The Real Estate Market

Obviously, the big story for practically any business in the U.S. is the recent economic downtown. But for systems integrators, this is old news. In some metro areas, the integration/installation business started to take a dive two and a half years ago—about the time that real estate values began declining in the most inflated markets. With the decline in the buying and selling of houses came a decline in business for integrators. Most of the integrators we know do most of their business when their customers buy or build homes, and those are rare events these days.

However, this situation may be good news for integrators. The crash of the real estate market was the initial cause of the economic downtown. In this crisis, it appears to be what economists call a leading indicator. Like capital-goods investment and the Standard & Poor’s 500 index, real estate went down before the rest of the economy did. And like those other leading indicators, it’s likely to recover before the rest of economy does. That would put systems integrators first in line to benefit when the economy starts to rebound.

Unfortunately, whether or not real estate recovers in 2009 is anybody’s guess.

TVs Still Getting the Love

Unlike cars, real estate, and fancy watches, the public’s fascination with flat-panel TV has not abated in the downturn. While holiday sales of most consumer products have been miserable, TVs have done OK. There are good reasons for this. First, the prices are nothing short of shocking; you can pick up a name-brand 42-inch flat-panel HDTV for $600 or less. Second, the latest super-slim, 1.5-inch-thick designs are hard to resist. And third, the pending demise of analog TV in February has led many people to think they have to buy a new TV, even though no one really has to.

Sure, most people will still get their TVs from mass-merchants like Best Buy and Wal-Mart. But upscale customers are just as excited about the new TVs as anyone else. And economic downturn or not, those customers will always demand a nice, clean installation—a task they’re unlikely to trust to semi-trained technicians whose main goal is to get the job done as quickly as possible.

Retail on the Ropes

Luckily for you, some of your indirect competitors are on their last legs. Tweeter is history. Circuit City keeps on going like the 15-year-old dog that the vet swore would never make it past 13, but the chain’s ultimate destiny seems almost as certain.

For years, we’ve heard that the distribution of electronics would eventually split into two camps—big-box retailers and custom installers—and that the middle ground would disappear. That hasn’t quite happened yet, but the economic downturn will almost certainly hasten that transition.

And that leaves more room for custom installation. When there’s no middle option—when the customer has no choice but zero service (Best Buy, Wal-Mart) or spectacular service (you)—many more are likely to spend the extra money to get a system that works right, looks good, and can be operated by anyone in the family.

Of course, that’s just the way we see it. But given that recent economic events have left practically every economic prognosticator looking like an idiot, our opinion’s at least as good as anyone else’s.

You think we’re crazy? Take a few minutes, follow our logic, then tell us we’re crazy.

Schroeder’s Science

In 1954, German physicist Dr. Manfred Schroeder first documented the fact that rooms have a “crossover frequency,” which we now call the Schroeder frequency. For typical residential listening environments, the Schroeder frequency falls between 100 and 200 Hz.

The midrange and treble tones that lie above a room’s Schroeder frequency reflect off of walls like billiard balls ricocheting off of bumpers. Because the sounds bounce around so much, they’re pretty much the same anywhere in the room.

But the bass tones that fall below a room’s Schroeder frequency don’t bounce, they resonate, just as sound waves do inside an organ pipe or a flute. Sounds whose wavelengths match the dimensions of the room are amplified. Sounds whose wavelengths don’t match the dimensions aren’t amplified. Some of these long sound waves cancel each other out. Some reinforce each other. And the effect varies greatly as you move around the room.

You can easily confirm Schroeder’s discovery. Just play a bass tone from a test CD and walk around the room. You’ll probably hear the level of the sound change radically from place to place. Now play some midrange or treble tones. They may be slightly quieter in some places, slightly louder in others, but you won’t hear a dramatic difference.

Schroeder established that a room responds completely differently to bass than it does to treble and midrange. One might imagine, then, that a single speaker position would be unlikely to work best for all audio frequencies. According to some more recent experiments, one would be right.

The Best Place For Bass

Groundbreaking research done by Harman International (makers of JBL, Infinity, and umpteen other audio brands) has shown that the smoothest, most consistent bass response comes from using multiple subwoofers and placing them along walls or in corners. In a rectangular room, you get the best possible bass with four subwoofers, one in the center of each wall. Placing subwoofers in each of the four corners—a more practical scenario—yields results almost as good. And you get very good performance even by using one sub in each of the room’s two front corners.

Of course, you can’t put the speakers reproducing the midrange and treble in these places. You have to put those speakers where they sound best. In a home theater system, the left and right front speakers have to be somewhere near the right and left edges of the screen, and the center speaker has to sit above, below, or behind the screen.

If you’re using full-range speakers, you have to stick with these positions, not the ones that work best for bass. So while your mids and highs might sound great, your bass won’t sound as good as it would with subwoofers in the corners.

Some home theater enthusiasts claim that by using full-range speakers in every channel, you’ll achieve smoother bass response. There’s a hint of truth there—but only if the bass occurs in all channels, which it rarely does. And still, the bass response won’t be as smooth as it would with subwoofers on the sides of the room or in the corners.

Implications for Integrators

These principles greatly simply audio system design. All you have to do is specify one sub in each front corner—or one in every corner if you have the space and budget. Then use satellite speakers for all the other channels, and put them wherever they’ll sound best. As long as the satellites can play cleanly down to 80 Hz or below, they’ll blend fine with the subwoofers if you use the industry-standard 80 Hz crossover point. You can use equalizers to get the bass even smoother, but that’s optional.

What you’ll end up with is bass that’s smooth and consistent no matter what chair you’re sitting in. It’s practically impossible to match this result using full-range speakers. Your midrange and treble will sound the same as they would if you were using full-range speakers—and perhaps even better, because small satellite speakers give you more positioning options than big full-range models.

That doesn’t mean full-range speakers have no place. Most two-channel preamps and integrated amps lack subwoofer crossovers, so for stereo rigs, full-range speakers can be more convenient. And their form factor may be an advantage in rooms where there’s no aesthetically acceptable place to put a subwoofer. In fact, The Integrator’s editor owns—and loves—a pair of high-end full-range speakers.

But if the best possible sound is your goal, a properly configured subwoofer/satellite system beats out a full-range speaker system every time.

First, a quick recap of LED’s advantages. In an LED projector, super-bright LEDs replace the high-pressure mercury lamp used in today’s conventional projectors. LEDs last far longer than bulbs; the PhlatLight LEDs used in some rear-projection TVs are rated to run 8 hours a day for more than 20 years. The lamps used in projectors today last 2,000 to 4,000 hours—and for the last quarter or so of their life, they become annoyingly dim. Replacement cost for these lamps is high, ranging from about $200 to more than $1,000. They also consume more energy than LEDs.

LED also offers the potential for picture quality improvements. LEDs can be dimmed quickly—on a frame-by-frame basis—so they can be adjusted to deliver the deepest blacks and optimum contrast for each shot in a video. Lamps respond too slowly to do this, although a similar if less profound effect can be achieved with an automatic iris. LEDs offer a wider color gamut than conventional lamps, and they come on almost instantly—there’s practically no warm-up time.

Chi Lin Technologies, the manufacturer that conducted the CEDIA Expo demo, gave us an update on the prospects for LED projection in 2009. Product manager Julian Chu said he expects the company to enter mass production in Q2 or Q3 of 2009, and confided that it already has at least one company signed up to distribute the projector in the U.S. (Chi Lin does not sell projectors under its own name in the U.S.—it makes them for other companies.)

Chu said that the company has completed a 2nd generation model which is more advanced than the one shown at the CEDIA Expo. He said the new unit is about 40% smaller and significantly brighter. Chi Lin’s specifications for the projector include a 100,000:1 contrast ratio and a color gamut 28% broader than the NTSC standard. The projector uses a liquid cooling system, which is necessary because the LEDs run at a very high current of 30 amps in order to achieve the necessary brightness. The prototype at the CEDIA Expo had a cooling fan that was vacuum-cleaner loud; no word on whether or not Chi Lin has improved that, but they’ll have to if they want into the home theater market.

Most companies that market projectors in the U.S. are keeping their plans for LED to themselves. However, Brian Carskadon, director of product management for Runco International, was willing to elaborate on LED’s future. He predicted we’ll see introductions of several LED-driven front projectors in 2009. He also predicted—not surprisingly—that the first ones will be expensive and noisy compared with their lamp-driven counterparts. He expects lower-priced, lower-performing models aimed at the casual market to appear toward the end of 2009.

And, most importantly, Carskadon expects LED to someday dominate the projection market. He said that once LED products reach performance parity with typical lamp-driven projectors (possibly as soon as two years from now), lamp-based products will be relegated to applications that require high brightness, such as extra-large home theaters.

For the integrator, LED has one big upside and one big downside. Of course, it will lead to more reliable installations and fewer service calls. But it’ll also give you fewer chances to interface with your clients.

The technology in question is the iPhone, which home automation manufacturers are starting to integrate into their systems. The idea makes obvious sense. After all, from a technical standpoint, the iPhone (and its cellphone-less cousin, the iPod Touch) isn’t terribly different from a wireless touchscreen.

But in other ways, the iPhone differs radically from a typical home automation touchscreen. It’s small: The screen measures only 3.5 inches diagonally, compared with 4 to 17 inches for a typical touchscreen. And it’s cheap: just $199 with a service contract (or $229 for the iPod Touch), compared to as much as $10,000 for a big touchscreen.

We wondered, though: How thrilled would systems integrators be to sell a $229 device when they used to sell one priced 10 to 40 times as much? And how much would their clients enjoy trying to control an entire home from a 3.5-inch, 480×320-pixel screen?

THE PROS

The big advantage of the iPhone in home automation is portability. You can slip it into your pocket and carry it around effortlessly. As Jim Carroll, president and cofounder of Savant Systems, described: “I can be in my media room and control that experience. I can use the same device to manage the media from my pool area. I can watch videos, listen to iTunes. There’s not a [touchscreen] remote I’m aware of that you can carry around which gives you access to and control of all those things.”

To Jeff Singer, marketing communications manager at Crestron, the biggest advantage is that the iPhone also works outside the home. “In the home, it communicates with your system via WiFi, but out in the world, it can communicate using the phone network. Anywhere in the world, our customers can see the lighting levels in their homes, the positions of the shades, the temperatures of all the rooms in the house, the status of the home alarm systems—and from anywhere in the world, they can change all that.”

Besides its unrivaled mobility, the iPhone has another advantage: public awareness. Many people don’t even know home automation even exists, but everyone’s heard of the iPhone—and 13 million have been sold to date. “The sex appeal of this is huge,” Carroll reported. “We’re signing up dealers because customers are asking for this kind of solution.”

THE CONS

The limited real estate of that little screen does demand some redesign of the control GUIs, but Singer and Carroll both say their companies don’t consider this a significant problem. “You may have to have a second page where before you could have just one,” Carroll explained. “But the resolution is high and with the number of colors it supports, you can do a lot with it.” Savant’s iPhone-based systems also use the TVs in a home to display control screens, in order to show more buttons on a single page.

However, Carroll and Singer strongly disagree in their predictions about how the iPhone will affect future system designs.

“I think the iPhone is definitely going to cut into sales of those things [touchscreens],” Carroll said. “Customers are cutting down on the number of remotes they’re using. People might have eight [touchscreen] remotes for everything in their homes, but if there’s only three people living there they might only need three iPhones or Touches.”

Singer doesn’t buy it. “That hasn’t been our experience,” he said. “Have our touchpanel sales been impacted because we offer control from PCs and laptops? Absolutely not. The iPhone is just another option. And when you have more options, you have more opportunities to meet or exceed the client’s expectations.”

Likewise, Singer sees no effect on margins for Crestron dealers. “The iPhone control app is absolutely free to dealers and programmers,” he noted. “How does that affect margin? However they want it to. If you want to throw it in to sweeten a deal, you can do that and it won’t cost you anything. If you see it as an opportunity to increase your margin, the markup can be whatever the client’s willing to pay.”

Asked if the iPhone will affect margins, Carroll replied, “I think in one sense yes and another no. In our implementation, it requires a server at the other end, which the customer will need to buy. And keep in mind that the iPhone is doing everything a touchpanel would do, so they make a margin on the integration as well.”

So the effect of the iPhone on home automation integrator margins remains an open question. But with Sooloos, Speakercraft, Proficient Audio, and others now offering iPhone control options, there seems to be no doubt that the iPhone will become an important interface—and perhaps even the primary interface—in homes of the future. As Carroll put it, “I think it’s a fundamental game changer.”

Calibrating television displays has become big business, but should you jump in? Companies like the Imaging Science Foundation and THX, Inc charge sizable sums for you to attend their instructional classes, while measurement equipment companies like Sencore, Data Color and Konica Minolta wait in the wings to sell you expensive color meters and test generators. Some consumers are willing to spend several hundred bucks to have their TVs professionally adjusted. Even big-box retailers like Best Buy sell the service to their customers. But while TVs of even a few years ago may have been horribly miscalibrated to achieve sales floor appeal, modern televisions—with their multiple picture memories and color adjustments—make a much more calibrated image available with just a press of a button. It’s enough to make you wonder if the calibration process is still necessary.

I do believe that a calibrated picture looks better than the average show floor image. For the sake of this argument, I will define “calibration” as the adjustment of a set’s so-called color temperature using a color meter. One could go further and include the adjustment of the actual primary and secondary colors themselves, a feature increasingly available on better displays. The adjustment of basic signal levels, like brightness and contrast, can also be considered a level of calibration, (and perhaps even more beneficial), but the tools and instructions needed to use them are available on a $40 Blu-ray disc or DVD.

Metered calibration is where things get interesting. For the sake of this article, I’m only talking about TVs, not two-piece projection displays, as the latter can’t be factory-calibrated for a given screen material. As the TV test manager for Samsung Electronics, I compare our TV sets with competitors, and I also verify the measurement results of our TVs that go to and come back from equipment reviewers. I’ve noticed a few things. For one, TVs from major manufacturers usually have a setting that comes reasonably close to 6500 Kelvin (the industry standard measure of a set’s color temperature). Secondly, what differences do exist rarely amount to much in a comparative analysis. Third, measurements from different people don’t match. What I might read as 6500 Kelvin, one reviewer might measure as 6300K, and another might say is 6700K. Both reviewers argue that the set needs calibration, and after adjusting levels up or down, declare the set as “improved” and much more accurate.

One can argue that the reviewers are compensating for differences in their source equipment. But if two different Blu-ray players output color temperature settings that are several hundred degrees apart, something is horribly wrong. It’s far more likely that different equipment will need slight adjustments to settings like brightness and contrast.

Different TV settings and tolerances between measurement equipment likely account for the majority of the disparity in results. Samsung uses a Photo Research PR650, a $20,000 color meter that, even though it’s considered the standard for accuracy, can measure up to 250 Kelvin (degrees) different from another PR-650—on the same display, with the same source equipment—and still be considered within spec. Lesser equipment can have even greater tolerances. But if two or three calibration experts using different equipment can’t agree on how the same set should measure, then how can we argue that one setting is more accurate than another? And we haven’t even touched on competence. I’m confident of the reviewers’ skill sets, but what of most calibration class graduates? Given that you can get a fairly accurate image from many manufacturers with just a change of the picture memory setting, it’s enough to question the process as a whole.

I don’t discount the process entirely. While metered calibration may not be as exact a science as many make it out to be, it can bring widely out-of-range displays, like second- or third-tier brands, back into the realm of the reasonable. And there is a small group of enthusiasts who appreciate knowing that their TV is “accurate.” Plus, how can you keep the manufacturers on their toes if you can’t measure their equipment to know what it’s doing?

More importantly, though, in addition to the profit stream produced by tweaking picture controls, many retailers and installers are finding that their “calibrated” clientele tend to be happier than normal customers, and may even have fewer product returns. One reasons for this is because otherwise simple problems are easily overcome when the installer is there to witness them firsthand. He or she can also verify that all of the system’s settings, not just the TVs, are properly adjusted. And even just knowing that the product is professionally calibrated can relieve an immense amount of anxiety for many people.

While these are good reasons for integrators to spend the $1,000+ entrance fee for a training program, or the $2,500 cost of a measurement tool, I do believe installers have a moral obligation to at least show their customers what the image looks like when you switch their display out of the factory default memory and into one of the more accurate modes. Some customers will want to go further and get professional calibration. But the greatest benefit may come more from the in-home personal service and attention than any change to the set’s gray scale.

The latest technology that has integrators curious but cautious is 3-D. There’s a lot of buzz about the resurgence of this decades-old technology. About a year ago, Samsung introduced the first TVs designed to accommodate 3-D gaming; now Mitsubishi is also offering 3-D sets. Da-Lite and JVC put on impressive 3-D demos at September’s CEDIA Expo. Last week, Sony introduced a new 3-D optical adapter that makes it easy and relatively affordable for digital cinemas to show 3-D movies; its demo at Sony Studios’ Culver City, Calif., headquarters blew us away. As a Sony spokesperson told The Integrator this week, having more outlets for 3-D will spur more moviemakers to deliver 3-D content—and the more 3-D content there is, the more consumers will demand it in their homes.

So is 3-D capability something that integrators need to consider when specifying new systems? Let’s look at the prospects….

3-D 101

It helps to start with an understanding of the technologies now in use for 3-D. The 3-D technology currently found in such sets as Samsung’s HL61A750 61-inch DLP rear-projection TV relies on special electronic glasses with LCD shutters. The TV alternates left-eye frames and right-eye frames; for this to work well, the TV needs to have a refresh rate of 120 Hz, so it can show 60 Hz video to each eye. The shutters in the glasses alternate to block left-eye content from reaching the right eye, and right-eye content from reaching the left eye.

From a display standpoint, there’s no great technical hurdle to clear here—there are plenty of DLP and LCD displays now with a 120 Hz refresh rate. However, there’s no video format that currently supports 120 Hz, which is why existing 3-D TVs can perform their tricks only when attached to a computer, and only with video games designed for 3-D. Also, the glasses need to receive a timing signal so the left and right LCD shutters “close” and “open” at the correct times.

It’s possible all of this can be incorporated into the Blu-ray “standard,” and it’s likely we’ll see 3-D capability in at least some of the next generation of video game consoles. But for now, it’s all via computers and it’s all from video games.

OLD-SCHOOL OPTICAL

Theatrical 3-D systems now in use rely on a more organic, analog way of creating 3-D. An optical device that attaches to the front of the projector polarizes the alternate left-eye and right-eye frames in opposite circular patterns—clockwise for the right eye, counterclockwise for the left eye. Glasses with one clockwise-polarized lens and one counterclockwise-polarized lens prevent the right eye from seeing left-eye frames and the left eye from seeing right-eye frames.

The advantage of this method is that it uses polarized glasses that are more comfortable and hugely less expensive than the electronic shutter glasses used for today’s 3-D TVs. The downside is that it requires an optical adapter on the front of the projector that must be moved or deactivated when conventional 2-D content is shown.

How this type of system might translate to home use isn’t clear. Of course, moving anamorphic lenses have become the norm in high-end home theaters, so it’s at least conceivable that an optical 3-D adapter could work in with a home video projector. But it’s hard to believe that the likes of Sony and Panasonic would put their efforts into a scheme with such a small potential audience. What seems more likely is polarization done using electronic, rather than optical, processing.

THE BOTTOM LINE

The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) is putting together a task force to develop 3-D standards for the home. A company called Sensio, which has for a few years now been selling 3-D systems that use specially encoded video, is working to license a 3-D compression/decompression technology to manufacturers. (JVC used Sensio’s technology in its demo of 3-D at CEDIA.) It’s great to see people putting effort into 3-D, but important to realize these are just efforts, which may or may not bear fruit at some indeterminate point in the future.

Now that you’ve got every dimension, in brief, of what’s going on with 3-D, the future from your standpoint should be clear: It’s not something you should worry about right now. From the home theater standpoint, there are no standards. There don’t even seem to be any proposed standards.

For now, the best solution for integrators who want to offer their clients the excitement of 3-D is to get one of the 3-D TVs already on the marketplace, set up a computer gaming system to go with it, and let the kids have at it.

They’re going pink by auctioning off a special, one-of-a-kind, hot pink Prism 50 from their Karim Collection to support Breast Cancer Awareness. The auction will begin October 20th on eBay with 100% of the proceeds going to the American Cancer Society Making Strides Against Breast Cancer fund.

In November, a gang of sneaker-clad Omnimounters, along with their friends and family, will participate in the American Cancer Society Making Strides 5K walk at Tempe Town Lake in Arizona. You can contribute to the Omnimount team by clicking here or go to the Making Strides Home Page to track down a team that’s walking in your area.

Cable Makers To The Rescue

The most exciting solution to HDMI’s problems is a new cable made by PPC that features a locking mechanism compatible with standard HDMI jacks. The shield part of the plug has two tiny prongs which mate with two slots inside the jack. A button on the plug body releases the prongs and allows the plug to be extracted.

PPC’s distributor, Ottovonmo Productions, claims the plug requires 7 pounds of tension to pull loose, compared with 1.5 pounds for a conventional HDMI plug. That’s not enough to let you drag a Blu-ray player across the floor by its cable, but it should be enough to hold the cables in place against accidental disconnection when you’re shifting wires around in a rack, or when the maid is dusting.

Prices for the PPC locking HDMI cables are surprisingly reasonable: For a 6-footer, it’s $49.95 for the standard model and $106.95 for the premium model. Unfortunately, the PPC cables are presently available only in 3-, 6-, and 12-foot lengths. These lengths are adequate for use in equipment racks and for some compact systems, but integrators need 25- and 50-foot HDMI cables to run between a rack and a video display.

A more robust, yet more complicated, solution is a new type of HDMI plugs with an attachment screw. The attachment screws are typically long and knurled so they can be turned with the fingers, like the screws found on many 9-pin RS-232 cables. We noticed a few pieces of A/V gear at the recent CEDIA Expo with HDMI jacks that have threaded posts to accept these screws. For most pieces of gear, though, you’ll have to remove the screw that attaches the HDMI jack to the chassis of the A/V component, then twist the HDMI plug’s attachment screw into the hole. Not every HDMI jack is secured using an externally accessible screw, but of the six HDMI-equipped devices we had on hand, five would accept the attachment screw.

Our quick survey found four companies offering HDMI cables with attachment screws: Best Deal Cables, Gefen, Lindy, and Xantech.

Wireless Solutions

Another HDMI solution that emerged at CEDIA is wireless HDMI, which can be implemented either through radio transmission or through the power lines in the home. These products were out in force at CEDIA, and demonstrated to good effect with 1080i and 1080p signals in the manufacturers’ booths. However, veterans of the CEDIA Expo know that a successful show demo does not guarantee dependable performance in the home.

These wireless HDMI products have significant limitations. Power-line HDMI products are generally limited to use with AC outlets running off the same circuit breaker; a manufacturer recently told us that most are designed to jump across at most one breaker. Radio-based solutions can be used room-to-room, but they have limited range. And while radio waves will pass through walls, the signal strength drops significantly with each thickness of drywall, and drops precipitously with each cinder block or brick wall.

Wireless HDMI is also expensive: $799 to $1,499 for the radio-based models from Belkin and Gefen, $399 for the power line-based product from Audiovox. Only time (and field reports from integrators) will tell whether or not these technologies are robust enough for use in custom A/V installations.

And as anyone who dropped by CEDIA for even an hour knows, umpteen companies introduced new baluns that convert HDMI signals to run on Cat-5 computer network cable.

Checking The Specs

HDMI’s always had problems operating correctly through long cables; integrators have had to either cross their fingers and hope the cable would work (bad idea) or test the cable before installing it (better idea, but hardly convenient). Although at least one cable manufacturer, Monster, certifies its own HDMI cables to deliver digital video of a certain resolution and refresh rate, you’re still placing your trust in the manufacturer.

The Digital Performance Level (DPL) Program seeks to give you a much higher comfort level with the HDMI cables you install. DPL Labs is an independent testing facility run by Jeff Boccaccio, formerly of Tributaries Cable. Manufacturers submit their cables to DPL Labs, which for a fee tests and certifies them to meet performance levels from 1 (minimum acceptable performance) to 5 (maximum performance). DPL Labs seems to be very open about its testing procedure, and its ratings are well-explained; this level of transparency is a welcome change of pace in the world of HDMI.

We can’t say the HDMI problem is solved, but it seems likely that some of these products will resolve some of the HDMI issues that integrators are facing. And yeah, that’s the most heavily qualified, wussed-out statement you’ll read outside a political campaign, but given the persistence of HDMI’s problems, it’s the best we can do for now.

And the high-end projector manufacturers also seem to agree, because they rarely submit their products for review anymore.

The general excellence of today’s affordable projectors makes survival increasingly difficult for companies that specialize in high-end video projection. But the recent CEDIA Expo in Denver indicated that there are still possibilities in high-end projection—and opportunities for integrators to differentiate themselves, wow their customers, and turn a bigger profit.

Let’s get one thing out of the way now: High-end companies who try to claim their projectors offer superior picture quality compared to the more mass-market offerings from Epson, JVC, Mitsubishi, Optoma, Panasonic, Samsung, Sony, have succumbed to their own hype. Yes, five years ago, projectors from the big video companies generally looked inferior to the best of the boutique brands. But during the last two years or so, review after review after review has shown that many of the lower-priced projectors are competitive with the high-end stuff in almost every way. They often incorporate top-notch video processing chips and expertly engineered light engines, and many are calibrated at the factory so that all they need after installation is a fairly quick touch-up.

The one place where some of the high-end projectors beat out the cheap stuff is brightness. That’s important if you’re installing 10- or 15-foot screens, but most budget projectors deliver more than enough light to illuminate screens measuring 100 inches or smaller.

Of course, you might be able to sell your customers on the idea that the higher-end projector has superior picture quality, but be sure to disable the Internet service in their home when you do the installation. Otherwise, they might discover one of the forums where members delight in picking apart unsupportable claims made by dealers and manufacturers.

All that said, there’s plenty of room for high-end video projection in the future—if companies put their creativity into technical innovation rather than into marketing hype. At the CEDIA Expo, three companies in particular impressed us as making a strong case for their high-end projectors.

The first was Wolf Cinema, a new division of audio importer Sumiko. Despite the fact that Wolf’s “starter” model carries a suggested price of $60,000, and its most expensive models reach to $180,000, we heard no one scoff. The projectors’ unusual features—including xenon bulbs like those used in commercial cinemas, concealed anamorphic lenses, programmable zoom settings, and integral HVAC ducts—make them viable even at such stratospheric price points.

Ditto the Meridian 810 Reference Video System, which the company says delivers a 4096 x 2400 picture on screens as large as 24 feet. Given the projector’s $185,000 price tag, we doubt the 810 will find its way into many homes; its quality is wasted in anything less than a large personal screening room. Regardless, Meridian has generated a lot of excitement with this product. Even if a Meridian dealership never actually sells one of these monsters, they should take great pride in merely telling their customers about it.

We at The Integrator had all but written off the high-end single-chip DLP projector market until we saw ProjectionDesign’s Optix projector, part of its new Avielo line. The Optix runs $25,000, which is a lot for a single-chip model. However, it incorporates dual bulbs and dual color wheels for a super-punchy picture. At CEDIA it delivered an image so bright, deep, and detailed it left no doubt in our minds that any customer would be impressed.

The efforts of these companies show that high-end video projection still offers great opportunities. The rewards will go to those companies who innovate, and who focus on creating products that will excite their dealers and customers. Those who instead rely on suspicious claims of superior performance that they’re not willing to demonstrate by submitting their products for independent review—well, they’ll end up in the same place that HD-DVD went.

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.