22nd August, 2008
Bad News For Best Buy. Good News For You.
Brent Butterworth
The CEDIA Expo doesn’t start until early September, but manufacturers and PR firms usually begin pitching new products to the press in June. We at The Integrator realized that by combining a diligent review of the pre-show press release, some thoughtful divination, and a few wild guesses, we could predict the trends at the show weeks before we enter the doors of the Colorado Convention Center.
So if you read this column, you can, in theory, focus on schmoozing and partying rather than worrying about the details of, say, new doorbell modules for multiroom systems.
So what did we find in our reading? Lots of new A/V furniture. Lots of new TV mounts. New cable management products. New touchscreen control systems. New iPod docks. And a lot more.
Where, you ask, is the trend in that hodgepodge of “solutions”? Well, it’s not there. The trend is in what you don’t see: major introductions of mainstream audio and video products.
Of course, the Sonys and Samsungs and Panasonics of the world don’t always wait around for CEDIA to show off their latest wares. But throughout the spring and summer, we’ve seen the product introductions from these companies, and frankly, we have a hard time recalling any particular standouts.
We may have reached a point of diminishing returns with conventional audio and video gear. For example, the murmurs from display manufacturers hint at future 240 Hz refresh rates and 4K resolution, but neither of those technologies is likely to deliver a dramatic improvement in anything short of a 20-seat home theater. There are some promising display technologies in the future, such as ultra-thin OLED screens, but large OLED displays are a few years off—and the roll-up OLED screens we’ve been promised will probably take much longer.
While the big guys seem to be wondering where to go from here, the small- to medium-sized companies that focus on A/V integrators are bursting with exciting ideas. Consider SpeakerCraft’s new interface that lets the iPhone and the iPod Touch control its multiroom audio systems. Now your clients can pull out their iPhones when they walk in the house and immediately call up their favorite music, radio station, etc. No keypad needed. Sooloos includes something similar in the latest software revision for its music servers. And I know of at least one more manufacturer who’s pursuing the same path.
If Best Buy has anything this sexy that they can offer their customers, we haven’t seen it. In fact, barring some major unforeseen revolution in audio or video, it looks to us as if the mass merchants will mostly be stuck serving the replacement market.
On the other hand, integrators have at their disposal the offerings of many dozens (or even hundreds) of small, innovative companies. At the CEDIA Expo, it’s a safe bet we’re going to see countless speakers in cool new form factors, more entries in the outdoor TV market, and fresh approaches to home automation that will bring it to a wider audience. (We could list more, too, but on much of this stuff we’re under NDA until the show starts.)
It doesn’t look as if there will be any new audio/video product in the next couple of years that Best Buy can use to captivate its customers. But any good integrator ought to be able to dazzle clients with technologies they haven’t seen and new form factors they’ll love. If you can’t, you really should dig deeper at this year’s Expo, because the products and technologies you need will all be there.
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8th August, 2008
HDMI: Can It Be Saved?
Brent Butterworth
Let’s have a show of hands here. What do you hate the most? The IRS? Microsoft? Or HDMI? For the thousands of integrators who read The Integrator, that’s got to be a tough call. For our crack editorial staff, the answer’s easy—inspired by a few nights with no TV because of the feisty HDMI interfaces on a couple of new products we’re testing. (What’s that you’re suggesting? Yeah, we tried that.)
Never in our recollection has a consumer electronics technology caused so many problems for so long as HDMI has. As one of the country’s leading custom installers recently told us, “Basically, it doesn’t work.” Some of the audio manufacturers we know become downright apoplectic whenever we bring up the subject. When the question “How many people here are installing HDMI?” was raised at the gathering of top Runco dealers in Mexico last April, only a few hands went up.
Yet we know that cable manufacturers have scrambled to solve the problem, creating cables that are guaranteed to pass a certain digital signal (720p/1080i or 1080p) without visible degradation. We also know that HDMI licensor Silicon Image has created Simplay Labs, a company devoted to certifying proper HDMI implementation and helping manufacturers get their products working right.
We decided it was time to check with a couple of leading integrators to get an update—and to find out if they’ve been able to make peace with HDMI.
“It has gotten better,” said Terry Menacker, president of Overture Audio & Video in Wilmington, DE. “But in 95 percent of our jobs, we still run component video cable as a backup. In most of our projects, even a 32-inch TV in a bedroom might be 20 or 30 feet from an equipment closet, and HDMI’s not always reliable at that distance.”
“You have to use it,” said Terry Mullin, CEO of Creative Stream in Costa Mesa, CA. “Now that Blu-ray has won, people want 1080p, and the only way to get that to the display is HDMI. But that has opened up issues. The biggest one we see is that if there’s any movement of the cables or the equipment, the HDMI plug can come out. Even if you do a strain relief, the cable eventually relaxes and you end up with the same problem. We make our own special strain relievers that pull the plug firmly into the socket, but it’d be so nice if they came up with a clip or a screw to hold the plug in.
“Issue number two is the length,” Mullin continued, echoing Menacker’s comments. “We use Gefen’s HDMI Cat-5 baluns to solve that problem.” At each end of these balun systems, there’s a box that has HDMI and Cat-5 connections. One box converts HDMI to Cat-5 (which can be run easily and cheaply), and another box converts the Cat-5 back to HDMI at the other end. “Cat-5 is a lot easier to run than HDMI cable, because that plug on the end of the HDMI cable is pretty big,” Mullins noted. Menacker reported that his crew has also begun using HDMI/Cat-5 baluns.
Despite Simplay Labs’ efforts, there still appear to be many products in which HDMI isn’t properly implemented, or in which an outdated HDMI standard is used. “We’re at the mercy of the manufacturers of cable boxes, receivers, etc.,” Menacker complained. “Comcast is still giving out boxes that have DVI output instead of HDMI.”
Menacker feels that cable manufacturers are no longer to blame for HDMI problems. “The cable has gotten better,” he said. “As long as you stay with major brands, it’s good. And some of the manufacturers have started to certify their cable for certain data speeds, so that should help.”
Mullins noted that he’d just read a magazine article talking about the possibility of yet another new HDMI level beyond the current HDMI 1.3b. But he offered a solution—one that shouldn’t have to exist, but integrators should be glad it does. “Run Cat-5,” he said. “It’s pretty much bulletproof. There’s not much you can’t do over two Cat-5s.”
So it seems the best way for integrators to solve the HDMI problem is to go around it. HDMI may improve further, but it should be obvious by now that it wasn’t designed with custom installation in mind. Indeed, it seems as if it were designed with no awareness that the custom installation industry even exists.
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