Köhler Medientechnik

Well, you mentioned 4K/8K/HDR and that it´s all "hog wash" unless you have a giant screen. While i tend to agree on the first two (our core competency are home cinemas with large screens ), i don´t agree on the last one, since you don´t need a big screen to benefit from the difference between HDR and SDR. However, might be that that i just misinterpreted your statement.

HDR has nothing to do with the size of the screen.

As always, it depends on your use cases and requirements. It´s true it´s not a cost save to have equipment centrally and just distribute the AV throughout the house. It´s much cheaper to locally attach streaming players to the displays. But support is more effort. I don´t want to regularly update the 13 ATVs mentioned above - i guess in that case you have a facilty manager anyway who´s keeping track of the stuff as some of our clients have. But then it´s not a cost saver anymore It also depends on the number of people living in a house - that usuallly determines the max. number of concurrent streams you need to have available. As i said in the other thread, i´d go for locally attached sources if you want maximum picture quality (home cinema, media room). For low priority applications (kitchen, bath, kids, etc.) i´d go for HD distribution and that´s actually pretty straightforward and by far not that demanding in terms of infrastructure and cost like 4K.

If you really want 4K in it´s full beauty (up to 60Hz HDR), i´d suggest not to distribute at all. We´re trying to place sources local to display/projectors and connecting via HDMI if picture quality is a concern. For the remaining displays (bathroom, kitchen, etc.) in most cases HD is totally fine which can easily be distributed either way. Both HDBaseT and AVoverIP can transmit up to 10Gbps. 4K60 with 4:2:0 requires 9Gbps, so that fits, 4K60 with 4:4:4 or RGB requires 18Gpbs, so that will be compressed. How the compression takes place is up to the manufacturer, some just reduce the color space (4:4:4 => 4:2:0) so it fits into the 10Gbps pipe but you lose HDR. AVoverIP is traveling via IP, so it´s usually sharing the infrastructure with other devices and there´s protocol overhead. So compression with AVoverIP kicks in earlier and it´s more demanding in terms of switch configuration and quality of the infrastructure. So if your wiring options are open, then i´d go with HDBaseT (end-to-end wiring). If you want to change that over time you can convert that to IP just by patching it to an IP switch. But as said before, my recommendation would be to avoid distributing 4K in the first place.

What material do you want to send over? 1080p? Or up to 4K@60? (EDIT: opps, just saw it - you want 4K) Are you aware that HDBaseT and AVoverIP are totally different concepts? The first needs 1:1 cabling from the matrix to the display, whereas the latter uses an existing IP network (has a lot of pitfalls, though). You should take that into account for your decision which way to go.

Handling video is extremely complex. Dealing with different bitrates, framerates, bit depths, HDR, DV, embedded audio formats, not to mention the complexity of HDMI itself with higher bandwidth applications. Audio is just so much simpler. There isn´t even a dedicated media player that can handle all that without a flaw. It´s just nothing you would add as a goodie to a control system. In terms of services wants Plex, the next one Prime ("i don´t get Atmos, can you please fix it?"), the next one Netflix ("i don´t get DV, can you please fix that?"), the next wants Kodi ("can you please add auto framerate swtiching?"), etc....

OK, good point. I´m too new to C4 to argue against. But as far as i can see, the choice of streaming services is limited (i guess for the reason i outlined above) - i don´t like to force a customer into a different streaming service because his favourite is not available. Of course i can fallback to an external device but i guess integration is not that seemless than the standard C4 streaming services.

Coming from a Crestron/RTI background, i was surprised to find audio streaming capabilities in a control system anyway. If you go that route as a control system manufacturer, you´ll end up spending significant resources into endless updates/fixes for already implemented streaming services plus implementation of the next hot streaming service customers demand. It´s pandora´s box.

And that for a good reason. I think control systems should concentrate on controlling. You´re talking about adding services to a control system that don´t belong there, they just make them more complex and more complex means more possibilities of issues. The control system needs to be stable as a first priority. There are already devices out there that can handle the additional services home users are excited about. Integrate them into an overall solution and everybody´s happy. But i doesn´t make much sense to build them into a controller.

OK, understood. I usually wait for use cases to come and then upgrade and not the other way round.

Ah, i see. But still the LAN capabilities of your equipment (you mentioned wifi 6 and your motherboard´s LAN port) have mothing to do with the size of your internet pipe. When consuming Internet services, the sender will be the limiting factor, not the bandwidth of your downstream.

I still have the feeling you don´t understand the role of a control processor in the overall solution. There´s no relationship between your internet speed and the speed of your control processor´s LAN port. There are just no significant bandwidth requirements for a control processor. Like others have already said, even a 100Mb/s port would be sufficient.

Why do you think it´s a general problem with the brand? If there are issues with a network, replacing the equipment with another brand would be very, very low in the list. Networking is not trivial to setup and a lot of components need to work with each other. There are lots of things that can cause issues: misconfigured switches, misconfigured endpoints, badly behaving endpoints, for wifi often (mostly) the endpoint is the problem, not the AP, cable issues, etc. You said "i began working with my original dealer" - has that changed? Who did setup the network?

But still, this traffing is not going through the controller. This would be just a waste of money.

Even Tidal highest quality audio streaming goes only up to 3Mb/s AFAIR. 4K UHD Video bitrates can go up to 100Mb/s (which wouldn´t go through a controller anyway). For what to you think you need 10.000Mb/s? - on a controller?....

Sub outs is nice.

I´m still new to Control4, but i´d be very surprised if the EA3 could generate DMX signals on it´s RS232. (if i´m wrong, please one of the experts step in) Usually, the control unit communicates via RS232 or LAN (depending on the gateway) with the DMX gateway and the gateway generates the corresponding DMX signals and sends it to the connected DMX devices. The Domaudeo you linked above says in it´s description: "The Domaudeo Low Voltage/LED Control DMX Driver provides an affordable solution for low-voltage LED or RGB(W) integration with Control4 using the Engineering Solutions DMX RS232 engine. " The Engenieering Solutions DMX RS232 engine is a DMX gateway. So you need that piece of hardware in addition.

For that setup, you need to add a DMX Gateway. The 32 channel controller is just a dumb device translating DMX commands it receives to different voltage levels on it´s outputs to drive the stripes connected to it. So you need a device that sends the DMX commands to the 32 channel controller. This device could be the Engeneering solution device. I´m using this device for myself, but not in a C4-setup, so i can´t comment on the question if it´s a good solution with using C4.

@blub I see. All US manufacturers of home automation systems have their problems with the European market, it´s the same with RTI and Crestron. Everytime they come up with sth new, somebody has to tell them "please don´t forget the European market"...

I´m sorry, that´s nonsense.

No, it´s "your best way", not "the best way". A good programmer takes care of the needs of his customers. There´s no "one solution fits all". That´s what a good programmer is for: to find out what fits best to the specific customer. There are customers with kids, without kids, singles, old people, young people, disalbed people, etc. - everybody needs to be taken care of differently. Most of our customers want some degree of automation, but they prefer to stay in control. In my own home there are a couple of things i like to be fully automated, but there are other things like light where i just prefer switches to trigger actions or sequences/scenes manually.

I would place the sats along the fence, pointing towards the table, away from your neighbour. I´d strictly avoid sats pointing towards your neighbour.

It´s a C4 driver issue. The Hue bridge provides 2-way feedback. Since i´m Germany based as well, i agree with your assessment of the C4 keypads not being a feasable solution. I haven´t done a research about that yet (no requirements yet), but are there really no options for European System 55 and C4-compatible wireless keypads? EDIT: A quick search gave me this Enocean Gateway that seems to have C4-drivers available. I haven´t done a deeper look but shouldn´t that solve your problem?

Wow, most people (including me) prefer to stay in control of their lights. There are areas where i find sensors useful, but there are lots of occasion when i wish lights to stay off. I´am using sensors in most of our rooms as well, but mostly to turn lights off (after a certain period of time) rather than switching them on. Yep, that´s what you would install in a "smart home". But if it´s an older building, this would require changing switches with keypads/push buttons, But it´s definitely worth the effort.

Satellites are not meant to be run without a sub. According to the datasheet, their cut-over frequency is at 100Hz which is too high for running alone.