Sports Bar, Movie Theater, Night Club All in One
Located down in the basement of this home is a little something for everyone. Actually, make that a lot something for everyone. It looks like it’s just for billiards and home theater, but this large room is set up for much more—theater, billiards, bar, disco, karaoke and sports video wall.
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Acoustical Treatments Can Maximize Revenue Flow
Most experts agree that the use of acoustical treatments is the preferred way to deal with sound issues for a number of reasons.
Acoustical treatments offer more than just better sound; they also provide builders and electronics installers a substantial upgrade path that includes design, materials and labor fees, which can greatly contribute to increased revenue flow.
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Home Technologies & Green Designs Helping Builder Profits
Despite the current economy and decline in the housing market, builders have not abandoned home technologies, according to new findings in the 7th Annual State of the Builder Technology Market Study released by the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA). The study found that a majority of builders remain committed to home technology and recognize its importance in marketing new homes. According to the CEA, consumer desire for electronics helped preserve builder revenue in the current housing market. Seven in ten builders (71 percent) report that technology helped them preserve home renovation revenue that might otherwise have declined this year because of the down economy – an increase of ten percentage points from last year.
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Beware of using high-voltage contractors for low-voltage work.
Coordinating the work of many contractors is the bane of most home builders’ existence. So it’s no surprise that some would like one contractor to do double duty, where possible. When electrical contractors say they can do low-voltage, structured wiring work, builders may be tempted to give them the business. After all, wiring is wiring, right?
Not necessarily, says Ken Smith, president of CEDIA, the Custom Electronic Design and Installation Association. “Unless your electrical contractor has an experienced low-voltage team on board, you’re taking a risk if you use them for low-voltage work,” he says.
Smith says he was recently hired to fix a serious problem caused by an unwitting electrician. The client wanted music in several rooms of a home, including the bedroom. The electrician’s first mistake was to use thermostat wire, which would have worked but was far from optimal. In general, Smith says electricians are not always aware of low-voltage wiring issues, such as problems caused by pulling speaker wire near high-voltage wire.
At the client’s home, the more serious flaw was the system design, which included left and right bedroom speakers in adjoining rooms. It was clear to Smith that the electrician had little idea of how to create a multi-source, distributed audio system. “If someone wanted to listen to Top 40, everyone in the house had to either listen to the same music or turn off their speakers,” says Smith. “A low-voltage [custom] electronics specialist would never wire a house like that.”
Read Full Story: 5 Things You Should Know About Hiring Installers.
ChyTV for Digital Signage
Addressing the booming digital signage and security alert markets, Chyron Corporation, the world’s leading provider of broadcast graphics solutions, has introduced ChyTV™, an advanced television graphics system developed for information, advertising, and security alert display. Cost effective, yet powerful and flexible, ChyTV is scalable for individual stand-alone digital signage and security alert applications as well as large world-wide networks.
“By combining its expertise in broadcast with the latest advancements in information technology, Chyron has designed ChyTV to be reliable, easy to install and operate, and extremely cost effective,” said Chyron CEO Michael Wellesley-Wesley. “ChyTV is perfect for a variety of applications including video messaging, retail point-of-purchase signage, institutional promotion and communications, and with ChyTV’s Alert package, is well suited for mission critical broadcast environments such as government and military security alerts.”
The ChyTV system is easy to configure in a display system or integrated into an existing video infrastructure. The graphic and text information coupled with programmable audio clips may be displayed on a single TV screen or broadcast throughout the facility. Easy and intuitive creation, scheduling, distribution and display of graphic content to flat panel and television monitors is possible with ChyTV’s dynamic display controller. Users can opt to show either full screen images or video graphics and text combined with an external video feed. Video regions can be resized and positioned from page to page with smooth dynamic transitions, while graphic and text regions can be assigned to surround or overlay the video window. Audio WAV files may be integrated seamlessly for sound clips and audio alerts.
Fast graphics creation is made possible by employing the output from common authoring programs such as Microsoft PowerPoint, Adobe Photoshop, or by selecting one of the supplied templates. Information crawls, active data updates such as time and temperature, or full page slides from HTML sources can be quickly and easily inserted into the graphic regions. All graphic pages can then be scheduled from a simple, intuitive scheduling interface, and added to a Playlist for either automatic looping or date/time playout via a standard Compact Flash interface, USB, or Ethernet connection. This self-contained operation requires no external computer connection and ensures utmost reliability and ease of use.