CurtPalme.com Home Theater Forum

**Curt Palme** · Posted: Wed Nov 13, 2013 2:53 am Post subject: CEDIA EXPO 2013 Show Report

I've been meaning to write this since I got back, and since I'm sending out a CRT projector mailout shortly, I'll put some of my thoughts into this thread. I took over 200 pictures, about 50 were duds, so if you think I should throw a picture up of something you haven't seen below, feel free to post and I'll see if I have a picture.

CEDIA was in Denver, Colorado this year, at the convention center. There was a bewildering number of vendors from every facet of the home theater industry, and as usual, there was the interesting, the over the top ridiculous, and the routine. Forgive me for sounding a bit cynical, but after having attended any number of trade shows over the last 30 years, yet another ceiling or wall speaker by yet another company claiming significant advancements over their competitors, yet seeing the same 'made in China' sticker on the back of said speaker, I tend to be a bit jaded. More on this in a few posts....

Also, keep in mind that while I deal primarily with CRT projectors, I do not generally get involved with many of the products shown here, so please visit the manufacturers' sites for more information, or to find a local dealer for most of what is posted here.

In no particular order, here are a few of the pictures.

By far the largest booth at the show was Crestron. It towered over many others, and yes, Crestron can indeed control everything.. including the kitchen sink. Crestron had a large amount of full color touch screens in all sizes and shapes. Crestron is indeed a very flexible system, but it is also challenging to program, and many small home theater systems simply don't need the flexibility of what Crestron is capable of. On the other hand, if you've got a monster home, and want everything to be integrated and automated, Crestron may indeed be the way to go.

**Curt Palme** · Posted: Wed Nov 13, 2013 3:02 am Post subject:

Here's a bit of the speaker overkill that I was talking about. How many in ceiling speaker brands does the world need?

**Curt Palme** · Posted: Wed Nov 13, 2013 3:09 am Post subject:

Sticking with speakers for a minute, new to me was this 'in ground' subwoofer concept. I've seen this in Disneyland and Vegas before, but hadn't seen it being marketed to the home stereo customer. Well built, but let's hope you're a decent distance from the neighbors!

**AnalogRocks** · Posted: Wed Nov 13, 2013 3:13 am Post subject:

Loos like the air cleaner off a 5 ton truck.

**Curt Palme** · Posted: Wed Nov 13, 2013 3:17 am Post subject:

And the last bit of the speakers, here are the outrageously expensive....

**AnalogRocks** · Posted: Wed Nov 13, 2013 3:19 am Post subject:

Large speakers. Those for HT?

**Curt Palme** · Posted: Wed Nov 13, 2013 3:38 am Post subject:

Switching to outrageous amplifiers, here are a couple of big amps. Of special interest is the Boulder Audio amp, that is pure Class A amplification. I met the designer of said amp, who happened to be standing beside it. A gorgeous amplifier if I say so myself, but I'm not quite sure how practical a 6000 watt service is for this one amp.

**Curt Palme** · Posted: Wed Nov 13, 2013 3:45 am Post subject:

I finally saw the Darbee product first hand, including several models of units not released yet. What I found interesting is that all the reviews online that I'd read are accurate, the difference that the Darbee makes is subtle, but noticeable. What I found far more remarkable is the difference that the Darbee made to Xrays displayed on a flat screen as well as a CCTV system image that was very hazy.
Interestingly, speaking with a Darbee rep, they feel that they will not be able to market the Darbee to the medical industry due to the hoops they'll have to jump through. Too bad, as I found that the XRay images through the Darbee were very clear compared to the original.

**Curt Palme** · Posted: Wed Nov 13, 2013 4:00 am Post subject:

Some interior shots of the major name brand receivers.

thewolfman · Joined: 28 Mar 2011 Posts: 1311 Location: Sweden

Finally some new Darbee models in the horizon! Smile

**Curt Palme** · Posted: Wed Nov 13, 2013 3:43 pm Post subject:

OK, some more fun type shots before the projector discussion! From the top picture:

Planar/Runco had a really nice looking video wall with small gaps between the panels.

JL Audio brings the bass!

Need a mirror with an LCD screen behind it? You can have several versions at CEDIA!

Even more HDMI matrix switchers

Boutique speakers from Opalum

Evolv showed a 50m HDMI cable, claiming faster electrons than anyone else..

There were many HDMI matrixes on display for switching and routing, Zektor was one of them.

The smell of hot metal filled the air at Bad Dog drillbits

Leather HT seats were on display by a couple of companies.

HK-Steve · Posted: Wed Nov 13, 2013 3:50 pm Post subject:

Thanks Curt for all the pics and comments,
Great to see.

One day I will get to see it in person the spectacle of CEDIA

**Curt Palme** · Posted: Wed Nov 13, 2013 3:50 pm Post subject:

OK, projectors!

The talk of course at CEDIA was the 4K panels and projectors. Frankly, I was more interested in the projectors, but here are a couple of pictures of 4K flat panels, including the new Sony curved LCD screen. I'm not quite sure why the need is for a curved screen, I mean the Cinemascope effect really isn't that noticeable on a 42" screen, but that's Sony....

Taking screen shots of a 4K flat panel was somewhat pointless, but all the major manufacturers were there displaying 4K sets.

**Curt Palme** · Posted: Wed Nov 13, 2013 4:16 pm Post subject:

The two main display booths that I saw demoing 4K projectors were Sony and JVC. Since it was a trade show, both booths had flaws and ambient light coming into them, but both did a good job of doing the best they could under the circumstances.

Since both rooms were relatively dark, I couldn't take pictures of the screen shots (again, somewhat pointless trying to discern a difference on your computer monitor), but I would say that the Sony 4K had a slight edge over the JVC, but that could have been the source material. As of this writing, there are no 4K players to the best of my knowledge, and Sony packages their 4K projectors with a hockey puck type server with some demo files on it. Anyone that has a 4K projector at this point needs to be satisfied with a 1080p source upscaled to the 4K display.

Now, Sony had about a 3 minute clip of a carnival in Rio de Janeiro. It looked stunning. Then Sony switched to an upscaled 1080p BluRay, and yes, it didn't look quite as good as the 4K source, but without a direct A/B comparison between two identical video clips, one running at 1080p and the other at 4K, how can you really tell if the 4K source was indeed better looking?

JVC had a similar setup, although on what I think was a slightly smaller screen, and as with Sony, had 4K material on a computer. Switching clips took a looong time to load into the system, and it reminded me of the first generation BluRay players, that took 2-3 minutes to load the opening screen.

Now, I ran into a prominent AV person at the Lumagen booth by chance on the last day of the show. I won't name him, but he's been in the industry for years, and he and I had communicated on occasion in the past. He's on the cutting edge of the technology, and knows a lot more about the industry than I do, since I concentrate on the trailing edge of technology with CRT projectors.

We were discussing 4K technology... or better, let me rephrase, Jim from Lumagen and he were discussing 4K, I was listening, trying to keep up, but the bottom line is, this person says that the whole 4K signal standard has not been set in stone yet, and he believes that a 4K projector purchased today may be a boat anchor within a couple of years, depending on what happens with the 4K protocol. Now, we saw this somewhat about 10 years ago, when the first generation Sony Qualia 004 (a $27K machine at the time) couldn't display a 1080p signal, and needed a $3500 upgrade to do so. While I know a lot of people have purchased a 4K projector already, I didn't see a huge difference between 1080p and the 4K signal, and would recommend that people hold off until some source material becomes available.

Below are pictures of the Sony and JVC booths and some of the Sony 4K projectors. More about 4K in the next post.

**Curt Palme** · Posted: Wed Nov 13, 2013 4:29 pm Post subject:

More about 4K projectors. It was interesting to see that a lot of the screen manufacturers, including Draper, Da-Lite and Stewart, opted to use large industrial Christie or Digital Projection projectors as their source projectors. While priced out of range of the average consumer, they definitely were kings of the show.

Digital Projection had a very impressive display with a couple of small rooms where I saw a couple of LED driven projectors. It's the first time I saw a front projector with an LED light source, and while not the brightest at the show, they were certainly bright enough for HT use. More on Digital Projection in the next post.

**Curt Palme** · Posted: Wed Nov 13, 2013 4:35 pm Post subject:

Now, I was asked to drop by the JBL Synthesis demo room, as it was supposed to be the best sounding room at the show. Well yes indeed it was... because there was $135,000 worth of speakers, amps and processing equipment powering the room. To give JBL credit, they do a lot of room modeling at the factory and interact a lot with the installation.design company to make sure the system sounds good.. OK, no... GREAT. There's nothing to post picture-wise about the room, as it was acoustically well treated, and all of the speakers were hidden, but I will reveal this:

The projector in the Synthesis room was a Digital Projection unit. At first glance the image before the show started was fine, but then I noticed significant misalignment of the panels as shown below. I took the pictures from about a 12' distance. To be fair, I didn't notice this misconvergence on the projectors at the DP booth, but the poor alignment at the JBL booth distracted me from the presentation. The misalignment shown below is accurate, it's not due to my camera.

I have also seen panel misalignment on a recently installed Sony 4K projector at a customer's home, so there are flaws, even in the high end digitals. If I had purchased any of these projectors, as an end user I would have immediately rejected them.

**Curt Palme** · Posted: Wed Nov 13, 2013 4:56 pm Post subject:

Last main topic for this thread: Home control systems. Again, there were countless control systems for home automation and media. Crestron, Control 4 and AMX all had large booths, with a bewildering amount of control panels, touch screens, and Iphone/smartphone interfaces. While all of these are fine for complex control systems for whole-house operations, I was more interested in the smaller control systems, either for a home theater, but now that I'm back into installing commercial sound systems, I am also looking for a simple Iphone control system to control a commercial sound system rack.

Again, there were a number of companies displaying smartphone controls, such as Sookbox, RTI and Irule. After listening to a couple of the presentations, I will be checking out the Irule as an inexpensive way to control any number of systems, both for home and commercial use. I'll order a starter kit shortly, and will report back as I get familiar with it how it works.

**Curt Palme** · Posted: Wed Nov 13, 2013 4:58 pm Post subject:

Finally, I need to post a picture of the chief bottle washer at Lumagen, Jim Peterson. Many of you here own a Lumagen Radiance, a world class video processing product. I've met Jim a couple of times now, and he's a downright great guy, with extensive knowledge of video processing and the pros and cons of HDMI.