Smart Home Pro

Smart Home Pro designers guide your best placement for a video display (projector screen or television monitor) and speakers, and will even work with your architect or interior designer if you're planning a new indoor or outdoor entertainment space.

Speakers and display placements involve many considerations – call us for a free in-home (or business) consultation.

The remainder of the equipment, such as satellite receivers, amplifiers, media servers, power management, switching controllers, Blu-Ray or DVD players, theater lighting controllers and so on present a number of location options.

In general, Smart Home Pro prefers to locate this equipment in a rack, centrally located.   With this approach, you can share equipment among several viewing locations, and simplifying equipment upgrades.

Some exceptions include:

• CD, DVD and Blu-Ray players, where access to the disk tray is important to the viewing room;
• Laptop computer audio and video feeds;
• Office equipment such as fax and printers;

The emerging digital video distribution question raises new questions.   HDMI cables have a distance limit, based largely on your digital video requirements (480p, 1080i, 1080p, 1080p with Deep Color).   The least expensive answer is to keep your 1080p sources close to your displays.

Crestron's Digital Media is a great answer to HDMI distribution, solving many distance and HDMI switching problems.  Look for a weblog entry on this topic in the near future.