Friday morning was Crestron's Press Show. While Crestron's press events are famous for being a huge data dump all at once, this year's tour, presented by Jeff Singer, Director of Marketing and Communications, did a good job of breaking it down and making their overall gameplan pretty clear.

There's an old joke, and I'm guilty of frequently repeating it, that goes "It's a new trade show, and here's Crestron with six new families of touch panel!" This year's CEDIA Expo press event was in a lot of ways more substantial than in years past, with some very innovative changes to their lineup.

Before the tour began, Singer took pains to make it clear that Crestron is in no way inimical to Apple. He reminded us that Apple are a strategic partner, and denied that there was any conflict, pointing to the interoperability of Apple devices as control interfaces with Crestron systems. "It's not a case of Apple or Crestron," he flatly stated. "That's a false choice." Singer reminded attendees that Crestron's iPhone app is one of the overall top grossing apps on the iTunes app store. "We sell more apps because we sell more control systems." He closed out the introduction to the tour with the reminder that Crestron is not at all proprietary, and their control systems will run on or with anything: PC, Mac, and as we would soon see, Android.

First up on the tour was Crestron's new Core3 OS, a complete redesign of its control system. Cloud-based, and IPV6-ready, it gives their control processors more power, speed, memory and security. Only one controller is needed to run even the largest projects now, rather than master controllers and sub-zone controllers. It's also the foundation for their new GUI framework. It can run hundreds of flash objects at the same time, and can consolidate all those objects into a single object for programming simplicity. This cuts down on programming time and streamlines programming, testing and debugging.

Unsurprisingly, iPad interfaces were front and center, including inwall and desktop docks. The most interesting was the iPanel: a handheld adaptor, with its own docking station that turns an iPad into a Crestron touchpanel with buttons on the sides. As absurd as that sounds when you first say that out loud, there are plenty of user applications where hard buttons on a handheld touch panel make a lot of sense. Fortunately the shell of the iPanel is a sleek form factor that doesn't cludge up the lines of the iPad.

Just as eagerly anticipated, at least by some, is Crestron's Android interface. Singer showed off the interface on not one, but three Samsung Galaxy TAB tablets. According to Singer, Crestron seeks as many alternative control interfaces as possible, the rationale being that they want clients to be able to control their Crestron home by any means they wish. The Android 2.2 OS has the advantages of providing true multitasking abilities and offers widget support, things that the iPad doesn't. In addition, the seven-inch form factor offers a smaller alternative to a larger tablet like the iPad.

Moving on from handheld devices, we proceeded to Crestron's core hardware. For fully integrated home-cinema rooms, Procise is an audiophile-quality 7.3 HD surround processor with three channels of full bass management, Audessy technology, and 6x1 HDMI switching. It also features balanced outputs and intelligently auto pairs with Crestron's matching seven-channel amps over Ethernet.

The Sonnex hardware is the result of applying Crestron's DigitalMedia technology to audio distribution. It delivers 48 channels of HD audio and control over single Cat5. The main box, SWAMP24x8, is a 24x8 switcher, preamp and amp all in one chassis. Consolidating three boxes in one saves considerable rack space, and with the high-output high-efficiency amp section, it needs no extra rackspace for airflow.

The two key benefits are that it seriously cuts down on the time it takes to stitch up a rack full of audio distribution units, because even when the SWAMPF-8 8-zone extenders are in the same rack, they connect to the SWAMP24x8 and each other via single Cat5, not eight pairs of unbalanced audio cables. That means greater installation efficiency and less work for installers. In addition, it also means that there is no need to home run speaker lines, nor to have the SWAMPF-8 zone amplifiers in the same rack: they could be local elsewhere in the project and connect back to the rack via single Cat5.

On the topic of Crestron DigitalMedia, Singer began by pointing out that over 6,300 successful installs were completed in the last year. This year, Crestron has introduced DM8G, which gives 8 Gigs of bandwidth on every output in the system, and can manage both analog and HDMI digital AV and control through a single RJ45 termination. Bridging back to the number of successful installs, Singer gives credit to the DM Tools software, which facilitates diagnostics and troubleshooting, even in systems with a huge number of HDMI inputs and outputs.

Finally, the press tour rounded out with an overview of the Prodigy line, which is becoming less distinct from the core Crestron lineup. While keeping Prodigy simple, affordable, and expandable, Crestron has incorporated the Core3 OS into the PMC3 and the new PMC3XP controllers. The XP bridges the gap and is capable of connecting to any and all Crestron hardware, making it infinitely expandable.

Article Tags:  CEDIA, Crestron, Jeff Singer, Core3 OS, iPanel, Android, Galaxy TAB, Procise, Prodigy, DigitalMedia, DM8G, DM Tools, SWAMP24x8, Procise, Audyssey