The race is on to see who will be first to market with a Dolby Atmos-enabled in-wall speaker. As noted in yesterday’s report, SpeakerCraft is staging an impressive demo of its working Atmos 100 Height Module here at CEDIA 2015. A few aisles away, Triad has its own Atmos-enabled module, the cleverly named InWall Height Module.
If you hate the way AC outlet and light switch wall plates look, Canadian design company, BOCCI, can change your outlook on outlets with its series of in-wall mounting plates.
Beale Street Audio’s Sonic Vortex technology is the secret sauce behind—actually, inside—the company’s in-ceiling speakers. Sonic Vortex technology turns the speaker’s integrated back box into “a compact, integrated, tuned cabinet that offers a ‘twist’ on Ported Transmission Line design by optimizing air movement” to produce stronger, deeper bass response more efficiently.
You can’t walk too far through the aisles of CEDIA without running into an in-wall/ceiling speaker—and nearly all of them look alike. James Loudspeaker takes a different approach with its Small Aperture architectural speakers—like the $1,500 63SA-4—which produces full-range sound from a 3 x 3-inch square (or round) cutout in the wall (or ceiling). The cutout is, of course, neatly concealed by an inconspicuous flush-mount grille.
Perfectionist speaker brand Revel is taking a good-better-best approach to marketing, with the new Concerta 2 occupying the entry-level part of the spectrum, joining the step-up Performa 3 and step-way-up Salon.
The big news from the Integra front is that all the surround receivers announced at 2015 CES now support HDMI 2.0a, accommodating the metadata that drives HDR, a significant improvement to Ultra HD.
JVC announced three new projectors building on its E-Shift technology. This process accepts a 4K source but displays it from a 2K chip. In doing so, however, is shifts each pixel slightly within each frame in a way that produces an effective halfway point between true 4K and 1080p.
I admit that I hadn’t been too impressed by this process when I reviewed one of the first E-Shift designs a couple of years back. But the process has been continuously refined...
Quantum Media showed its full RGB 4K laser projector. The booth was too dark to get a good shot of it, but it’s large (and loud) enough to deserve a small projection booth of its own. In its 4K guise it will cost you between $150,000 and $200,000...
According to Sony, an expected 100,000,000 4K displays are expected to be sold worldwide by 2017. Not all of these will come from Sony, but the company certainly covets its share. And while flat screen sets will make up the bulk of these sales, CEDIA is not a show at which a mass of new flat screen sets is introduced. That’s CES. The displays featured at CEDIA are invariably projectors.
And Sony showed three new 4K projectors at the show...