Hi, everyone! Welcome to my wrap-up of Day One of CEDIA Expo/CIX 2024. First of all, I’ll say this was a weird day for me as someone who normally has back-to-back appointments. Trust me; I still had appointments. But I got to choose all of them for myself!

First thing’s first. I attended a really cool demo the night before the show at QAV’s Experience Center. (This is an integrator in Centennial, Colorado.) First of all, it was so fun getting to catch up with some of the journalists on the CI side of things. But second, I got to hear what L-Acoustics speakers do in a resi setting. I’ve never gotten to do that before! And if you aren’t listening to L-Acoustics speakers in your home theater via the movie you downloaded on Kaleidescape, you’re missing out. It made my teeth rattle. In a good way! @CIs how do I add a home theater to my studio apartment? Let me know.

Second: I attended a Sony press conference before the show started and learned about TWO! New! BRAVIA projectors. The BRAVIA Projector 8 and 9 have a respective 3400-lumen and 2700-lumen laser light source and a 4K native SXRD panel.

Alright, now to the show floor. I attended a portion of the smart home media tour on the CEDIA Expo show floor today, and I had a great time. I learned about how Creston’s DM NVX can take an analog signal (from a record player or something), convert it to a digital signal and send it all over your house. Simple, right? Wrong! The longer you extend an analog signal, even if you convert it to digital at some point, the worse it sounds. People on Reddit are ready to threaten my life because of my 10-foot dual RCA cable, and like … they have a point. But when I asked all the questions I wanted to know, like would you ground the cable in this situation, the Crestron rep said no.

This isn’t the first time I’ve seen a solution like this, but I do think this was one of the best explanations of that technology I got.

A quick aside to say that the vibe of this show is SO DIFFERENT than an InfoComm or ISE. I talked to Jeremy Sternhagen over at Planar about this; I told him I was still very much trying to gain an understanding of the CI channel and he gave me the best description: CIs are people who have wanted to do this and work on these projects their whole lives True blue tinkerers. In the same way that commercial integrators quite often fall into their jobs, CIs prep and plan for theirs. CIs are much more inquisitive up front to manufacturers about pricing. I asked about the price for each product I saw today. Most people answered with a real number.

The last big thing I have for you today is that I had a lot of fun at the Stealth Audio and the Waterfall Audio booths. I’ve said it before: I’m no AV genius. But I love the art of audio and I love to watch people seemingly bend physics to accomplish what they want. I was very impressed by Waterfall’s Niagra line, with three options depending on price range and what sound you want in particular.

That’s enough from me for today. Talk soon!