IN THE ZONE

IN THE ZONE: BRINGING STELLAR AUDIO TO THE WHOLE HOME

Ekin Binal, Director of Audio and Video Products at Crestron, argues the music is where it all starts.

In my mind a true home automation system starts with excellent distributed audio. Of course, as Director of Audio and Video Products at Crestron Electronics, I am a bit biased — it’s my belief that every integration starts with sound. As a fan of music, I am passionate about building products that are designed to improve the distribution of audio in different types of spaces. The entire audio path from source to our ears is only as good as the weakest link in the chain. One could spend thousands on the best amplifiers, speakers, and cables and have the experience be limited by the compressed audio track from a popular streaming service. Fortunately, over the last few years there have been several surprising breakthroughs from major audio music services to improve the quality of the audio experience. Even companies such as Amazon and Apple have made significant investments to try and differentiate their music services by offering higher resolution audio and more immersive audio formats. This is great news!

Even so, with better audio at the source, perhaps we don’t notice that improved audio quality in some of the environments we are listening in – whether it’s background audio in a lobby, or on headphones on a noisy commute — but when we come back home and turn on our multiroom audio systems, the difference becomes apparently clear – or, at least, it should. It is my position that we need to demand better audio quality in all spaces that we enjoy and experience audio in. At Crestron, when we set out to build our next generation 8-zone streaming network amplifier, that effort was not driven by what audio technology could we squeeze into eight zones, rather it was driven by how many great sounding zones could we fit in a rack mounted enclosure. Excellent content is now available from the music providers to maximise the audio experience, the hardware has been there for years, and so it would be a disservice by not providing the means to produce great quality sound across the board. Immersive audio formats like Dolby Atmos and Sony 360 Reality Audio are being embraced by music services and it is only a matter of time before our customers are going to demand that the same immersive experience provided by their headphones is carried to their shared listening spaces in their homes. This not only secures the value of a quality surround sound room for home theatre purposes, but it creates the opportunity for more rooms with more speakers than ever before.

People love music, its a strong driver to buy

DEVELOP UNDERSTANDING

As always, it’s important to understand the customer and his or her needs – is this an audiophile that pours a double of Scotch and sits down in a dedicated audio room? Or is this a customer that has a crowded and active household that runs from room to room? The beauty of today’s technology is that we can provide a solution that caters to all these individual needs. With advances like lossless and real-time network distributed audio (as we find in Crestron DM NAX) we can distribute high quality audio across the network so you can build a dedicated audio room while also serving up audio on a multizone networked amplifier in parallel in many other rooms – all listening to the same (or different) content in the same stunning quality. The infrastructure is there for us to lay the piping for great audio, and we should always aspire to do so. The amplifiers and speakers can be the variables in the overall system design for the customer. Better doesn’t necessarily mean they need to be more expensive, but the types of amplifiers, speakers, control, and room treatments must be thought through to maximise the audio quality for the space. That is where you step in. As the custom installation expert you can guide the client on how they can get great sounding audio in as many zones as they want. The automation and AV industry has done a fantastic job in designing a huge library of products that can stream, distribute, control, amplify, and output fantastic audio for rooms of all types.

So, in short, when we talk about multiroom audio we need to flip the narrative and ask: Why wouldn’t you listen to great music in every room? We now have the technology, and you have the skillset to provide your customers with a stellar experience in every zone of their homes.

Music has the power to move people perhaps more than any other art form

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