Our Takeaways from the 2018 CEDIA Expo: What You Need to Know

At Sound & Theater, our team is all about providing homeowners throughout the Buffalo area with best-in-class home technology solutions.

Of course, technologies are rapidly improving on an annual basis – and that means our team consistently needs to stay ahead of the curve to continue offering you modern, innovative and effective solutions.

Every year, our team attends the CEDIA Expo – the largest trade show in the country for custom technology integrators. Earlier in September, our team flew out to San Diego for this year’s show.

And we want to keep you up-to-date with everything that we observed at this year’s event.

In this blog, we’ll explore our favorite takeaways from the 2018 CEDIA Expo so you can make the most of the home automation system or entertainment setup at your house in the Amherst area or beyond.

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Control4 Updates

If you own a Control4 home automation system, you know that the brand is continually innovating and producing ways for you to more conveniently manage your home’s technologies.

Of course, our job at Sound & Theater is to ensure you have access to those updates so you can make the most of your smart home setup.

At this year’s CEDIA Expo, Control4 unveiled its latest operating system update – OS version 2.10.4 – which added several features to the brand’s already best-in-class user interfaces.

Firstly, if you own a Control4 multi-room audio system, you already have access to a variety of streaming sources – SiriusXM, Spotify, Tidal, iHeartRadio and more. The latest OS update also adds Amazon Music and Deezer HiFi capability to every system, expanding your already vast library of music sources you can choose to play from the speaker arrangement throughout your house.

Control4 also revealed several updates to its recently unveiled When >> Then automation platform, which allows homeowners to easily add their own automation commands to their smart home system.

Among the upgrades to When >> Then:

• The ability to create and edit voice-control scenes for Amazon Alexa.
• Modify schedules for custom lighting scenes.
• The ability for homeowners to modify and add settings to a pre-existing system.

Our team at Sound & Theater is here to help not only explain these changes for you but also can help update your system so you can continually enjoy best-in-class performance.

Sony’s Crystal LED Display

One of the products that stunned our team was Sony’s Crystal LED Display System, which already is available for commercial applications and soon will be released to homeowners.

Its stunning design features a 1,000,000:1 contrast, top-of-the-line HDR performance and an ultra-wide color range, allowing for peak brightness and black levels.

With the ability to support 8K resolution and boasting a refresh rate of 120hz, Sony’s CLED display makes it the perfect choice for watching movies, sports and video games in a resolution that exceeds nearly any other screen on the market.

But what genuinely distinguishes Sony’s Crystal LED display is the fact that it’s a flexible modular design. The one showcased at the CEDIA Expo, for example, consisted of 72 individual sections put together to produce one striking screen at a 21-by-9-foot dimension.

The fact is, though, that Sony can custom-build any Crystal LED display for your home to your desired specifications.

8K and Supersized TVs

One of the general trends we observed at CEDIA 2018 was an increasing number of products capable of delivering 8K resolution.

While the amount of 8K-native video sources still is limited, our team is staying on top of this trend and is continually watching out for any upcoming developments.

We also continued to observe an increased number of super-sized TVs on display at this year’s Expo.

Of course, Sony already offers televisions as expansive as 100 inches and several in the 85-inch class. But the brand’s Z9F Master Series was one of our favorite TVs on display at this year’s show – with options at 65 inches and 75 inches.

It’s not just that the Sony Z9F Master Series TV boasts an expansive screen; it’s that the Z9F delivers content the way the creator intended it to. For example, it features picture-processor technology that optimizes sharpness, contrast and color and also a Netflix-calibrated mode to display the company’s original content in studio-caliber resolution.

Our team at Sound & Theater is proud to stay ahead of the curve, keeping you up-to-date on the latest trends and technologies available to you and your home automation system.

Interested in learning more about the possibilities for your home in the Amherst area? Reach out to us today!

Contact us here or chat live with us below to get in touch with our team today.