sub can be wired up as an alternate option). “We chose WiSA because it’s high-bandwidth, point to point, high bit rate, so you…

The folks at AirTV beat both the heat and the inventible wave of new streaming device products expected to be unveiled in late summer/early fall from the likes of Roku and Amazon’s Fire TV line, with their new AirTV Mini. It pushes the benchmark a bit higher and debuts a new form factor. While the current AirTV Player and AirTV, both of which remain available, have a more conventional “set-top” size configuration, the new AirTV Mini is their first foray into the “plug into an HDMI jack dongle” device design popularized by Roku, Chromecast, and Fire TV. It has a bit boxier size and aesthetic than the long, thin look of its competitors, but is still small and lightweight enough to easily plug in and hang behind the TV. As…

One day, we will live in the golden age of voice control – our eyes and thumbs freed from the screen as we converse intuitively with the technology around us. Today is not that day. That being said, voice control has improved substantially, even in the last six months. Advancements in the smartphone ecosystem have made voice a better interface for a lot of everyday tasks. The same can be said for voice control at home. For the most up-to-date features of currently available voice ecosystems, here is our 2019 comparison guide from the four leading platforms: Alexa Benefits: Controls more third-party devices than any other platform and integrates cleanly with Amazon shopping. It also recognizes different voices and adjusts to the behavior of each user. As of 2019, it…

What makes a house a home? A home is a representation – a reflection – of who you are and of who your family is. It is a place where you should feel free to be yourself; somewhere you feel comfortable and safe. It is your hive, your intimate space. Over the past 19 years, my family has lived in three homes – the current one being a short sale from the bank that we then remodeled ourselves. Nine years, two kids, and a dog later, the house needed a bit more love, so in April of this year we began a remodel of almost our entire first floor. The renovation would include our entryway, kitchen, a new window in our dining room, a façade upgrade of our front patio,…

Imagine you walk into a room and every device instantly adjusts to your preferences. You didn’t touch anything, you didn’t ask your voice assistant to trigger a routine, and you didn’t have your face scanned by a panel on the wall. You simply enter the room and watch it come to life, perfectly personalized for your preferences. The dream is now a reality, thanks to an ingenious and deceptively simple device created by CEO Oren Kotlicki and his team at IntelliThings. It’s called the RoomMe and it looks like a smoke detector. It’s slim, beige, and sort of… unimpressive in appearance. But, that’s how it was designed. Aesthetics The goal of the RoomMe sensor is to disappear into the surroundings and seamlessly integrate with all of your smart devices. It…

A year ago, Residential Systems Inc., a 30-person custom integration firm in Denver, was struggling to find a better way to manage the flow of products in and out of their warehouse. About that time, Residential Systems staff member Jim Ford stepped up and shared his idea with company co-founder Travis Leo for creating an iOS app to streamline the process. The resulting Tracknicity app initially was developed just for internal use, but after Leo shared it with his peers in the Azione Unlimited buying group last fall, he felt that it could benefit other companies in the industry, as well. “Tracknicity was born out of frustration from the lack of a truly integrated inventory solution in Quickbooks and D-Tools,” Leo said. “We designed Tracknicity to solve a problem that…

DSI Luxury Technology, in Lake Balboa, CA, is one the most often-awarded home technology integration firms in North America. Founded in 1994 by Eric Thies, the 26-person DSI team has a reputation for turning away more projects than they accept. Thies says that he intentionally limits the number of projects his company accepts every year so that they can give their clients all of the attention that they need. DSI has been known to have an approach that is human-centric not tech-centric because their clients want the benefits of technology but often don’t care much about the actual tech. For more than 20 years, Thies and his DSI team have specialized in providing top Hollywood professionals on the Bel Air Circuit with exceptional private home theater systems. This highly specialized…

Luke Williams is a busy man. Even a quick summary of his work and accomplishments seems like an everyday person’s lifetime resume. Williams is currently a Fellow at the global design firm Frog Design Inc., the professor of marketing at the NYU School of Business, the executive director and founder of W.R. Berkeley Labs, an international bestselling author with his book Disrupt: Think the Unthinkable to Spark Transformation in Your Business, and an experienced speaker across 21 different countries. Oh, and he has also invented over 30 patents in the U.S. With this impressive track record, it’s no wonder that Williams was chosen as the keynote speaker for this year’s CEDIA Expo smart home technology showcase in Denver. Williams previews his speech, as well as his thoughts on the evolution…

I’ve always enjoyed the simplicity of the Bathtub Curve when it comes to observing the technology lifecycle. The electronics that we sell generally go through three distinct stages: Early Failure (Infant Mortality), Useful Life (Constant Random Failure), and End Of Life (Wear-out Failure). Until recently, we’ve shied away–out of fear–from proactively addressing this lifecycle head-on with our clients. That all changed last year when we decided to openly talk about the expiration date of electronics the same way we might look at the expiration date on a gallon of milk. By placing the elephant in the room front and center, we’ve been able to re-orient our sales and service touchpoints around the inevitable need to upgrade systems every three to five years. If clients ever complain or sound surprised, we’re…

It was a co-op apartment upgrade that sounded great on paper. Our 58-year-old building in New York City was finally getting a window overhaul: full-pane windows to replace legacy double-hung units that sometimes wouldn’t open and other times wouldn’t close. But as the installation date approached, we were so focused on the upheaval of the window frame removal that we didn’t anticipate the shade situation. As neighbors started to report their experiences, it quickly became apparent that the existing 19-year-old living room window treatments – three separate ones to cover two standard windows and a wide, south-facing picture window – wouldn’t fit the dimensions of the new windows. That meant the adjacent west window would have to get a new shade, too, to match the others. The last time I…

To say that much of our daily lives revolve around smartphones is somewhat of an understatement. Taking the train, walking around the city, or even sitting down for a meal, you will most likely witness people checking their smartphones on a nearly compulsive level. Seeing eyes consistently glued to smart devices can definitely make one ponder about the stats behind our favorite addictive tech, be it the time spent surfing the web or the companies that make everything from the iPhone to the Galaxy. Whether you’re reading this on paper or, funnily enough, on a smartphone, here are the numbers behind our favorite pocket-sized supercomputers. Worldwide Daily Time Spent on the Internet (Mobile Devices) Fastest Average Mobile Internet Speeds by Country (Measured by Mbps) Mobile Data Traffic Globally (Measured by…

Harman knows that no other audio company can match its D2 compression driver and High-Definition Imaging (HDI) waveguide technologies and components. So, the company is leaning into its proprietary and patented ultra-performance tech by integrating it into just about every loudspeaker in its premium JBL Synthesis home theater line – even if it seems impossible to do. For the SCL-5, Harman took the same compression driver technology used in previous SCL models and squeezed it into a round footprint, alongside a 6.5-inch woofer for use as overhead height channels in immersive audio (Dolby Atmos, DTS:X, Auro-3D) room designs, or as an overhead LCR (left-center-right) surround (if the design requires all speakers to go in the ceiling). “From a performance standpoint, there’s no in-ceiling speaker that can do what this can…

Lighting control systems are a part of every home systems integrator’s product portfolio, and a growing number of homeowners are putting it on their home improvement wish lists. Right there with audio, video, and security, systems that control a home’s light fixtures based on certain scripted parameters have become increasingly popular elements of a smart home. But are you maximizing all that this type of lighting has to offer? Just because a light fixture is smart doesn’t mean that it’s doing its job completely. And no matter how much intelligence is built into a lighting control system, it takes the right type of fixture, the right positioning of those fixtures, and the right design to maximize the full benefits of smart home lighting. For this reason, AV professionals who also…

I am an inherent fixer, creative problem-solver, and endlessly curious like a four-year-old child. When confronted with a problem that I know I can solve or positively influence, I’ll become impassioned quickly, want to fix the world, and, before I know it, I can overcommit myself, my resources, and my time. Age and experience have shown me, however, the value of recognizing this passionate pitfall and making decisions that require the word “no,” even when I want to scream “yes!” One such defining moment, for me, was for a project that started out looking great on paper. It was budgeted for six-figures (a good get for the Midwest), with a client who “knew people” and had a long list of potential referrals lined up waiting for us. Yet, in the…

Video calibration discs were so prevalent in the DVD and Blu-ray era that any self-respecting videophile probably had at least three in his or her disc collection. For a minor investment, you could dial in your display’s brightness, contrast, color, tint, and sharpness settings to a respectable degree without having to drop $500 on a professional calibration. In the UHD era, though? To call such discs a rarity would be an understatement. Samsung released an HDR10 Reference disc back in 2016, but it would only play in the company’s own UBD-K8500 UHD Blu-ray player and didn’t support Dolby Vision, which of course limited its usefulness as time went on. Diversified Video Solutions also offers a couple of discs in addition to its various digital file packages, but a disc with…