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I would go with ubiquiti..tplink is pretty terrible. WiFi is basically line of sight + ricochet... you can account for a cinder block wall creating a 50% attenuation on wifi signal so plan accordingly...

If this is going through a receiver or matrix switcher there is usually a setting on the device itself to level across sources. All of the Onkyo, Marantz, Denon, Sony (bad choice I know), and Audio Control gear I've had in the last 20 years could do this. Audio matrixes are a mixed bag, there are probably people here who know much more than me on that topic. I would honestly fix it in the device before doing something like this in programming.

Lots of Anthem discussions, just wanted to chip in on the Audio Control products. The Maestro X7 and X9 which share a common heritage with the JBL SDP-55 and several Arcam products (AV40 I think?) are spectacular audio performers, Dirac Live with bass management changed my world. At least on the Audio Controls flavor the Control 4 serial connection is unstable and the processor to die and become unresponsive over time. To the point where you have to power cycle it to control it. The IP driver doesn't seem to have the problem. Its hard to say whose fault it is as the serial driver spams the processor with constant request.. I.E. for cover art etc when the onboard audio sources have never been engaged etc... when the unit locks up you can see the C4 driver sending the request but no response. Ive seen this with my system and with some customer systems. I would buy again in a hearbeat, just use the IP drivers. I don't have any Anthem experience so cannot compare and contrast to that, I can say audio output is significantly superior to the Marantz I had before personally and is noticeably better than at least one (older) krell preamp. HDMI switching is quite fast and solid too...You can also disable the on screen display if you have a Lumagen or madVR Envy... good product.

Uh yeah. according to the stats the 8 port is a 20G backplane, the 16 and 24 ports are 32r and 56g respectively... They actually list Head of Line Blocking as a feature, that's an indicator of poor performance in fan-in scenarios which is what you're creating with a 1G uplink....I wouldn't brag about that. If the switch supported VOQ that would be something to brag about... For similar price you get a 4xSFP+ uplink in an enterprise switch (and I don't mean ubiquiti, thats not enterprise, similar pricing for the "pro" series though)..... not good value for the money IMHO. 10G ports shouldn't be unusual or expensive in 2021....anything with an SFP port should be 10G. We're moving to 25G for IDF usage thanks to backpressure from APs with Multirate (2.5/5G) uplinks.... time moves on.

Yes, odd and jankey... In their defense, not much actual need for 10G in residential, the fact that it's about the same cost now as 1G is a different conversation. To OP, 1G DAC cables are kinda weird/rare. I would just buy two 1G SX optics from FS.com and a length of OM-3 50 micron with LC connector fiber patch cable. You do not want single mode cable with SX optics, you don't need OM-4. The optics are $7/each and the fiber should be about that. If you know somebody in the IT business they probably have a bucket of the things pulled from customers as nobody uses 1G uplinks anymore. I would not use second hand fiber, not worth it. Parting shot, fiber has a bend radius of like 2". Hard bends, zip ties, rough handling result in problems in the future with fiber.

The slowdown in a shared media situation is from collisions, if you just have a camera blasting video one way and every once in a while send a packet to it you can get near the 10mbit line rate.

So there appear to be two flavors of these things. The completely passive ones are what I was ranting about earlier. They are passive components and make it work like old school 10base2 (google if you don't know what that is). That's going to really stink for anything outside of a camera on the far end due to collisions. The other kind are powered via POE and have active electronics. Looks like some of those are more advanced than others but would potentially get you an actual 100mb out of the wire. The real answer is MOCA. Just in case someone in a year digs this thread up there is another class of ethernet to copper conversion called VDSL. It's similar signaling to ADSL which is now branded Uverse by a certain carrier. Those can operate over any two copper pairs and depending on noise and distance get from 100mb down to a few megabits... Powerline is also a player at a few hundred megabit.... Or just go wifi

If you look, those things all are 10/100 because gigabit requires two paths for transmit and two for receive. There is also no shared media construct for 1Gig. I don't know if it even bothers to watch for voltage rise to implement CSMA/CD. I think those baluns are the same thing as running 10 megabit ethernet 10base2 over RG-58 but they include a matching pulse conversion transformer and terminating resistors. That makes the coax wire a collision domain. I never ran anything like that at 100mbit (because it didn't exist, there was TCNS or 100mbit ARCNET over fiber but I digress). I can tell you that on a 10base2 segment you were looking at a maxium of about 3 megabits of throughput due to collisions. It gets worse with more devices on the network. If the scale holds you could potentially get 30 megabits on a 100m link with these things and a few devices chatting. As a matter of fact, you could check the MIB II stats on a network switch and see if there are runts, jabbers, head on collisions like in the old days. Gigabit will not work because it uses all four pairs on the same carrier frequency. They could all be encoded over one wire but it would require frequency shifting or time division multiplexing, all of which are outside the realm of anything passive or this cheap. These things work great for security cameras because 99% of the traffic would be from the camera to the NVR or whatever consumer, not a lot of bi-directional communications.If you put users or media streamers or anything bidirectional it will break down at some point. Use these things if you like but know you can't cheat physics. If you do stick with them please give us a report and let us know how it works. Perhaps it's good enough.

You can paint them, we do it all the time. Know that you may be voiding the warranty on a very expensive AP. We also use the foil brady labels on large jobs, we did an ekahau survey with no labesls, one label, and two labels, no change in performance. We also use cloth coverings up in the iron in theaters (commercial) as they generally want everything flat black. ^^^ This makes a lot of sense ^^^ Only issue with this is that these are (H)ospitality APs, meant for you to put one per room on a wall plate or behind the headboard in a hotel. They're limited to 50mw transmit on 2.4 and 80mw on 5ghz. That's about half of the normal indoor transmit power and much less than the actual T series outdoor units (250mw transmit on 2.4 and 200mw on 5ghz). An indoor in a box turned on its side would probably do better but Ive never tried and the point about coverage pattern being wrong is very valid. The real solution would be if you could mount an external antenna on an indoor but that goes against Ruckus's religion...

Ok, learn something new all the time... I wasn't aware of these... I honestly don't understand how it works with Tx and rx on the same wire without shifting the frequencies... unless it just lets them collide and that's why they seem to be 10/100... perhaps that's what they're doing... if that's the case it would be suitable for 1 camera but I wouldn't run anything more than that. If they are more Sophisticated in some way someone let me know, but if it's a passive impedance match and just sums rx/tx and lets csma/cd handle the overlap I would stay away unless for the camera application... Thank you for the education but unless I run into the camera situation I think moca is the more robust solution...

Also, the ubnt gear has a watchdog that you can set to ping the far side and reboot itself if the link fails... no external dependencies...

Powerline networking can be finicky over distance too... worst case a pair of 900mhz ubnt bridges can burn through walls and trees... is slow but can do 100mbit. I just tested a pair for a customer and with transmit power turned all the way down I had it going through four walls and all the kitchen appliances with 92% signal quality...A pair of nanobridges can do hundreds of mbits and should be quite stable...they cannot handle interference in the frenznel zone between units. We have office space in two building and have a nanobridge pair that's been up for years....

You can't do a "balun", that's a impedance matching transformer, you need something the electrically converts the signal... in this case MOCA is what you need..

You could also fix the link so it doesn't drop... just saying...a pair of modern uniquiti aps properly pointed at each other shouldn't drop and your not talking much for something like a nanobeam...

Zone controller gives you better management options and traffic tunneling. It's overkill in a home environment.

Custom buttons are a pain in 3.x, they're a bit odd in 2.x as well. It's really the only decent way to deal with a customer that wants something like DSP modes or something. Scenario buttons outside of the given limitations are quite nice, can turn into a pain for you and your dealer (edit/upload/repeat). The upside and downside of C4 is that the UI is only so configurable. The upside is it's consistent and easy to program. Things always work the same way. Have you ever seen a windows program with weird and non-standard controls? Annoying? Pain to use? that's the opposite side of the coin where someone thought they know UI design better than the OS developers and you get something that could be wonderful but is more often than not annoying. The difference with C4 is it makes people angry when their houses don't work... lesser of the two evils is to make it fit a pattern, make it consistent and easy to program and support. If the dealer that built it gets hit by a truck, that customer can get good support from another dealer with minimal fuss. The downside is accounting for that uncommon 10% of things people want to do can get annoying from a UI perspective. I'll take it never being broken when I'm out of town for the inconvenience of dealing with the UI. The one big game changer is in 3.x you can favorite Experience buttons to the room, quite nice. I recommend giving it a try. Just hold down on the button you want to favorite, should get a popup allowing you to favorite it to the room. It also works at a higher level. For example in an alcove in my foyer I have a panel and use the garage door buttons a lot as well as security panel and security cameras. I have the doors, and the panel room favorited as well as the overall icon for cameras. No watch/listen sources in that room so it's sort of an entry/exit security control center. I also have home/away/vacation buttons favorited to the room. Very nice! I believe these show on the Neo remotes as well. You have to do the favoriting on a touchpad or app, but the button will appear in the room on the Neo after that.

Wireless survey needed. Get someone with an Ekahau Sidekick who knows how to use it. Probably 2.4ghz is too strong and the iPads are not roaming to 5ghz properly. There could also be co-channel interference or some bad implementation of 802.11k/r... hard to get right. I'm not a fan of the prosumer stuff when real enterprise grade gear can be had at the same price, but APs shouldn't drop. Sounds like an RF/config issue...

The 710 gives you multi-user mimo up and down. Unlikely you will see much benefit from that if any. The 610 gives you 3x3:3 antenna arrangement which is about best case for a nice laptop so it's an excellent choice. There is also a nice phone app that goes with Unleashed...easy to check and see if something or someone is on or AP status etc..highly recommended.

Chiming back in, 6 APS are probably overkill, my home is 4600sqft and I cover with three R710 APs. You will get more range out of the AC and AX aps than you did the older units.. I could use one in the garage which has more to do with concrete and how that level of the house is built but its not enough for me to pull a wire or get it pulled. You need to make sure you don't have overlapping channels, I doubt a unifi system does auto channel properly. You also probably need to turn down the power after installation but that gets more neuanced based on your construction.

You need to work with your dealer/installer on the C4 side of things. Communications between the C4 elements is pretty critical and much of that is wired or wireless networking of one flavor or another. You also have a lot of options depending on what you want to achive with your HA system. 1. Fundamentals - The EAs talk to each other via your network. I would try and hardwire each EA controller back. As to weather you need an EA at every TV is sort of a budget issue. For example, I have an EA5 in my main eqt closet and my living room has an EA1. My bedrooms and back patio are controlled by C4 but don't have an EA. There are three kinds of network that are important to your installation: Wired, Wireless, and Zigbee. Wired can be as great or as small as you like. I'm a fan of using a nice enterprise grade POE switch wherever your most central equiptment location is. I would then home run your APs for your wireless network back to that point and power/control them from one location. I would also connect your router there if possible. You would also get max throughput that way. I reccommend either Ubiquiti or Ruckus wireless gear. If you don't know wireless well I would get some help here. You may need one to three APS on each floor depending on the size and construction materials you use. Anything with water in it soaks up the signal (fire rated drywall, wood framing etc) as does concrete and rebar. I would also put everything you can on 5Ghz as 2.4 ghz is overcrowded and conflicts with both bluetooth and Zigbee. I would also plan on using some Control 4 light switches at strategic points as they will extend the Zigbee network in otherwise hard to reach areas. You may want ethernet drops at each TV that are home run back to your main switch. I do and have a dumb switch there to plug the endless parade of controllable devices. If everything you have is IP controlled you don't need local IR repeaters or an EA. I control almost everything IP. If you don't have a stable network it will break and you will be mad that you have a bad system. I would be reticent to do that at a customer if they mess with the network themselves. After you have the plumbing you can focus on the nice-to haves. I would also not bother running Coax at this point. Unless you have a cable modem or like satellite or cable TV there is not much use for it. 2. Nice to haves - Do you plan on integrating a hard wired alarm system like a Honeywell, DSC, or Elk? You may want wires from the panel to where your C4 is going. Do you wan to use sensors and onboard relays to manage your garage doors? You may want hard wires to your opener(s) and door sensor(s). There is a zigbee wireless option to make that work if wiring is not feasible (talk to your dealer). Do you want to put moisture sensors near your washer, dish washer, drip pan for HVAC? I have sensors everywhere except under my dish washer, guess what leaked and ruined my hardwoods? $100 in sensors would have saved a few thousand. Again, if you are in a position to wire for these you can centralize, otherwise you can use a zigbee option. If you have a pool controler you may need wires there or a serial to wireless gateway. 3. Whole house audio - There are several options, you can do all C4 and matrix amps, you can do a system with remote audio endpoints. You can also integrate something like Denon HEOS. You will want to plan where your speakers are going as this is as important as the speaker selection. If you want architectural speakers you are going to get far better quality out of dealer lines than you will from home depot. Again, on the C4 side I would talk to a dealer as there are a lot of options and a lot depends on your budget.

The board may only support a few stages but the issue I had was a little more complicated. I have a Lennox system that originally had a third party zoning board. It used the standard old school thermostat wiring to talk to the board in the air handler. It was controlling staging of the blower. Thermostats in zones were first Honeywell, then Honeywell ZWave, then later Ecobee. The issue I had was Zone 1 calls for cool , meanwhile after 8 mins Zone 2 calls for cool. After another two mins Zone 1 is satisfied and quits cooling. The air handler however sees a continuous call for cool, decides it's not getting the job done and increases to max fan speed at the 12 minute mark when Zone 2 which is much smaller really only needed to be run at low speed. Then you get a freeze/thaw cycle in your house. Going to a Lennox zoning board allows it to control the cooling/staging and it knows the CFM and cubic footage of each room and can make a determination based on which zones and how many are calling as to the best fan speed. I don't know the model or how many stages it supports. It wouldn't help you if you don't have Lennox or are after only purely variable speed zoning. Probably not perfect but it's a hell of a lot better than before. It could probably be better if I ripped out all my ducts and completely re-did the zones etc... but it was cost prohibitive. This was a great compromise for the zoning board and some minor duct moves for a reasonable price to my HVAC guy.

I added commands for the new sharpening that was exposed in November or December. It's my daily driver scaler so I do keep it up to date when they add new features. They have also added features for me. Two bug fix releases in the last year were thanks to issues I discovered (The Nvidia shield issue and the one after it). I also got them to allow you to change the color of on screen messages. The new remote adds test patterns, saving config, HDR setup, auto aspect enable/disable, and input aspects for some additional formats. Of them the following are supported via serial: Test patterns, Save config, Enable+reset auto aspect detection. I refrained from exposing save config as it seems like something you would use infrequently. Same thing for test patterns. The Enable/reset auto aspect detection would be trivial to implement. The following are not exposed via serial at this time: Auto aspect disable, HDR setup, NEW aspect ratios. If there is need/demand of those things I can add them pretty quickly. I have a driver I'm trying to get substantially finished this week but will free up a little after that. I have no relationship with Lumagen other than being a customer and developing the driver (and calling support perhaps a few too many times) so I can't really comment on the PIP situation.

Here is a writeup of features. I've been using it for two years, I've had customers for a full year. Since I wrote this I've added the new sharpening commands from the fall firmware release and increased the number of inputs to 10 to account for the additional virtual inputs and the new hardware with 10 inputs. The preferred setup for Lumagen is to have all sources connected directly to the lumagen and then connect the lumagen to your preamp/processor/reciever. This creates an issue that you don't get any volume or mute feedback on your screen because the preamp/receiver is out of path. The driver has property enabled features called "Auto Volume" and "Auto Mute" that will grab the volume level and mute state from the room the lumagen is located in and use them to trigger a message on the display. No programming required. If that doesn't work in your configuration, there is a mute on/off command available in programming and a message can be written to the display to indicate the volume or mute state via MESSAGE1 and MESSAGE2 variables.Supports IR power on, set the power method to "IR" and bind an emitter to the driver, this is only needed in some rare condition.The driver supports all remote commands fired from programming and also exposes almost all of the lumagen video attributes as variables. This allows you to alter Lumagen configuration based on something in your environment such as moving an anamorphic lens in and out or selecting a video game source that needs certain latency (game mode) or video configuration. You can also automate any aspect ratio, zoom etc changes. The state of video being displayed by the lumagen can also be used to trigger outside events. Every time the video changes aspect ratio, resolution, refresh rate, color space etc, the variables are updated and via standard C4 programming any type of automation can be triggered. We have some customers that change color space settings on their Sony projector based on the input color space. I believe they are using the Lumagen for DTM and they are putting the Sony in the proper HDR color space without triggering high lamp or something like that. We have other customers that use the aspect ratio to trigger automatic masking systems and anamorphic lenses. Care must be taken that sources that change aspect ratio frequently do not cause mechanical malfunctions. I prefer to select when my anamorphic lens is in or out of path so I automatically change output aspect ratio via a memory setting when I move the lens in and out.An arbitrary message can be written to the display to indicate the volume via the QUICK_MESSAGE or MESSAGE1 and MESSAGE2 variables. Message persist is the amount of time any of the onscreen messages from the driver will be displayed, 1-8 seconds. With more recent firmwares, the lumagen supports setting the colors of the messages. This is configured with RGB hex codes similar to HTML. The entire set of "standard" computer colors and hex codes are added as well as the ability to define up to five custom colors. Alpha channel or transparency is also supported. We have a customer whose preamp has a feedback driver but no on screen display and they write a display message when their audio format changes as they like to know what mode it's in.CommandsThe following commands are supported via programming.Mute On - Display MuteMute Off - Clear display of MuteSelect Input 1-8Select Input Aspect Ratio NLS, 4:3, 4:3NZ, LBOX, LBOXNZ, 16:9, 16:9NZ, 1.85, 1.85NZ, 2.35, 2.35NZSelect Output Aspect Ratio O16:9, O2.35, O1.33Select Memory MEMA, MEMB, MEMC, MEMDSelect Resolution 480P, 540P, 600P, 720P, 768P, 840P, 1080P, 1080ISend Generic Command - Commands not covered by above featuresSend Darbee Enable/Disable, Mode, and adjust value up and down in increments of 1,5, and 10.VARIABLESAll feedback is handled through the device variables. The "Debug Action" will display the state of these variables at any time regardless of the setting of debug on/off in the driver.Note: These variables are all read-only, and changing the variables' values does not cause the Lumagen to change state I.E. setting the INPUT_PHYSICAL variable to 03 does not cause the Lumagen to change inputs. You must use a command (above) to do this. If you want one variable to change another, for example when a source with two way is powered on manually you want the lumagen to auto switch you can fire the input command from the power state variable on the source.Variable Value------------------- -------------------INPUT_PHYSICAL Selected Physical input 1-8INPUT_LOGICAL Selected Logical input 1-8INPUT_CONFIG_NUMBER Selected Input configurationINPUT_ASPECT Input aspect ratio I.E. 178 is 1.78:1 or 16:9INPUT_RATE I.E. 23 = 23.9 FPS, 24 = 24FPS, 60 = 60FPSINPUT_RESOLUTION I.E. 1080 for 1080P HD, 2160 for 4KINPUT_MODE P/I/n Progressive, interlaced, or no inputINPUT_3D_MODE 2D / Frame-Seq / Frame-Packed / Top-Bottom / Side-by-SideINPUT_DYNAMIC_RANGE SDR/HDRHDR_MIN Minimum Luminance of HDR signalHDR_MAX Maximum Luminance of HDR signalHDR_CLL Maximum Coherent Light Level of HDR signalINPUT_STATUS No Source/Active Video/Internal PatternNLS Normal or NLS for Non Linear Stretch enabledMEM A / B / C / DOUTPUT_STATUS 000e - Binary field, needs better decodingOUTPUT_3D_MODE 2D / Frame-Seq / Frame-Packed / Top-Bottom / Side-by-SideOUTPUT_MODE P/I Progressive or interlacedOUTPUT_CMS_NUMBER 0-7OUTPUT_STYLE_NUMBER Selected output style 0-8OUTPUT_COLOR_SPACE REC601 / REC709 / REC2020 / REC2100OUTPUT_RATE I.E. 23 = 23.9 FPS, 24 = 24FPS, 60 = 60FPSOUTPUT_RESOLUTION I.E. 1080 for 1080P HD, 2160 for 4KOUTPUT_ASPECT Input aspect ratio I.E. 178 is 1.78:1 or 16:9OUTPUT_ADJUSTED_ASPECT Aspect ratio from AR detection I.E. 178 is 1.78:1 or 16:9, Can be overriden by user forcing aspect ratio with sticky.These variables should be writable. The specified action will occur immediately after updating the variable. The message feature could be used for several things. For example, if the customer has a soundproofed theater you may want to write a message when their doorbell rings or security alarm goes off. You can safely write to the variables at any time, if the lumagen is in an off state the commands are silently discarded (so you can be lazy programming and fire the dorbell message without regard for if the theater is in use for example).Variable Value------------------- -------------------VOLUME_DISPLAY integer will be immediately displayed as volumeQUICK_MESSAGE string will be immediately displayed as a 1 line messageDARBEE_ENHANCE integer value of 0 - 120 for darbee enhancementMESSAGE1 string will be stored for displayed as line 1 of a 2 line messageMESSAGE2 string will be displayed as line 2 of a message. Writing to this will trigger display of line 1 and line 2

I wrote it, it works famously

Make sure they're using the right driver. The first one I did was on 2.9 and there were several different drivers that "looked" right and somewhat talked to the module, the correct one is labeled 4232CBM(Residential). My personal system has an expansion board and several keypads so it was a pain sort out the programming on the panel and the alarm guys generally don't like to fool with it. Once it's working it's rock solid.