Crestron just released its line of 4-Series control systems, marketing them as the fastest, and most secure the company has ever built. With 15 times faster processing and up to four times more memory, the 4-Series includes the ability to manage anything with a network connection, including AV, voice and data, lighting, security, streaming media services and HVAC. Crestron says the 4-Series is the only control platform that offers the ability to unify these technologies on application appropriate hardware or software, from small appliances, all the way up to enterprise-grade virtual servers. So, individual rooms can be managed with the MC4 and RMC4 models; floors or complex rooms with CP4 / CP4-N, or the AV4, PRO4 and DIN-AP4 (releasing in the near future); and buildings and campuses with the server-based Crestron Virtual Control platform (clearly aimed at the current QSC lineup).

As a company that embraces open standards, the 4-Series enables programmers to use standard development tools to create C# programs, with SDKs made publicly available on nuget.org. Crestron has also made it possible to upgrade from the 3-Series to the 4-Series control platform. Programs created for the 3-Series will run on the 4-Series with no need for code changes, just a recompile.

The complete 4-Series product is here.