Posted by: jon.m
on May 1, 2009
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.
Posted by: jon.m
on Apr 23, 2009
In the Smart Home Pro world of custom integration, we've been dealing with digital video and audio signals for a while, now. As with most in our industry, we've had our share of frustrations with "changing" standards.
The future is most definitely digital, even though analog signals won't go away for a long time. But the industry's investments and development are applied toward digital technologies. The biggest player in digital signals is HDMI (High Definition Multimedia Interface). If you've shopped for TVs recently, you see all televisions come with HDMI inputs now.
Aside from some early growing pains, HDMI is fairly reliable. One big advantage to HDMI is a single wire carries both video and audio, in high quality.
Posted by: jon.m
on Apr 8, 2009
Just what are the differences between "digital" signals and "analog" signals? (And why do I care?)
If you're curious to learn something about analog and digital video and audio, read on. This could get just a little technical, so be forewarned.
We know the future lies in digital audio and video. The process started over two decades ago with the introduction of the Compact Disc (CD) audio recording format. Vinyl albums are analog and CDs are digital. Video made the change from VHS tapes (analog) to DVDs (digital). Most folks will recognize the improvement in sound and video quality associated with these changes. (This is the why do I care? answer – the quality is better!)
Smart Home Pro is now an authorized 
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