Award-Winning Home Automation & Electronic Control Systems Integrators in Michigan

Say - what is all this ‘cue-sticks’ stuff, anyways? Well, acoustic treatments help control the sound in the room. You might visualize sound from a loudspeaker or subwoofer kind-of like dropping a quarter into a bathtub full of water. It drops in, making waves on the surface that move outward and then bounce of the sides of the tub, reflecting around for quite awhile. If the waves were sound, that first wave from the quarter directly hitting your ear will make a nice, clear, intelligible sound.

The problem comes in when the rest of the waves bouncing around continue to strike your ear, from multiple directions, delayed by varying amounts of time. Although our brain is astoundingly good at figuring out which signal arrived first and understanding the basic content of the sound, it gets a little confused about which direction it came from, and the true tonal quality and subtleties.

The fact is, the vast majority of what we consider to be audio fidelity is completely morphed and man-handled by the air between you and the speaker, along with all the reflections that merrily bounce off the walls, floor,  and ceiling. When you think about it, it’s amazing we can understand anything at all. To figure it out, humans use a three-piece pattern recognition system consisting of the left ear, right ear, and a grey ball of mush called our ‘brain’. Try this sometime in a noisy, crowded, indoor space: tightly close off one of your ears with a finger. All of a sudden, the environment sounds much more random, and the brain has a hard time distinguishing sounds and figuring out where they came from. T

here are two primary ways of controlling all this chaos in a theater room. The first method has to do with controlling the dispersion of the speaker itself. If you don’t want reflections from the ceiling, then don’t send sound in that direction in the first place, silly. This might be accomplished with types of horns, baffles, or tall and skinny line array speakers. The second method handles the sound where it strikes the wall or boundary.

Absorption is one method of dealing with the waves as they approach theater room surfaces. Most absorption materials, such as fiberglass or cotton panels, are porous to a varying degree so that sound pressure waves must push their way through, bounce off the wall, and then push their way back out. All this resistance knocks the energy out of the wave, maybe even stopping it. Imagine riding a bicycle down a sidewalk near the beach. You can move along quite easily unless you veer off into the sand, where you slow down quite quickly or even stop due to the friction of pushing through the softer material.

Diffusion is another method of keeping sinister reflections from gittin’ ya. But I’ll defer the de-confusing diffusion discussion until another not-too-distant discourse.
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Sean Hotchkiss
shotchkiss@grandhome.com

Speaking of wars…  Akin to the pushing between Coke and Pepsi, McDonald’s and Burger King, or Ford and Chevy, the two control systems manufacturers AMX and Crestron have been serious competitors for a couple of decades. Recent press releases reveal that for some, the stakes have become very high indeed.

Although GHA normally uses Crestron gear, really either of these two systems can provide truly elegant control of almost anything that can be controlled. Much bantering goes back and forth between the two camps regarding differences, capabilities, reliability, yadda, yadda. When it comes right down to it, if you’re not enjoying a great movie a few moments after pushing the “Watch DVD” buttton on your custom remote control or shiny wireless touchpanel,  the problem most likely has to do with the initial design or programming. Systems like AMX  and Crestron come out of the box with absolutely nothing programmed into them - no buttons, no colors, no settings, no fancy intuitive logic. Everything that happens when you press a button (or not) is totally due to the integrator’s application and programming of the product.

The insider advice says - don’t shop for product brands or logos. Choose the best integration company. One that does very thorough client interviews, project scope definition, engineering layouts and diagrams (before work starts), continuous project management, and exhaustive quality control on every project. Come to think of it, I know of a great group of people that just happens to fit the description…
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Sean Hotchkiss
shotchkiss@grandhome.com

War is so messy. Mayhem, destruction, and casualties. The same has been true of the great format conflict between the two opposing camps of HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. Both vying for the privilege of replacing the ubiquitous video DVD as the next generation of digital high-definition movie media, the struggle had been going on for two years. Primarily the big beef was between Sony (Blu-Ray), and Toshiba (HD-DVD). Similar to the epic videotape clash of the late 70’s and early 80’s, only one media format would ultimately come out on top. Avenging for the death of the superior BetaMax videocassette, Sony’s perseverance paid off with Blu-Ray, and won over the heart of the market.

The Blu-Ray format is truly superior in that it uses blue lasers to bounce off the disc’s reflective layers. Blue light has shorter wavelengths, therefore allowing smaller dots on the substrate, which equals - more data! It has taken many decades for manufacturing technology to advance enough to mass produce small blue lasers and LEDs. Besides, blue is just a really cool color when associated with techy stuff. BlueTooth for your cell phone stuffed in your ear, blue lights on your satellite receiver - so soothing…

So now is the time we can go ahead and upgrade our home theaters and media rooms with a brand-new, high-definition, all-digital, uber-blue, movie watching MACHINE! Just make sure your fancy LCD TV has an HDMI connection for the highest resolution signal possible. Yeah, I know… but you really need a bigger one anyway - don’t you?
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Sean Hotchkiss
shotchkiss@grandhome.com