SurgeX Offers Big-Bang Theory
By Jeremy Glowacki
There’s a lot of entertaining stuff on youtube these days, especially when it comes to science experiments that end in an explosion. That’s what you’ll find when you type “SurgeX vs. MOVs” into your web browser for an entertaining and informative demo that harkens back to the days of “Mr. Wizard’s World.”
SurgeX's Martin Dornfeld on the YouTube, right before he starts making things "pop." The clip from North Carolina-based SurgeX shows how the company’s Surge Elimination technology matches up against an unnamed competitive product that uses MOVs (metal oxide varistors) to reduce and ...
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A Letter from Mike Detmer to Niles Dealers
By Jeremy Glowacki
Last week, Mark Terry, president of The AVC Group LLC. (formerly called the Linear Group) promoted several executives, including Mike “Sparky” Detmer from Niles Audio’s VP of sales and marketing to president of the brand, calling him “a truly iconic figure in the custom installation industry.”We at RS had been curious about how the various AVC Group executives had addressed management changes at their respective brands with dealers and their own employees. Fortunately the Niles PR team saw it fit to share Detmer’s letter to Niles dealers, which was sent out last week. For non-Niles dealers, ...
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Do Your Vendors Want to ‘See Other People?’
By Jeremy Glowacki
The news last week that B&W was offering its loudspeaker lines to the big-box-ish Magnolia stores was the CEDIA dealer’s equivalent of learning that a significant other wanted to “see other people.” Are you feeling unloved or at least under-appreciated lately? I wouldn’t blame you one bit. Friday’s B&W announcement was just one more sign that the CEDIA channel just ain’t cuttin’ it anymore in the eyes of AV product manufacturers desperately holding it together during the Great Recession.In recent years more and more specialty-oriented audio suppliers have expanded distribution to new ...
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Heiss Reports on E3 for the BBC
By Jeremy Glowacki
Earlier this month, Residential Systems contributing editor Michael Heiss provided his in-depth report about E3, the annual technology convention for the gaming crowd.In his blog, Heiss noted, “If you have any doubt about the place of games [in the CEDIA channel], particularly consoles and handhelds from the “Big Three” of Sony (PlayStation and PSP), Microsoft (Xbox 360) and Nintendo (Wii and DS/3DS), wipe those thoughts from your mind. For those of us who are hardware freaks, this was a banner year at E3.His reporting apparently also caught the attention of the BBC, who interviewed Heiss ...
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ELAN Targets 'G' Spots
By Jeremy Glowacki
ELAN’s Eric Harper is convinced that doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result borders on insanity. That old adage is what inspired the director of marketing and communications for the Lexington, Kentucky-based manufacturer to launch an aggressive new promotional campaign, called “See G! Run,” meant to drive consumer interest in its new g! residential control platform.
ELAN is thinking outside the box when it comes to marketing its new "g" platform. The campaign proved to be a success for three chosen dealers in the Atlanta “pilot” market, with Dallas ...
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Tips for Standardizing Your Organization
By Jeremy Glowacki
The CEDIA channel is made up of approximately 3,000 electronic systems contracting companies, each with an average of fewer than seven employees. In small firms like these, most people naturally wear many hats and are often responsible for a variety of functions within the organization. In this model, everyone subscribes to a “do what it takes to get it done” philosophy and the fact is that this type of approach has worked reasonably well for a lot of ESCs over the years.Unfortunately, this has also resulted in the reinforcement of the idea that more formal business practices are not ...
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Savant: Join the Apple Feeding Frenzy
By Jeremy Glowacki
Savant's opening night cocktail reception featured the famous NYC skyline. During the opening keynote for Savant’s fourth-annual dealer event, held June 23-25 in the SoHo section on New York City, company CEO Bob Madonna encouraged dealers and reps in attendance to “join the Apple feeding frenzy,” by selling home automation based around the Apple iPad, which, he said, is a format consumers around the world already understand and embrace.Savant has been completely Apple based since 2005, when Bob Madonna and Jim Carroll co-founded the company based on a business model from their previous ...
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My Retrofit Home Network Install was a No Brainer
By Jeremy Glowacki
The Wi-Fi network in my home provides relatively thorough coverage throughout our 5,000 square feet, but lately I’ve been streaming Yankees baseball games in HD to my laptop, and sometimes the picture locks up due to bandwidth limitations. Thanks to Plaster Networks’ PLN3 powerline Ethernet adapters, however, I was easily able to extend my home network over existing AC wiring and maintain a more interference-free video stream.
Plaster Networks' two PLN3 adapters Founded by Silicon Valley networking pioneer Paul Baran (who is known as inventor of packet switching), Plaster Networks had ...
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What Do Crestron and the Kamasutra Have in Common?
By Jeremy Glowacki
While I’m not much of an apps guy, personally, I do appreciate the creativity of developers who come up with such clever designs (my latest favorite is the virtual Bic lighter designed to summons an encore from your favorite rock band.)
A screenshot from when Crestron and iKamasutra shared the spotlight in the Apple iPhone apps store. So, it was cool to learn that Crestron’s Mobile Pro App for iPhone recently reached #6 in top-grossing iPhone apps (the only industry app in the Lifestyle Category’s Top 30, according to Crestron). Can you believe it? Our little-old industry found a way to ...
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Holiday Service Calls Pay Off for Illinois ESC
By Jeremy Glowacki
What do Memorial Day weekend, graduation week, and Chicago Black Hawks hockey all have in common? For Digital Home Technologies (www.adigitalhome.com) president John Goldenne, the answer is: emergency service calls. Goldenne, a Palatine, Illinois-based integrator friend of mine, said that he had planned for two weeks to spend his holiday weekend with family and landscaping both his home and office. But, before his plans could get into full swing early Friday afternoon, the office phone rang. It was 2pm, and the boss had already sent his staff home for the three-day weekend and had begun his ...
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Media Décor Says It Can Do More
By Jeremy Glowacki
Media Décor says that when it comes to choosing high quality art to
hide your client’s TV, there is a difference. The Ft. Lauderdale-based
manufacturer says that it can offer clients more artists, styles,
genres, mediums, interpretations, categories, and limited editions than
any other moving art manufacturer.
Media Décor found this print for a Beatles fan's moving art system Judith
Sexton, V.P. of Media Décor, says that Media Décor offers more than
2,500 artwork choices, and that the company’s portfolio continues to
expand and evolve. “Our Limited Edition Artists, who have won ...
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Micromega's Airstream Wireless DAC: More Than An Apple Airport Express
By Jeremy Glowacki
In
his June 2010 Residential Systems print edition review of Micromega’s
WM-10 AirStream wireless DAC, Dennis Burger says there are more
differences between the AirStream and AirPort Express than merely the
former’s brushed metal chassis. For one, he says, Micromega has
equipped the AirStream with a much beefier power supply and a fancy new
clock to reduce jitter, and has removed the 8P8C Ethernet and USB ports
(or, more accurately, hidden them inside) to completely eliminate the
possibility of any physical contact between the device and a
potentially noise-ridden computer source. ...
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Part 3 of Dr. Toole’s Audio Class is Tomorrow
By Jeremy Glowacki
If you’ve participated for the last two online audio and acoustics classes led by widely respected audio acoustics expert, Dr. Floyd Toole, then you won’t want to miss the final session tomorrow, from Noon-3 p.m. EST. And even if you missed the first two sessions, Dr. Toole has some great insight to share.The purpose of CEDIA’s ESD303 Home Theater Audio and Acoustics - Part 3 course, which is sponsored by Residential Systems magazine, is to provide an understanding of how acoustics and psychoacoustics influence what we hear and how to take advantage of that knowledge to optimize the ...
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Home Networks and the DVR Evolution
By Jeremy Glowacki
Keeping pace with the progress of consumer electronics often makes you feel like you’re running a marathon race at a sprinter's pace. Sometimes it helps to pull off to the side of the road, metaphorically speaking, to catch your breath and review the landscape behind you and assess the road ahead. A new white paper by Entropic Communications VP of technology Dr. Anton Monk takes that sort of approach in that way that it describes the evolution of video recorders and their interaction with home networks. Entropic is a San Diego-based fabless semiconductor company that designs, develops, and ...
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Quotes from Coppola
By Jeremy Glowacki
SIM2 Multimedia and SIM2 USA Inc. celebrated the launch of its worldwide ad campaign starring the five-time Academy Award-winning film director Francis Ford Coppola, during media event last week in Napa Valley, California. Here are some excerpts of Coppola's comments during the event: On his love of technology…“I always had this love of technology -- in electronics -- but I was bad at math so I didn’t become the nuclear physicist I wanted to be. At any rate, I became a film director, but always had this boy scientist part of myself.”
Francis Ford Coppola and SIM2 Multimedia president ...
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