CEDIA 2013

Qmotion came to CEDIA in a big way this year, showing off an elaborate booth of the companies various shading solutions. Prime among the products on display was the range of wireless, battery-operated roller shades with several unique design features, including easy battery replacement without needing to remove the shade from the brackets, a claimed battery life of “up to five years”, and a snap-on spline attached to the fabric that allows for easy cleaning or replacement of the fabric.

Kaleidescape Brings Movies to Life With Cinema One Kaleidescape demonstrated their latest product, the Cinema One, which brings the movie and music streaming performance of the company’s regarded Premier line to a far more affordable – sub $4,000 – price point. (Expect a full review of the Cinema One from Darryl Wilkinson.) Kaleidescape also had one of the sweetest booth giveaways at the Expo, drawing a card each day at 4 PM and giving the lucky winner a Cinema One! Also new from the company is the addition of cover art view to their awesome iPad control app. Now users can browse through their movie and music collections using the same cover art view that had previously only been available on the on-screen GUI. Want to shuffle the titles around? Simply give your Pad a shake.

In-wall or in-ceiling speakers require there to be a minimum depth to mount into, but if you have a narrow cavity you can be out-of-luck. Or worse, out-of-luck AND with a big hole in your wall or ceiling. Fortunately, Revel has just the speaker, the new low-profile version of its 2-series in-wall/in-ceiling speaker. Designed to fit in a depts. Of only 2.8-inches these speakers will fit where others won’t. Fortunately, you won’t be skimping on sound just because you are going shallow, and you can choose between a 6 ½-inch or 8-inch woofers. Both models feature high-quality drivers including aluminum cone woofers and 1-inch aluminum-dome tweeters. They include the popular micro-bezel design and use multiple neodymium magnets to securely hold the grills in place.

Two-year old RipWave has come out with the ultimate media streaming machine. Not only can it rip your Blu-rays and DVDs to its hard drive, you can add a cable card or off-air antenna and use its hard drives as a DVR. It can also stream videos from most any video streaming website using the PlayOn server or stream to other devices using the Plex DLNA server.

Models names follow the surf theme. They are offering a dedicated movie player model, the Tsunami for $2000. The media player line can also play music and photos and includes the Stingray with 3 to 12 TB of storage, the Barracuda, and the Orca with 9 TB up to 30 TB of storage. The software menus are as impressive as the hardware features. Users can choose from a number of graphic menus from a carousel to a grid to extensive information about a movie that displays metadata from 7 different sources. The menu options make it one of the truly intuitive devices as each user can choose the view that is easiest for them to use.

The Ripwave is the best media server I've seen yet. Let's see if it performs as well as its first impression.

The RMB-1585 is a new flagship multi-channel amp from Rotel. High current class AB topology delivers 200 watts to each of its five channels via two massive toroidal transformers. Rotel credits the use of a total of 120,000 µF of British-made BHC “Slit Foil capacitance and the use of six output transistors per channel for the RMB-1585’s power delivery capability. This 80 pound behemoth offers both RCA and XLR inputs. From my perspective the $2,999 pricing is in line with separates of this quality and in many ways it’s a bargain!

Sonance announced Soundbar, a non-powered center channel with adjustable widths meant to exactly match your TV. Soundbar are available in two sizes, one to match TV in the 50” to 65” diagonal range, the other for TV’s in the 70” to 80” diagonal range. However both are true three-way designs, offering six 4.5” Kevlar + Nomex lower frequency drivers and three 4.5” coaxial (midrange / tweeter) drivers. The units ship with all required mounting hardware. Pricing has not been finalized but expect at or under $2,000.

Sonance invented the architectural speaker category in 1983 and this year the company is showing more products - 50 - than ever before. The company launched the Visual Performance series back in 2007 and the aesthetic with micro-bezel and magnetic grille was a real revolution to the in-wall speaker design. This year, Sonance has given the Visual Performance series a radical sonic makeover resulting in in-wall speakers that the company says will sound as good as freestanding speakers.