Welcome to the second session in AV Enthusiast’s AV 101 series, What is a Smart Home? We hear the term “smart home” thrown around in the media, in web articles and on the news. It is used when talking about energy efficiency, home automation and convenience. These are all correct, but are only parts of what makes a home “smart” Today we will try and help you understand how all of these things can be combined to offer you a connected home environment that offers convenience, flexibility, and an enhanced lifestyle in an easy to use interface.

We recently installed an audio video system for Hudson Alpha Institute for Biotechnology for their educational department. The room we installed called for audio reinforcement, distributed video, video conferencing with ability to stream all A/V sources, audience microphones, presenter microphone 1) HDMI & VGA w/audio jack and the ability to do any function of the room with no more than 1-button press.

    For the audio reinforcement system we utilized EV RE90H ceiling microphones, EV RE92TX lapel microphones, EV RE2 receivers, EV PA4150L amplifier and EV EVID series in-ceiling speakers. All audio is routed through a Clear One DSP.

 The video switching is handled by a Vanco matrix HDMI switch. Feeding the Vanco are 3) Vaddio HD cameras (Vaddio ZoomSHOT, Vaddio WideSHOT and Vaddio CeilingVIEW HD-18 DocCAM), 1) Mac Mini, 1) Apple TV and 1) Atlona HDMI/VGA w/audio extender/scaler to handle the auxiliary jack on the desk.

The Vanco feeds all of these sources to 1) ASK Proxima projector, 1) Samsung 50" panel, 1) desk mounted 22" Samsung panel and the Vaddio A/V bridge which feeds the Mac Mini for video conferencing. Control/automation is handled with an RTI XP-8s processor, iPad and the RTI iPad panel. Everything resides in a custom finished gloss white Middle Atlantic EWR series wall hanging rack.