HomeTech.fm - Episode 499 - Home Theater Design with Tom Dellicompagni and Owen Maddock

Episode Date: September 20, 2024

On this week's show: While Gavin is still on vacation, we chat with Tom Dellicompagni and Owen Maddock from The Home Cinema Design Podcast and discuss immersive home cinema design, Sonos leaks about the Arc Ultra and Sub 4, Bluetooth 6.0 is announced with improvements for smart home devices, Ultraloq and Eufy introduce new smart locks with cutting-edge features, a pick of the week, UniFi Protect ONVIF first impressions, and so much more!

this is the home tech podcast for friday september 20th from sarasota florida i'm seth johnson from reynoldsburg ohio i'm tj huddleston from somewhere in canada i'm gavin campbell gavin's still traveling around but we're here we're going to talk about home tech stuff home automation home technology i kind of miss gavin g Gavin GBT is, you know, it's nice, but... Just not the same, you know? Yeah. We really should get him out of the basement. I think we've locked him in there for way too long

and he probably needs to come out and get some sunlight or something. So we should probably go ahead and just do that, Seth. I mean, what are we waiting for anyway? What do we even put him down there for? I mean, I think it was a MatterLock thing that we were waiting on. I don't know. Oh, yeah.'s got something about yale locks here he wants

to talk about so maybe that's it that makes sense yeah he's waiting for an update i'm sure it's a it's a home assistant update that he was waiting on so oh well gavin uh should be back next week but we uh we have a pretty good show tonight we have an interview with owen matic and we should ask how to say tom's last name when we had him on. I'm going to butcher it, though. But it's Tom Della Compagni, I think, of the Home Cinema Design Podcast. Great conversation about really quite a bit around like designing, like what goes into design and spec of theater, like the thoughts and considerations that go in. And we talked a lot about the new newish i guess at this

point rp22 design document i actually read it i did some some homework i opened up a pdf and read the whole thing it's not it's not a bad read tj you should really give it a shot okay i don't i don't want to be rude seth but you read the whole thing is 157 pages it's not but you can skip a lot of it's like definitions like all right and you can skip a lot of it's like definitions like all right and pictures there's a lot of pictures in there too there's yeah but those are the interesting ones you want to read those don't want to skip that skip the words look at the pictures no i mean i i think if you if you like looked into it uh it's 157 pages there's a lot of sections so there's eight sections right and they just make those like these big giant

full-on this is a whole cover page right so you can skip those pages those don't count right and then the append there's appendixes you can't count the appendix it's all the research junk yeah so you can take that away and i think what you're left with is maybe around 100 pages ish maybe less and um it's it's not a bad read you like i said you can skip quite a bit of it especially if you have a background in audio and know what some of the terms mean um but they do a pretty good job of like going over stuff in there so it's good read he they also talked about some um other uh documentation that's coming kind of kind of in the same uh same vein as rp22 uh which which is

pretty exciting so it was it was a good conversation i had a lot of fun talking to those guys and if you're not already listening to the home cinema design podcast you should be um because there's a lot of really good information that is in that podcast especially especially if you are interested in home cinema design i think that's that's their forte yeah they really break it down to where it's like i don't know it's more it's easier to understand um because unless you're like a huge nerd about some of this stuff, it is kind of hard to digest some of this. Um, but some of the designs that get laid out and, you know, I, I skimmed the RP 22, um, and it was pretty informative for like designs and stuff and just getting like the basics down at least. Um, so I'm, I'm not going to be on,

on Owen's level anytime soon. soon um but it's nice that that there's actual guidelines in here because you know kind of like what you and i talked about seth during the episode there so we kind of just a lot of times just put speakers and projectors and screens in and there was no really a like rhyme or reason why you put it in a certain spot like you you kind of use general ideas and what sounded best to you and stuff, but there was never really like a much thought into it, at least for the majority of like companies I've seen around.

It's kind of just like, oh, we want a nicer spot to watch TV and then we can put speakers in the ceiling. But no, there's like actual things you have to follow. They'll fit between those trusses right there well enough. Yeah. And it's just like, you know, and I just did one where it was not a good layout for anything. But that's what the client wanted, unfortunately. But just like anything else in the world,

there's good standards and there's ways that you're actually supposed to do things. And it's nice that this exists for home theaters now. Yeah. It's a great baseline. And like i think we talked about you know it this document is designed for home theater installers but it's also designed for specifiers architects and that kind of thing where they can read through it understand what they're looking at and and come away with it with like a basic understanding of of uh of what kind of room and performance they're going to get for, you know, they bring it down to like these four levels. It's kind of like the, the famous thing that's been going around these four levels,

one, two, three, four. And where four being is like completely uncompromised. Like you get everything. And one is like, yeah,

this is going to be a great system, but it's, you know, compromised and X, Y, and Z. Like they, they have minimum specifications for each one of those.

So I thought it was a, it's a good document a great conversation with uh two two really fun people and uh you know hopefully we get to talk to them some more because i had a great time most most of the show this week is going to be that interview but we do have a couple of home tech headlines so what do you say we jump into those let's do it all right the uh this sonos arc Ultra and Sub 4 have leaked out. And guess where do they leak to? Where do they leak out to?

Where can you always find the leaks? It's always The Verge. They say Sonos is gearing up to release its next flagship soundbar, the Arc Ultra. It's a new high-end subwoofer, the Sub 4. Leaked images confirm the Arc Ultra will support Bluetooth audio playback and feature sound motion technology from Sonos' acquisition of Might.

I still don't know how to pronounce that word. I don't know. I don't know. In 2022, this tech promises big sound from smaller components and the Arc Ultra will be priced somewhere between $1,000 and maybe $1,200 and showcase redesigned physical controls.

Sub 4, following its predecessor's design with a matte finish, will launch alongside the Arc Ultra, and both products should be available in black or white. Not bad. Not bad, I guess. I don't know. I was talking to my wife earlier, and I was like, oh, we should get a Sonos for the garage, know you can have some music out here she's like no more

no no some more sonos the app sucks i'm like oh man brutal brutal that's how you know you messed up and you just made the uh the average consumer mad not even the tech people that pay attention to this stuff um you know the sonos sub 4 i really don't understand i mean it's just kind of whatever um but the the arc ultra i think is i think is interesting um personally the the arc itself is not that great of a soundbar i think it's all right but for like the 900 it already is i don't think it's worth 900 um so if this one comes in a little bit more and it's actually really good it's probably worth it but if it comes in at like 1400 or something crazy i don't see the appeal of it um but maybe they're putting that new speaker technology to use and maybe it'll sound a lot better so

i'm just a little not too happy with my my sonos arc i think the uh the the play bar sounded a lot better personally oh i actually got a play bar. They're great. I keep seeing play bars pop up on Facebook and I'm like, oh, I don't really want one of those. Well, and they're so cheap. I mean, you can buy a play bar now for like $100 to $200. And as long as you don't care about AirPlay or HDMI, it's really good. Hmm. So maybe you should just buy it.

I mean, well, people in Sarasota really think they have something special when it comes to Sonos gear. They do not discount. There's no discounts here. Yeah. Like, you can get better deals at Costco, as far as I'm concerned. Like, the prices they have on the newer Sonos gear is expensive. And the prices on, like, older S1 stuff is also very expensive for what it is. Oh, yeah.

So, I'm like, man, come off the guys. Yeah. Yeah, there's not too often that a good sonos deal pops up you just kind of have to watch out for them i did see an amp yesterday like the new amp for i think on right under 400 wow that is a good deal that would have been a good deal i'm just i don't know i was like oh i should get that and like well then i have to buy some speakers so i'm not gonna do that i have i have some outdoor speakers but i have an older sonos amp the uh the connect amp um and it's fine the like five times a year i use it but it would be nice to have airplay i guess i've never used the airplay with the sonos stuff um i i've there was some like back in the day there was like a a thing you could run maybe on like a Raspberry Pi or, you know, in a Docker or something like that, that would bring AirPlay into Sonos.

And I used it, but there was a delay. I don't know if there's a delay anymore, but there was enough delay where I was like, I don't like this. And I just, I never went back to AirPlay on anything. Yeah. Good for some people, not for anybody else. I don't see any more Sonos on here. There was one Sonos Port for under $200. I'm like, well, I don't need that either.

I'll sell you my Sonos Ray. It's definitely the worst Sonos product I've ever owned. You're really selling it, man. It is not a good one. Yeah. Are we going to go pick up a Wiem or one of those Vessel things? One of those two. Oh, there you go.

Yeah. Get a branded one from don oh yeah home tech home tech branded got some some interesting some interesting news here from uh bluetooth i know you've never heard this before but bluetooth 6.0 has officially launched it's going to bring some significant advancements to location trackers and smart locks uh this new version of bluetooth focuses on enhancing precision and security. And one standout features, it's improved location accuracy, which is now within a few centimeters, making it ideal for applications like indoor navigation and asset tracking. So

very similar to what I think Apple has on their phones now, where you can like, if you lose your phone or a device that has Apple tracking in it, you can like walk around. Like I lose my phone all the time and I can on my watch, grab my watch and like push the button and find it. And it'll kind of tell me where it is and kind of show me like what direction to watch. And it's pretty nice. Yeah, they use that for the Apple TV remote instead of having a speaker built into it.

So you can't find the remote um they use that for that as well um it works all right but i just wish the apple tv remote had a speaker to be honest play a sound a little ditty i don't know if i should be saying ditty out loud right now whoops yeah there's no indictment yet it's got to come out soon ah here it is they call it the apple ultra wideband i think that's what they call it Oops. Yeah, there's no indictment yet. It's got to come out soon. Ah, here it is. They call it the Apple Ultra Wideband. I think that's what they call it.

So like if you have that, it's in most things these days that Apple produces, including the remote, which is nice. Nice little way to find it. It sounds like Bluetooth is going to have a solution for it as well. So yay, go Bluetooth. I'm sure next year everything will have Bluetooth, right? Everything.

They say that every year. It's all wireless. All right. More lock talk here. Utech has unveiled the UltraLock with a Q Bolt Mission UWB plus NFC. Oh, here we go. This is what I was looking for. There you go.

Because I just read the news article. It just kept going. It would have been right here. It's the first smart lock to use ultra-wideband technology for auto-unlocking. This promises a faster, more reliable experience compared to current methods using BLE. This is Bluetooth. There's some shade towards Bluetooth. But you get Bluetooth 6 in there, you'd be good to go.

Wi-Fi and GPS. The lock can also be unlocked with Wi-Fi Matter NFC and supports Android and SD-enabled phones at launch with future support for Apple's Home Key. Includes a keypad for pin access, traditional key option as well, powered by eight, count them, eight AA batteries. Wow. Holy cow. And boasts a year of battery life.

Well, it better for eight batteries. I'm going to give up eight batteries for this. The Mission Bolt will be available later this year uh with another version supporting apple's ultra wide band unlocking expected in 2025 so hey you don't for you know it doesn't it doesn't look terrible it's not it's not it's not like those locks we had last week those things we had last week but it looks okay ish yeah i'm gonna say this this is normal at I mean, because you typically have a keypad on a deadbolt anyway. And this looks like there are other locks. So I don't think they're doing anything crazy here.

Definitely a good improvement, though. Is it worth eight AA batteries a year, though? It's a year long? I don't know. I think mine only takes four. But I'm going to use mine with Z-Wave. I'm going to use mine with Apple HomeKit or anything like that. So, or HomeKey.

HomeKey, yeah. It's their NFC opening and closing thing. Which, I mean, it's nice. It works. It's a nice compact lock, though. I think they're decent. I've installed a couple of these. They work fine.

So, I think it's a good improvement. And I'm liking the ability to buy a lock in whatever flavor you want. And typically, the problem with smart locks is that they'll make a smart, whoever makes a smart lock and it works with wifi or they make a smart lock and it works with Zigbee or Z wave, but they don't make anything that just like works with everything or that you can get the same design and everything. And just cause you can buy a lock and Z wave doesn't mean you can buy it on

wifi in the same style or anything. And so I do like that a lot of these manufacturers are basically just coming out with the same lock in a different wireless protocol. And I think that's a smart idea because a lot of people like the looks. They just want a specific technology. I always like what Yale did with theirs where they put the little module inside.

Yeah, just the chip. Yeah. Yeah, you know, I kind of of i've always wanted that just to be a thing in all technology like just buy a light switch and just change out the chip or you know whatever it is um i feel like that would add a lot of money to the cost but probably yeah i think that'd be kind of nice just to you know oh i'm changing my ecosystem let me just buy a new module for everything usually those yeah usually those do have like some kind of detrimental cost factor, like all the little parts and pieces and extra things you need to make sure like

whatever pins they are line up. That's usually problematic, but I don't know. Like it could be a soft problem here in 2024. And there's, we're just, a lot of companies are all being lazy. I don't know. It seems like they could probably do that and replace like that with, you know, four AA batteries and i'd be okay like i'd be okay with

that yeah give me the freedom to kind of like swap out a module to change over to from z wave to zigbee like you can with yale and and you can keep four of those batteries just a thought i'm not a product designer don't listen to me all right uh see see gavin goes away and all we're going to talk about is locks this week. Just lock talk. Locks and Sonos. Eufy SmartLock E30 is Eufy's first Matter-compatible SmartLock priced at $169. Operates over thread, enhancing responsiveness, battery life, and connectivity compared to Wi-Fi or Bluetooth locks. This lock can be controlled by the UFI app and other Matter-compatible apps like Apple Home, Amazon Alexa, Google Home, and Samsung SmartThings.

It features multiple access methods, traditional key, fingerprint reader, and a keypad, and notably it supports out-of-home control and home innovation routines through voice assistants. Not bad for $169, and it doesn't look bad either this actually looks pretty good it wouldn't go on my front door but it does look good yeah and this is actually matter over thread too which is nice i mean that way you don't have to worry about the wi-fi issues and stuff that i've had a lot with uh matter devices um yeah and it's it's not ugly i think it actually does kind

of look nice i don't really know if i ever want a fingerprint sensor on my door lock. Um, I just don't think I'm the use when i'm confused or i didn't bring my watch or something or my phone with me and i'm like walked around the house and i need to get in i'm like uh i could put my code in or i can just put my finger on this thing right here and it'll unlock it it's not what i i first go to like just putting my watch up against the door thing and it unlocks we were making fun of the last lock for the 8 batteries and 12 months battery life. Have you seen what this one is, Seth? Oh, it's another 8 battery. Nice. And for 8 months battery life.

Up to 8 months, so even worse. Alright, AA battery DB.com and it is Oh, I got it. Alright, nice. Perfect. Yeah, we need to know and we'll break it down by cost we'll do the different duracell batteries and stuff uh yeah yeah that would be

cool like we can swap out you can use the generic power boost ones or no i don't think i'll be getting this uh domain but um 24 batteries is 25 dollars you get they come down in price like or in bulk if you buy them in bulk, like a Costco or whatever, you can get it. Yeah, for sure. Well, eight batteries, um, it's cost you roughly $10, uh, every eight months. Start saving your batteries up guys. Cause these locks are coming out and they all want your batteries and they all want your batteries. So I want to drain your battery. I wonder like what the real use case. I mean, the Quarra has like four batteries

and I can't tell you when I replaced them last, but I know that like it runs down every now and then. I probably should check it because if it does go down, then I can't get in that door because I'm not carrying a key like some kind of like monster. Like hillbilly.

Yeah, like a savage. Exactly. I'm not one of those people, but you know we'll see i only need four batteries every so often i have already replaced my yale batteries and i've been here for a little more than a year i think whenever we had the uh the scream and video that i showed off um so they lasted less than a year as well so i think it's pretty typical smart locks this is my door lock is oh no it says it's unlocked so oh batteries are high i don't remember the last time i replaced them though mine's at 91 i got mine a

couple months ago i bet there's firmware updates let's do this all right well all the links and topics we talked about tonight can be found over on our show notes at hometech.fm slash 499 all right let's jump into our interview here with Owen Maddock and Tom Della Compagni. I hope I get the name right. I'm not sure. Sorry, Tom. We would just call you Tom D. I just said to just call him Tom, but Seth wanted to make it complicated for some reason.

I was like, no, I don't. It's going to be all right. Just link to the show. Link to their show. Yeah. Great show. Great. We'll also put a link in there for the Home Center Design Podcast.

If you aren't listening, go out out now hit subscribe on this thing uh little little icon i'll show up with uh like little measurement icon i always see that and it pops into my podcast feed i'm like oh yeah another another what 25 minutes of uh talking about some really fun audio stuff is coming my way so check it out uh let's go ahead and jump into the interview though welcome everybody we've got owen here and tom from the home cinema design podcast welcome guys hi yeah thank you we've got a lot to talk about well we were trying to figure out what we're going to talk about we ended up talking about all of it i think before the show and it was like we should probably just hit record and start talking and start gab gabbing because i think that's what we're going to do we're going to like bounce ideas off each other and talk about fun topics uh especially when it comes to uh home cinema design and what that kind of means in in 2024 with all the the new the well i guess

new guidelines uh that that are floating around out there uh rp22 in very specifically oh and i think did you you said that you've had some you had some time on that committee right like you you helped a little bit like quite near the end like in the last couple of years i think it took five plus years to put together and i kind of joined as it was mostly in shape and then there was just a lot of wrangling over the details and because it needs to be consensus reality right so there's a lot of debate there's a lot of time in the room and there's a lot of personalities you know it a lot of time in the room and there's a lot of personalities. You know, it's not just the home integration community talking about this. We've got people from, you know, who were senior at Dolby. We've got senior content creators.

We've got top level world class calibrators. Right. In our group. I mean, like you've got Dolby, I'm sure DTS has a competing standard, I guess. And so you like reading through this and it's like, Dolby recommends you have this at 30 degrees, but wait, DTS, it's 35. You know, it's like, okay, thanks guys. Like make my life hard. Yeah. But I mean, the thing is,

angles is a little bit of an old fashioned way of looking at it. You know, it's really about the zones that the speakers are in because we're not designing for a single seat. We're designing for a load of you in the theater, right? A few people, yeah. So that's one of the cooler things about modern design thinking generally, which probably started off, I'd say, with the Trinoff guidelines a few years back. And they've kind of been-

Which are great. I love those. You shared those with me and they've got all the math and everything in them. I mean, they're way, way geekier than that. All right. So if you want to approach this, let's start with RP22. It's a free document. You can go download it. Yeah, because it's kind of a way to, they've certainly taken some of that wisdom and kind of brand neutralized it and kind of folded it into more generic advice. Yeah. Which is great because not all of us are selling TwinOps every day, right? Right, right.

All right, to bring this back to the original conversation, what are we talking about? What is RP22 and why are we discussing we discussing and who the hell are we right so um who the heck are these guys my name is owen maddock i'm i own cinema works i'm a home integration company in bristol i just do cinema rooms i got bored of everything else so five years ago i rebranded and i stopped doing whole home and i stopped doing kind of people's wi-fi networks because i don't want the call every time virgin media or verizon or whoever crap out um and that's gone much better actually i think it's like if you're a builder doing i don't know loft conversions and you write i do loft conversions on the side of

your van you get much better at doing lofts right and um people kind of know you get yeah yeah and that's that seems to i think i think niching and specializing is good and he's tom i am hello so i am a uh yeah home cinema guy i've got a joinery background and a big old workshop and we build and design mostly cinemas for a living these days yeah and i've fallen very very deep into the engineering side of home cinemas and audio nice yeah and actually actually we were we were both part of rp22 but during the end bit I came along 2022 Tom came along probably at the end of that year and Tom sits on more working groups than I do I'm doing other volunteer stuff for the moment I sort of think of us as we're the kind of the provisional wing of Cedia right you know we're not the voice of Cedia sometimes people come up to me

and gone C did this did that explain yourself and i'm like i don't know i didn't do it i'm just a volunteer member right so we can kind of sit in the committee yeah we're just we're just volunteering we're just doing our bit you know yeah and i think that means we can speak a bit more freely as well and so to kind of also, yeah, exactly. And also answer TJ's good question there about what the heck is RP22. This is a, and I'll just read off the title page here, immersive audio design recommended practice documentation. It is basically, how long has immersive audio been around? In the way, like Dolby Atmos, DTS?

Atmos came out in the commercial theater in 2012 i believe it was 2012 okay yeah yeah yeah it's not that long and i think what happened is kind of what does happen which is the existing supply chains are kind of already in place so all right audio from above oh that's cool we've got cd we've got ceiling speakers guys and we just started putting ceiling speakers into the same sort of cinema designs that we had. But that's a problem in itself. Right. Because the sound's kind of pointing in the wrong direction.

And the good sounding bit of the speaker isn't getting to enough ears. You know, you're kind of getting the really off axis compromise sound. And I sort of feel like modern home cinema design, and especially in my bit, in the kind of middle market, is broken. Because you've got kind of lots of existing brand loyalties you've got the kind of buying group scenario or it's like well i buy it from him because he's my friend or i buy it from him because i've always bought it from him and you've got a kind of brand-led religion and not enough sort of engineering design and then we got into this this whole rp22 business started applying it first in our own rooms and then in customer ones

and then just our world's got a lot better and so we've now started a podcast to talk about it so that's what the home cinema design pocket you basically you're focused on all the learnings that you've you've come from you know you're back by having your background in cinema design and then also working with the rp22 group to to publish that document it's just owen and i talking about our our journey to where we're at today it literally from from guys throwing speakers in a room to guys who are engineering rooms i think's probably the right way to put it owen yeah i think that's fair i mean i spend a lot of my life kind of taking what i understand from maths and physics and engineering and kind of just trying to boil it down into slightly more common sense folksy waves of saying it but that's

i'm trying to bring everyone with me you know i'm trying to get people to point their speakers at the audience and i'm trying to get people to not put seats on their sidewalls where it sounds terrible and i'm trying to get people to maybe move the subwoofers around the back row get rid of the back row you can't you sit there. Well, yeah, exactly. Or you can call them Super Bowl seats and have them twice a year. But don't pretend you're having an immersive experience when you're right up against the back wall,

because you're not. And if you're the integrator, you've been paid, you're at home, right? Sounds fine. Exactly, yeah. But for that client, that's not a good experience on what they've bought. Like about a year or so ago,

we were on Adam Justice's podcast, yeah? And he was having a theater. And I think one of the first things we did was look at the room and say, you can't have three rows in here. Have two. And maybe just put a little bar at the back for the Super Bowl. Because it's more consistent. It's better.

No one's up against that wall. And you spent quite a lot less on seats. You just made a better room. Well, and it's good compromise too, because you're not a lot less on seats you just made a better room well it's good compromise too because you're not going to use those seats all the time right i mean unless you have parties all the time or whatever you're going to use those just like you said you know super bowl or whatever games they are twice a year and so you really don't need to emphasize that third row especially in those situations yeah it's it's so common i mean if you because it's a bad it's a bad client question. You know,

how many seats do you want? Because they're going to go, how many seats can I fit? If you say, how many of you are in the family? Cool. Describe movie night to me. Right, wicked. And then tell me honestly, how many times you're going to pile everyone down into your basement to watch something? Is it just on Thanksgiving? Is it just for the Super Bowl? Well, then we should design differently because we'll get a much better result for the four people that live there. And your guests will be all right. They've had a drink, you know, they're fine. Yeah. I, I'm, I'm kind of flashing back to, I was, I was looking at the dates when you said it didn't come out until 2012. I think it said electronic devices, uh, consumer electronic

devices in 2016, somewhere thereabouts. Um, I remember back when I, I was first, well, not first starting but like when we were doing the the cinema theaters we were using the yamaha amplifiers and they were just getting to the point where they were putting like the elevated speaker channels yeah that you could put in um on some of their hiring receivers or processors or whatever so like that i think i mean those those types of things kind of like those ideas float around a little bit and then somebody like dolby will come out and be like well here's here's the standard way of doing it and and the processor maths to back it up see i use maths i can speak your language um the the uh what what i think the

rp22 does is give us integrators give designers a better way they it's like a start here document like you start here and learn what's important because I think what's missed a lot of times, we've already, we talked about seats, we talked about speakers and that kind of thing, but like what's really missed is like the room, right? The room is like the foundation of, of what you're doing. And RP 22 does a pretty good job of highlighting like, Hey, there's a lot of things that you can change on the speakers and seating positions and all that stuff, but you really can't change the room and seating positions and all that stuff. But you really can't change the room most of the time.

Most of the time you're stuck in a little box and you get that box and you got to make the best decisions you can out of it. And here, based on like experience, also they highlight a couple of other papers like best practice papers or specification papers. Here are those and then like as we line those up we'll give you four simple levels to market that at i think it really does help i know there's some controversy about that in in the industry about like the level one two three four because like everybody would be like i've got level three and it's not level three nobody checked the math right and and so like it it really does help, I think, give someone, um, a goal, like here, here's the goal we're trying to get to level two.

And then we're going to make decisions based on that. Now, if we get there, yay. If you don't, you've got a really good level, level one system. Yeah. And also, I mean, again, I don't know the American market as well, but I do sort of certainly see a lot of stuff, you know, especially pictures on social media. There is definitely rooms in both countries where you can just take a look and someone's proud of their job and they're going oh this is brilliant and just look at look at it and go yeah that's not level one because it can't be somebody looks fantastic i mean he's got like spider-man in there and there's like 16 like uh six foot figures wax figures i don't know what they are like of people standing around the rooms and like costumes and jerseys and stuff and then yeah it's like yeah i there was a beautiful job i think it was more of

a star wars theme it was you know what they'd done in terms of art and creativity and sort of almost making a sculptural looking sci-fi space was fantastic but i'm the guy that threw it out the awards because it wasn't good enough yeah that's what i like about like this this doc is that it it's acknowledging that there are both worlds, right? It's acknowledging that there is a scientific way to arrive at the perfect room. And it's also acknowledging that we don't live in a perfect world and that we have clients to serve, people with money who may want to see giant busts of Spider-Man on the side of their wall and football jerseys and stuff. Oh, of course. That wasn't why. It's just that they hadn't brought any performance design to it.

You can absolutely have both. And you do see rooms that have got both and have got amazing, spectacular kind of effects and yet have been engineered unbelievably well. And that's going to be a thrilling experience when you walk in and go, wow, look at this cool room. And an equally thrilling experience when you sit down and watch something and that's what you want right i don't think enough people realize that the room is the biggest component that you have to design to and with without a good room i don't care what speaker speaker cable projector processor amplification you use if the room isn't right

it's not going to be potentially a great outcome right you know we have to design these rooms we have to do something with the the noise floor in there a quiet room is so much more important than the amount of horsepower that's feeding the speakers that you might have put in there for sure and it's it's far more technical to get a quiet room than it is to get a loud room absolutely yeah it's easy just to throw in giant speakers right i mean you could just anybody can throw in speakers and an amplifier and make it work it's not that complicated but it is it is more complicated to make it sound good um and to look good and everything else so there's definitely multiple aspects there. And especially if you're in the normal integrator,

what I would consider the normal integrator market where you're just putting in equipment and you're not really designing the room from scratch, there's not much you can do with that. I mean, it is just throwing stuff in and making it work, but there is proper ways to design around that now with these guidelines. There's loads of stuff you can do. I mean one you it's it's unlikely we're going to get a kind of a

full qualified acoustician in but for example um harking back to adam's room that you put in um just moving the subs about you know and applying a bit of design there using using the wizard system you can have the difference between oh my god there's nothing happening at kind of the beat of a kick drum to oh but if we put them here and here then the bass is actually going to be quite even at these seats and that's going to sound way better because there's no notes missing um it's just slightly off topic but i kind of want to stress i think most integration firms have good intentions you know i think they want to do a good job they want to do the right thing by the customer it's more a case of the information you had to go

and ferret out before yeah you know yeah oh yeah yeah figuring out what everybody wants figuring out what the proper design was was difficult i mean it still is you know and putting it all in one place and making it much, much more easy, much, much more accessible, it helps everyone. Because, you know, it's no good if the training path is a bit of a secret, right? Yeah. This market is good at that. Everything we do is secretive.

And it's still a little, it's still, I mean, it's still, I'm not going to say this is easy, right? This is still a big lift for somebody who is, like we were talking before, he's installing alarms yesterday, like alarm systems. And his loudest thing he's heard is the 100 dB siren that he's installed. And then now he's like, well, I've got to install this theater that's 110 dB.

And I've got to make, like what's the difference between that and the siren that I put in? This does make it, I mean, you do need some education about what sound is how it works uh how transient noise echoes you know all that good stuff works like how how to a little primer on sound diffusion sound absorption like making rooms and and how the construction about those rooms goes i was very ignorant into that until I, we got spec to make our,

our first like a studio and we did floating, floating floor. We didn't do the floating floors. We kind of did, but not really. And then we did floating walls and ceilings. And then it was built over a garage. And I remember,

I remember sitting in it one day and like at the end, we're trimming out all the XLR cables and soldering and all that stuff. And we're like, yeah, it's quiet in here. And you know, it's got the mechanicals all done, you know, completely separated with, with, uh, mufflers and stuff from the, uh,

the, the eight track system, super, super nice room. And, uh, somebody comes on and hits the, uh, the garage door opener and the whole room goes. Amazing. Nobody thought about that. Yeah. I mean, there's, there's definitely some training resources you can do um i mean even though i haven't yet i've kind of gone around about an awkward

tortured route but everyone should take haa level one you can do it online it's easy you can buy it from cd or it's straightforward if you don't know what how the db scale works if you don't know you know basic sound maths and stuff like that and if you kind of don't have a primer on throwing sound around small rooms, Home Acoustics Alliance is a good place. CDA have a two day training course that will happen, you know, from time to time around the tech summits. And, you know, things like the show just gone. Peter teaches the two day course on that. It's tremendous. You know, I'm a 30 year veteran.

I learned a lot. Yeah, there's supplementary education. If you read document you go what the hell yeah rp22 is a list of questions that you have then got to go and find the answers to for sure yeah yeah at least at least it's nice that it gives you but it's nice like we said if it gives you those questions up front so you're not you're not going through five different spec white papers and spec sheets to figure out like what we're trying to get to with this particular system or yeah like we were talking about like the turnoff thing is great it's got all the math and everything in it and but like that's pretty much by the turnoff engineers right like it's not really going to apply if i'm using clip speakers or something

i mean yeah i used it a lot and i did use clip speakers. Yeah. But like, because it's science, it's proper science and it's right. You don't have to be using their processing to apply that into what you're doing, but it's less likely, you know, if you kind of think I'm in the mid market, my brands are Denon or Anthem or Integra or whatever, you're less likely to go off and read the Trinov white paper because it's just human nature, right? Right. That's why I like the fact that a lot of that wisdom has been boiled into RP22 because then it's definitely for everyone.

Yeah, it's definitely referenced in there. I mean, I see hints in... I mean, it's not the same. It's very much not the same. But there's definitely hints and everything in there that they referenced that document and pulled knowledge from it. And Arno from Trinov was very much a significant contributor to those meetings,

especially when it comes to, I suppose, elements around spatial audio and our sense of placing objects convincingly in space. Yeah. Which makes sense because all they've done is decades of research about that stuff. So it makes sense that we should use it. It's a pretty cool change i mean when we were doing home theaters it was like i was on the back side of the like 2006 i guess through 2012 somewhere in there um where we were just it was basically we would go to cda or show

like it talk to whoever we could to get whatever discounts we could on whatever projector and then uh and and same thing for speakers. Well, we kind of had our like go-to speakers. They weren't bad. They were like, I guess, Sonance speakers that we use all the time. THX certified speakers they had. And then we would pop in whatever amplifier fit the budget

or whatever we were trying to do, like processing unit or separates or whatever. So not a terrible job. You did learn a lot about the construction process during that that point because i had no idea you know what went into making theater or what went into making sure that a uh projector would line up with the screen you know there's all these like little things little gotchas i think what you've just what you've just described there seth i think is 97 of the cinema guys that are out there they they're unfortunately

doing it the wrong way around yeah they've got a bill of materials and then they're going to go and put it in a room yeah absolutely what rp22 is doing is spinning that round a lot right we've got a room let's design the room we're doing it to this level this is what volume i need whether it be how quiet it is or how loud the loudspeaker is and then we find the right kit to hit those specs and it teaches us how okay how do i get 105 db at this seat from my left speaker and how do i get it with a convincingly even timbral response at this seat and that seat, which leads us neatly into the next thing. Is that how you pronounce it?

I thought it was timbre. If you like. Tom says, what do you say, Tom? Timbre! Timbre! Because he's just a wood basher from Stoke. That's all he is. You know what I mean?

Yeah. Knowing that word and reading that for, I don't know, 20, 30 years or whatever, it still trips me up every time. I think if you're a Frenchman, it's Tom, but you know, we're not. So there we go. Yeah. And this gets interesting because there's, there's more up, there's more recommended practices to come.

I mean, you know, this is fun stuff. Like if we're building stud walls, right. We don't have to go and investigate the timber because we can just use cls right canadian lumber standard are we talking about no i'm talking about the importance of standards-based design right and i always think about it about just stud work i go down to the builders merchants when i have to do this sort of stuff and it's like all right i need some four by two right is it cls in other words it's going to be yay strong it's going to be yay free from defects i can build a wall with

that without really worrying i might visually inspect it to make sure i don't get a wonky bit right but that stuff's been tested by independent people so that i don't have to do any math or any worrying about it i can just build the bloody wall right right? Right. Or if I need a drill bit, you know, it's made according to DIN standards, which stands for Deutsche, I don't know. Close enough. You can look it up, right? Which means that if I kind of drill a hole in a wall

a certain size, I'm going to get a round hole and it's not going to break for the material it's designed for. Well, audio is much more complicated than that. So instead of saying, right, I need this much strength and I need this much free from defects it's 100 plus page document but suddenly we can codify and say i'm going to get this much emotional response in my customer's soul right that's much better yeah yeah well it definitely it definitely does bridge the idea of like the technical specs with the artistic

specs like that that's like, there's, there's, there's two sides. There's two pulls to this and you can have all the technical specs in the world. Like TJ was saying, you can,

you can pump as much energy as you want into a room, but if it, if it doesn't sound right, it's not going to feel right. Ah, but here's the thing that science has been done right by the, by Dr. By Dr.

Floyd. Yeah. It's all, it's all figured out. He's been sitting people in a room and working out what people like since the 80s and 90s. And we like even response. You know, we like a smooth, well-performing audio without any stupid lumps and bumps in it that's got nice predictable reflections. You know, this is all settled science if you like and then john that used to be an alarm engineer comes in and goes oh but i prefer these speakers because i prefer them because they're my friends and it's like that's not the same that's just your gut feel against studies you know that's that's not the same i believe in the scientific method call me weird do do um i you know i have a background in mixing and and and there and there's a whole process in that. I mean, between going in and engineering a song, you know, EQing out different frequencies

to let vocals punch through and all the stuff that you have to do to record in the limited, very limited spectrum that we can hear in. It's way more limited than you think. And then to have that reproduced on the medium that we have you know uh there's all sorts of tricks to that trade and one of one of the the final pieces especially when mixing is uh is is is when they they go into finalize for whatever medium they're putting it on used to be for cds and now i'm sure everybody mixes directly to for mp3s or or m4as or whatever what do we do we have that same kind of uh push in in movies like where and in cinema where one i don't know sound studio may have a different

approach to how like they may not like they they have they go they aim for that flat response like that that's what we're going for in these cinemas. We're going for a cinema that produces a flat response for everything in there. But I'm sure there are some times where you get transients and noise and things that come off of sound effects or songs or whatever that go up and above and beyond what you expect it for. Is that something that you have to think about? Or is that something that like, just once we get the foundation for this, it's good to go. I mean, it's similar, but different.

You do a studio environment that you're mixing and it's going to be pretty calibrated. It's going to be pretty even. That said- Although each room has different- I don't disbelieve it. Yeah. The reasons it's different go like this.

Fundamentally, you're aiming for one point in space, which is one person on the mix. And yeah, to a point, they might check it from other positions. But really, that central seat is critical in content creation stuff. I don't think it should be or is so in a theatre environment. I think it's, you know, someone and their partner or it's you and the wife and the kids or it's kind of a whole load of people so we're trying to get as good and as consistent response as possible in a much wider listening area is thing one and secondly i mean in the studio you've got things like the yamaha ns10 right which are kind of nasty but they're very

analytical in the mid-range so you can find and fix a problem in a piece of content using those but you would never use five of those or 17 of those in a home theater because it would just be horrible right so it's different but there's certain shared similarities as well um yeah tom are you gonna say yeah so you're i think you're talking about how do we know that our rooms sound correct a little bit, yeah. At the end of the day, we talked about the stuff going in. Does anybody go back and look at it and measure it? Oh, yeah.

We come on to RP32. Real pros do. Yeah, so that's the thing, isn't it? So how do we know? So RP22 is a design document. It's what we do to make sure that we've got the right kit doing the right thing that's going to give us the headroom to equalize it post-install, which then moves us down to another RP that we're on at the moment,

which is a verification of your design. So RP22 is a design document only. Okay. So how do we know that we've hit our brief and hit our expectations of the room and made sure that our mass is correct? Well, we then have to verify it, which is very difficult.

So post-calibration, have we left enough headroom in the system knowing what our speakers do or don't do? Do we cue them? We say flat, but so commercially they have something called quite often in a dolby room they have a x curve to follow and that's what they've got to hit they've got to they've got to match that x curve we don't have something similar in the residential world because our rooms are so varied and so much smaller and so much more difficult to get the same

like a big commercial theatre would be, which is much easier to work in because they're having to deal with less audio issues that we get in the small rooms. Big rooms, easier. That's easy stuff. Small rooms, harder. Yeah.

Yeah, big rooms, you know, modal issues, just throw speakers throw power sounds same thing with outdoor mixing like i i mean and you listen to an outdoor concert you may be nowadays with the airline arrays like they can feed everybody the same level of sound which is quite amazing but used to you'd have to like the goal was like to rush in and get right in front of that sound booth because you knew that guy was going to get the best mix and the loudest mix for the whole concert and that was going to be odd like forget standing upstairs like in front that's where the subwoofers are and the guy just sits there and tweaks those to make everybody sick up there like right there in front of the sound booth that's where i'd be

but now line arrays man you could be off axis and it's great yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah and it's funny i did a a uh i don't know if you guys have ever heard of some software called smart yeah um i met sam birchow many times he had beards yeah so pro audio software and i did i did their training so i was in a room full of pro audio guys not one of them knew what a room mode was because they don't have them yeah yeah because they've never had to deal with it never yeah that's that's funny that's really funny i mean that's what that whole software suite was set up to do was like you set the little microphone in you're like oh look at that it's gone what happened there and you like tweak something on the eq the ashley eq and like oh it's back there we go we're good to go yeah yeah i i i use it for for measuring phase i think it's

absolutely amazing i don't think there's anything better on the market for it but we have problems with measuring phase in a small room yeah because the room's so small because the wave's so big it becomes very problematic to measure accurately and uh the instructor couldn't quite give me the info because they're just not used to dealing in in small rooms makes sense open areas are easy yeah yeah i'm still learning my way through the kind of calibration process mainly from tom if we're honest and yeah there's there's a whole rp for this so um no there isn't oh you're right that's just measurement verification rp32 is not a color yeah it's not a calibration document it is a verification of what you've done okay i need to get that out no that's worth that's

worthwhile cool yeah um what was i going to say the thing is, and I do include me two years ago, by the way, there is a general, I worry a lot about AV receivers that have auto calibration. Because I think it creates a peace of mind that shouldn't be there. Because most people, and this definitely includes past Owen, what they do is they run the microphone and then they run away. I'm done. I'm calibrated. I've seen this on awards entries, ones that didn't get as far, where they go, yeah, we calibrated this system. And they basically say, here's what Anthem or Odyssey or whatever it was did. And you get this wonky line. And here's what it looked like post calibration.

And you get this lovely, smooth, perfect looking line. It's not true. What's actually happened is the AVR has measured the system once with whatever attendant problems it might have. And then it's suggested a filter curve that might remedy those problems. And that's it. Now there's two things. Firstly, did you do a good enough job giving that auto calibration as little to do as possible and you didn't on average out there in most of the uk and most of the america you didn't you just put the speakers in and you ran the mic and you ran whereas even things like towing your speakers around 20 degrees or whatever the hell you could have improved that speaker did you mess about with

bass so that you actually don't have that huge great big hole at 80 hertz anymore no you didn't and i know because if you were i'd be talking to you know i'd already know you i feel so called out right now no no no it's fine it's everyone i've been i've been there where where and it was too loud to run the stupid thing like the room the noise floor in the room the the receiver was like yeah i can't do this i can't i mean you make it quieter and i'm like i can't make it quieter. Just run. And I'm not clever or special. I only just figured any of this stuff out because I think Alec mentioned in passing. It was when I was writing a CPD for Cedia in 2019 about bass.

And he went, oh, of course, the first thing you should do is move the subs around. And this got me thinking. And then I bought Roomy Q, downloaded for free Roomy Q wizard software and started playing with their room simulator. And suddenly my job's got better. So anyway, back to it auto calibration is the devil because you can auto calibrate a problematic room and it's still problematic but if you'd applied a bit of design even a few hours worth it would have been an awful lot better and you've never then independently checked what's actually happening at the seat and if you do that then you can improve and improve

and improve again and this has been mine and tom's learning journey i guess our jobs have just got a lot better yeah i've i've really fallen quite deep into calibration i think it's it's like putting a formula one or an indycar together bolting it up and then going driving without setting the thing up you have potentially got a very fast motor vehicle there but if it's not set up correctly it's going to probably handle very poorly so if you run the auto eq and i use auto eq systems don't get me wrong if you use them and don't verify them i guarantee the simplest of things level from left center right and every other speaker at one position will not be correct. I haven't met and used a single system that gets it right.

Not one. Never. The delays will be off because they always are. Time alignment is never, never small enough for it to be good enough. Ever. And I think I've used most of them. Even on the very expensive stuff it doesn't get it 100 right yeah and and it and it tom said calibration is hard but some of these basics are really really easy you know you can just run a sweep to your main listening position and you can

go oh my sensor is you know 0.2 milliseconds off all right okay i'll just change that yeah yeah and then you listen again to some content you're like oh oh it's all snapped into focus and it's gone all spatial and it's gone all good you know so this bit it's it's the difference between watching a blurry like the projector's out of focus and and and oh yeah let's just move it a little bit oh it's in focus now yeah yeah yeah it's it's hard to describe because we're you know we're i guess we're an audio podcast i guess we could do that but like it's very hard to describe because we're, you know, I guess we're an audio podcast. I guess we could do that. But, like, it's very hard to describe how much of a difference it actually does make when the room is calibrated and put into spec where it should be versus… Yeah, well, if your time alignment from your left and your right are out. So we, as installers, generally go to quite…

We want to put the speakers in the right place. Mm-hmm. really go to quite we want to put those speakers in the right place if they're not time aligned correctly you're effectively moving that out of the location that you've installed the speaker so uh for every 0.3 of a millisecond you're moving it 10 centimeters out of its physical position yeah it's about a millisecond a foot if we're in, you know, freedom units. Yeah. Yeah, freedom units. So to go to the efforts that we do go to

to install a speaker or place a speaker to then not make sure that it's time aligned correctly, you may as well not have gone to that effort. Just put it anywhere. But it is. And it's the same with volume. If you've got your left speaker slightly louder than your right speaker, it's not going to image.

And I struggle to understand our industry not knowing that. And the investment here can be tiny. You can get a $100 mic from either Mini DSP or Dayton Audio or people like that. And you'll be way ahead of everyone in your state or town or whatever it is. That's true, yeah. And a little bit of time, a little bit of time on YouTube

using how to work it and talk to the me and Toms of the world and that kind of thing. And, you know, it's transformative. It's transformatively better quite quickly. Me and Tom, actually, we've just run one so far and we've got another one coming up in Bristol in a couple of weeks. Accidentally and out of the podcast, and it's mainly Tom, we've done a little introductory calibration course for our integrator buddies. I don't know when we it's been brilliant because everyone's keen and everyone seems to want to do better. And we're just showing them some super simple stuff

around things like time alignment, things like looking at what's actually happening to your audio and whether you calibrated it properly and then how to fix that. I don't think most integrators have seen anything like that. I mean, I could tell you that most installers that I've worked with sure haven't. I mean, if I was to describe something like a smart soft or whatever, I keep like SIA soft, I think used to make that, or maybe they still do. Uh, like that was, that was a really cool tool.

And it just, it doesn't exist in this industry. Like, uh, like anything like that I've, I've, I've run across, it's all been like, well, I plugged the microphone in, I hit go, it made some weird noises and bleeps and bloops. And now it seems to think everything's cool. And that's, that's okay. And it has a place, but I always think if,

um, if someone comes home from, you know, Magnolia, if that's the thing or Best Buy or whatever with a AVR and, and, and runs the auto calibration system, well,

surely as a pro, you ought to be able to do better than that. Yeah, sure. Yeah. You know, I think the software that everyone should start on is a different one it's called room eq wizard um it's either free which is a great price i know the guy that wrote it um or it's a hundred dollars for the pro license which lets you do multiple microphones at one in one go it's trivially cheap and it's extremely powerful oh yeah you've shown this to

me yeah yeah yeah you've got your room simulation to help you do subs, and it will do most things. It does everything, pretty much. I wouldn't go as low down to say it was a starting bit of software. It can be your everything software. Yeah, it certainly is mine. I mean, how much did smart set you back, Tom, for the license? Not trivial, right?

He's gritting his teeth together. Yeah, I don't want to think about that. Perpetual's about $1,500. Okay. Yeah, Room EQ Wizard is only $100 free to me. Not bad. That's if you want to use multiple mics. And you would only want to use multiple mics to speed up your workflow.

It's not needed. You know, a U-Mic's $100. True. There. You're going to be above most of your competition with a $100 mic and a laptop. And also you should buy the Pro license anyway because John deserves to be paid.

Exactly, exactly. It's only $100. Yeah. If you make, as an integrator, you can make $100 easy selling the service, you know, as a tagline to the end. 100%. The first calibration you do, even if you did it to an existing theater by somebody else, you would transform it.

And that would be worth quite a few hundred dollars. And then you can just page on and crack on with your life. Yeah. Would you put a $10,000 projector in without having it professionally calibrated? Are you talking about here, me? Yeah. Traditionally? There's one sitting right there oh traditionally and i'm lucky that i've got such a bad memory and

that we're we're anonymized but i was um i was judging the cd awards again this year i'd one day they'll find me out and kick me off the panel yeah but until that day as soon as they ask i'm going to keep saying yes but um our technicians have 30 years experience and so we set this projector up using our taste and judgment and our eye and it's like your eyes not that good and also how would you know how would you know exactly what they meant by you know the sort of slightly whitey pinky of that person's skin that they signed off on in the production suite you weren't there right you've seen it on your tv but your tv's in bloody you know dynamic high contrast mode anyway how on earth would you know what the director intended for that red that green that blue should be why didn't you just get a guy to run cowman for you

it's a few hundred bucks and then everything is better you're making me laugh because an audio is the same that yeah i'm gonna go to audio right now. I was meeting, it's probably one of my favorite dealers now because these guys are fun. They have a very large shop or group of shops that they run and they do the Trinovs. They do everything, right? And one of the things they told me, no matter what the system is that they put in, no matter what it is, the first song that comes out of that system is miley cyrus party in the usa that is that is it so i was like oh that's amazing you you guys this is amazing like it's the ref the reference that's what they go for it sounds great on miley cyrus it's going to sound great

on everything else my my go-to in in my theater when music i've got a little playlist going on the first one is flowers by miley cyrus in atmos yeah it's good man oh yeah it's a great vocals yeah yeah she's you know they've put the time and the money and the budget and the performance into that piece of work it's great yeah and then obviously we go a bit more highfalutin and what have you but yeah absolutely go miley just lean away and home theater sound yeah tom had an experience following on from a guy um a calibrator who would literally just listen to The Greatest Showman and then change frequencies based on his subjective opinion on how that would be. Oh, yeah. The number of times I heard that this year at CDA, it's still out there. It's still out there. It's a good demo. cannot calibrate a system by ear yeah i just think you look at the way that that the pro audio world are putting shows on now and look at what they're doing to set up look at how they're

look at l acoustics they're probably doing some of the big stuff you know i just think we need to be more them yeah yeah yeah that's how i see it now we need we it's it's i say this a lot over here in the uk you know we are the biggest diy industry i've ever been part of yeah 100 and and i don't mean that in a horrible way but it's very real and also the pushback you get from your industry colleagues you know oh we don't need it oh you're being pedantic oh the thing is owen we can all go down to our local local high street brands we can all buy it from amazon or wherever it might be put it in a room screw it to a wall turn it on hit the auto eq how is that any different from engineering and immersive audio experience to you know how do we how do we get how

do we justify what we do right right i i gotta say like one of the biggest things like rp22 kind of highlights it to our conversations about the the what was it john the security guy um listening to sirens all day and then installing a theater um one of the things that that probably does prevent that next step is is profitability of the job and and while rp22 does a pretty good job i think recognizing that we live in an imperfect world and that's why you know we have these different levels but also a number of things that they mentioned throughout this document like say like that acknowledge that not everything is within the designer's control like not everything is you're going to you're going to try and install one of these things and there's a kitchen

behind you, you know, that's going to come up. Right. And I think like the day-to-day business operations of someone who wants to get in, make some money on the, on the,

on the job and get out might come into interference with, with some of these, some of the longer tail things like even calibration i don't think that's true as it goes and i'll tell you for why it's because you wouldn't do a quite big network without testing some cables oh we don't need to test these well i wouldn't anymore look at tj i would test a couple people do it all the time that's what i say like i think just the day-to-day, this is always how we've been. I got green blinking lights.

I'm good. Yeah. You don't get paid without a calibration report. If you're doing a big commercial operation, you won't get paid without the cable testing. Now, I think that customers come to us and they say more like, I want a great theater experience in my home. I've got $50,000. I want to make it amazing. It's up to you how to break that down. like you know i want a great theater experience in my home i've got fifty thousand dollars i want to make it amazing it's up to you how to break that down now provided that few hundred couple

thousand whatever go now once you know and understand and internalize that designing it better and then calibrating it better is going to make it transformatively excellent even if you spent a little bit less on kit. So let's say it's a zero-sum game. But the client never said, I want a brand X. They never said, I want you to use a Sony projector. They never said anything, really. They might have a couple of little brand preferences in their initial chat, but so what?

They're just trying to make conversation. They want 50,000 pounds worth of excellent, and it's up to you how to make that happen. You just need to do it a bit learn it a bit get a bit better and then you say oh this takes me two days i need to charge you what's wrong with that yeah i think i think i've got quite a good rp22 is a really good sales tool and i think i don't think people understand that enough so how do i use it as a sales tool it's really hard to use as a sales tool in somebody's home

but get them in this room that i'm sat in at the moment which is my demonstration room which has had rp22 thrown at it and it's about to have a bit more rp22 thrown at it at the end of the year and i'll sit them sit them down in here and say right i won't go into the engineering but i'll flash over it of what's happened here. And I want you to sit down and I want you to experience exactly what I've done in here. No doubt this custom has been to my competitors in the local area and sat in their rooms. And I want their feedback. And I want to say, right, what did you think? I've had a demo this morning. He's been to half a dozen competitors around middle England. He listened to one demo track, one, and said, I've heard all I need to hear.

You're going to be doing the job. I've not heard that before. Let's talk about the detail. And I've got one. On page 150 of the document, this is a project me and Tom are co-producing as it goes. Lovely guy, nice size room, kind of interested. He'd done a bit of research. He was kind of keen. One thing I knew is going to be a two tier cinema, you know, row seats for him and his missus and maybe one of the kids and another row for kind of other kids when they're home because they're grown up and what have you, or maybe guests or whatever. And I said, how important is that second row? Is it guests and is it the football or is it kind of, they also need to watch a film and be immersed? He said, it's definitely the second one. I said, right, this is easy. And I just sent him page 150 of the document,

which is appendix E 2.8, 19 discrete speakers. I'm not that good. I'm looking at it right now. And I said, well, in that case, you're going to need an expensive processor made in France and by one or other make. And you're going to need 19 speakers because that way we can create a decently spatial result, both for you at the front and for your guests behind you. And they went, cool. That's a shit ton of amps and speakers that I've just sold. So, you know, thanks, Cedia. Thanks, guys. I appreciate that. And it's right, you know, and it's right for them in terms of the delivery we were going to experience. I could have used fewer, but not without compromising the spatial effect for my back row. So how cool is that?

Yeah, it's right there. It's written down. Recommended minimum for two rows. That's what the book says. And because I was there on the journey, at least at the end of's written down. Recommended minimum for two rows. That's what the book says. And because I was there on the journey, at least at the end of it, I know that the book isn't lying. So I'm more than happy to use that. But I think that's awesome, you know, because it's not a zero sum game for the profitability

of the business, because by following RP22, I've just made that chunk of business quite a lot bigger. Right. And better. Yeah. I mean, any minor step in the direction of this is going to make the system better. Yeah. I mean, any, any, any minor step in the direction of this is going to make the system better. And of course, potentially make you more money, uh, either by selling more or selling a better product. Right. And, and even if it is a base system, if you were to do some of

the things that they, they suggest, especially even the front, like for level one system, like if you're doing a basic level one system and it sounds great, then yeah, get a referral out of that and all that so completely but people have friends that really does happen as well when you're sitting in the cinema and you kind of go i've sat in this kind of budget before and it wasn't like this that keeps happening now so that happened in first i guess my first big rp22 room was the one i own right in bristol and then the second one was kind of down in weymouth on the South coast. And it's, it's just so good in there. You know,

it's like, wow, that wasn't crazy expensive. It's a bit bigger. It's got a few more speakers, but it's like, Oh yeah, no,

I'm home. I noticed in the beginning of, of RP 22, it was talking to a little, I don't think I went back and touched on it. Cause I think most of it's more about the immersive cinema, but like immersive music is, does that play much of a role is that much in demand

inside of these rooms these days or is it just mostly focused on cinema huge i it's funny isn't it i don't think i don't think a huge amount of people are really aware of it but it's again it's it's definitely part of my my my sort of little getup when I get people here into my demo room. You know that there's Atmos music, don't you? Well, what's that? And then you put some on, and it's like you see the little faces light up, and there's, you know, boom. What's the song?

Tiesta. And he's literally flying around the room. So good. It's an awesome experience. I was on the fence when I first started apple music was i think the first to start throwing out atmos music yeah yeah um i was really on the fence i mean initially when they they launched it it was about six db cooler than the normal music so you know you couldn't get the volume there but they've sorted that out now and And I, I love that experience of Atmos music.

I think it's great. Have you, have you ever watched Hans Zimmer's Prague music? Not, not in any kind of, uh, uh, oh my God, reference area.

I mean, maybe, maybe on some headphones I could do it. Hey, it's a work on, does it work on Sonos? Does anything? AirPods are about the same,

right? You need to get, it's, it's possibly the reference material to test the system on i've heard good things about it yeah for sure i just haven't um it's unbelievable yeah and i don't think you'd get the same emotional response listening to that exact same track on two channel no absolutely and i mean i don't i don't get much demand for it from the end consumer going oh we really want to listen to Atmos music in here.

But when I get them in my room and when we've played all the obvious stuff, you know, we've played them Ready Player One, and we've played them Lady Gaga, and we've played them a bit of A Quiet Place and all this stuff. I just put some music on for a bit and they're like, wow, that's a thing. I'm like, yeah, it does that too. It does that too. I start with music.

Nice. Yeah, I start with music now. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. I want to talk about product data because that's i think cd had just gone um the first draft of rp1 you can't design a predictable room without more product data than nearly all the manufacturers are giving us um if you're familiar with a polar

plot you know which is just kind of what's happening to the output of this speaker as you go further off off axis that's been on every single commercial product since the beginning of time, beginning of time. Yeah. That, that we don't get it all. We never see, we never even,

yeah. So L acoustics do resi now. So they, they obviously give it and they basically design the domestic systems pretty much the same way as they always have. But it's expected. Like we don't have, like we don't have that in,

uh, we don't have, I've never seen that rarely ever seen a polar plot inside of a resi two links so ascendo ascendo immersive audio which is aia-cinema.com you can link that and per listen the sort of new make that's got some of the great and the good from some of the other speaker makes they're big on data okay and they well you know one of the best sounding rooms that c CD had just gone was the Ascendo room.

One of the other ones was the Trinov Perlissen room. Big on data. So you can design a predictable response at the seats. You can actually know what's going on rather than just guess. It's an amazing start. And the other sort of interesting standard for us is Spinarama, which I think is CEA 2034 as a standard, which it tells you what's happening in terms of the reflection response so if your early reflections sound good and smooth and sound much like the

direct sound did as well then your brain can relax because it kind of understands what's going on equipped with a polar plot and spinorama data you can design a proper room without it you are pissing in the wind sun can i say that i yeah you can uh i i was like i was trying to find these these websites i'm like he's he's he's uh he's pulling my leg here like some of these names like it's just a spit like one of those spin classes things with the bicycles like what are you talking about so i think i think i think what this boils down to for us guys doing this professionally is this allows us to, to a certain level of, a high level of degree, know what's going to happen in that room when you first turn it on. Yeah.

Because if you're not designing, if you're not seeing what you're speaking, if you don't know what that speaker can do, A, how do you implement it? And B, how the bloody hell do you know what it's going to do when you play that first song or movie through it you know so we have got to be able to people say oh this is loads of time rp22 is going to put so much time onto my no i don't think it is what rp22 is going to do is give you once you get into it once you've built your excel spreadsheet which is effectively what what what you know most guys who are implementing it have probably done yeah um

it's going to give you easy repeatable results you know what's going to happen within reason we can't be 100 sure because acoustics but it's going to give you a model to work off and get you 98 the way there to even at level one is a great sounding room and also a lot i mean they're a bit bigger in the states right so typical room in the uk is probably between 15 and 20 feet long in the states is probably 20 to 25, I guess, because there's just more space. Right. But you do the same room an awful lot.

Yeah. You know, so you kind of, well, this spec worked in this space. It's very, very similar to within a couple of feet to this one. I know what I'm using because it's in terms of output and in terms of

predictability, it's the same stuff. It's just this time you're starting from a much, much higher baseline. The other thing is right now I can think of three makes off the top of my head that give good data but behind the scenes a lot of guys are working on it my friends at monitor audio said you know we're going to wait for rp1 to be published and then we'll start collating data and we just want to hit this target once in terms of providing the output stuff. So that's a great start. They're a huge make. RP1 is going to be great for our industry.

100%. Like you guys just said, data. We, you know, in this domestic industry that we're in, there is no data. Why is there no data? We've never demanded it. We've never asked for it. Unlike the pro world where it's been just part of everything. The ethos forever. You don't buy a microphone without looking at a polar plot you don't buy a speaker without looking at the dispersion path like yeah come on like it's not it's not even why don't

they want to give it because we've never asked for it and now they're scared that the data they give us isn't going to be good enough well that's not that's not always the case because the data may show some it might show some flaws but more importantly it shows us you know if we really like that product you mentioned sonance i've this has got sonance speakers in this room i really like them i've got no data on them i've got my own data now but it might have shown me how to use that speaker better right or to give a hypothetical let's say we designed a speaker i don't know in the 1970s and i don't know hypothetically made some donald fagan records on it and then for some reason started throwing that into home theaters and it's like yeah but the minute you go 10 degrees off axis that whole thing falls to shit i'm gonna get you

sued sorry um nobody listens There's like three people. Sure, sure. This is great. But you know where I'm coming from. Yep. Because we're designing for one listener as opposed to suddenly we're designing for six. You might need different products, don't you think? Maybe.

Maybe go back to the drawing board and redesign it. Right, right. I think that is coming, actually. That particular make. Some of their new stuff is arranged differently. Interesting. To its benefit, you know yeah well it it's it's so you've mentioned rp32 rp1 are those the two that are that are coming down the pipe for and 23 which is going to be really interesting

which is video now video project, HDR, viewing angles, specular highlights, brightness. It's going to get interesting. It's going to ruin my garage setup here. Yeah. So RP23 is exactly the same for video. It's a design document on how to best get an image in a room, not just from a projector but from anything and

it's yeah again and i'm very guilty because i'm not nearly as much of a video guy as i am an audio guy but how do you design to best get an image in the room yeah that's kind of been that that's kind of been like one of the things that we tried to do more i guess than i mean the audio thing seemed felt like it was a given right like you would you would get the audio lined up and it turns out no well it turns out when you're doing like production custom work like you really don't you get brought in so late and then the theater is just like a checkbox like yeah i want to do that or they sit in a little theater demo. A status symbol, basically. Exactly.

All your neighbors have theaters. The furnishings, I guess, kind of make the difference. Like you can do some sound treatments on the wall to kind of like make it sound a little different. You can put the fabric up on the wall. That's nice stuff. You don't really have that in the States as much, do you? Not really.

Not? I've only done a couple of those rooms. It's mostly just been a couple of those. And it's only because of our friend from Scotland that's become really mainstream in the UK. Yeah. You know, one guy. It was there before, but it was always really, really niche. And then Roddy, our friend from Scotland, just went, oh, I got this Fabric track.

And, you know, it's just great and easy. And we all suddenly, you know, I didn't know how to use a chop chop saw before i met roddy but it's cool because you can hide your acoustic stuff away yeah yeah it's tools like that i'm just surprised it took so long right right it's it's been it's been wild like even even this like rp22 rp23 32 one like all of these things are guidebooks are tools along the way, but it's not the final, it's not the final Excel sheet, you know, like there's,

there's, there's gotta be something down the road that helps us put all this together a little bit better. So as I'm reading through this, you know, I'm like, I know I, I know Owen has like a little drawing that he uses that he adjusts an

angle on and like gets ballpark figures and stuff pulled out of. I've seen that, I've seen him use that a couple of times and it's like, yeah, they're, they're all of this, all the math and everything are here. All of the ideas and like check boxes are here. Like there's gotta be something down the road. That's like an Excel sheet that you pop all this into and say, Oh, here, here you go. Here's, here's how you make the room and, and where you want to be. If you want to be at this level or whatever price point then you got to go fill the backfill the products into it so and it's pretty cool stuff that that's basically what rp22 is is you design your room you get you get what level you're trying to get to and then it will say right you have speaker a speaker b

this one's got this sensitivity with this polar plot this one's this sensitivity if i use that one i need 200 watts if i use this one i need 400 watts yeah and then you build your system to your but you're building it to your specification you're not having a 200 watt amplifier with an 89 db sensitivity and hoping for the best when you get there yeah but back in the 5.1 days, because, you know, we used to say that- Those days are behind us. What? Not for some of us. Not for me.

Back in the 5.1 days, you know, back when we were doing these theaters, they weren't too much bigger than that. But the thing I commonly said was, like, your speaker, your seventh invisible speaker that you can't see, right. Is, is the room. And that's the most important one. As long as you get that right, you can, you can dumb down your speakers. Like you don't have to pay for the most expensive speakers because the ones you do put in are going to perform so much better. Um, I had no idea, you know, there was anything beyond that, like how to execute or anything like that, but it made a lot of sense. If you treat the room, if you make the room have a lower noise floor, you can,

you can use less expensive stuff. It's going to sound better than the, than the, the a hundred thousand dollars system that you put in and you have to crank it all the way up. And it still sounds like garbage. You put half a million dollars worth of speakers into a glass house. They'll sound crap.

Exactly. Yep. Simple. And it's why we don't have white cinema rooms. Because the image will look crap. You don't? Really? Depends where you are in the country, at least.

I don't. I did it once. I did it once in 2007. I was still working in the hi-fi store at this point. And a guy just came to see me, and he wanted a projector, and he wanted a white room. And I said, okay. And I put it in for a moment.

Oh, shit. I'm not doing this again but you do still see it and the worst thing is you see it because you know how you know how people are some people want to be contrarian you know it can be a badge of honest go I'm not following the rules damn you're stinking

rules and all this good stuff you know and if you're Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry in 1970 whenever that's fine because it's a film and it's a, you know. And if you're Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry in 1970 whenever, that's fine because it's a film and it's a made-up story, right? But if you're going, I'm going to put a projector in a white room because I'm a rebel, oh, amazing, you've just made like this washed-out pastel crap on the walls and you think you're clever and you're high-fiving yourself. I'm not here for that.

Yeah, you just lit your money on fire. Congratulations. Even though I mostly think my industry colleagues have good intent intent there's a couple of instances where i slightly wonder i'm just like that's toilet guys what you're doing you know yeah i remember i remember seeing that before too where the the ceiling was just like a reflection almost like i don't i think they used even some kind of like glossy paint on the ceiling. Oh, lovely, yeah. Even though it was dark, it just reflected it back. I'm looking at the ceiling.

It's more distracting than anything in the whole room. It's like, why did we do this? You know I love the Spider-Verse films, right? Partly because it's kind of like bonding with Louis, but partly just because I'm a big kid and I really like them, right? So it's no good when the ceiling is red and blue or the other color of red for miles morellas or whatever but it's like nah nah i'll always see that

i don't want that in my life right well cool guys uh anything else you want to touch on i think that's quite a lot you're gonna need to cut this down i um no probably not nope nope don't have to we're still under two hours so we're good to go oh my god yeah i was gonna say we've got longer we'll figure out how to get it into the show somewhere

no but it's i think it's all good because i think there's loads of little quick wins in this stuff you know just stuff like pulling your speakers around just stuff like doing some basic base calculations you know you can make huge strides with with little changes and that should give you the confidence to go a bit further and so on and so on so yeah let's let's just make things better cool well we'll leave it at that oh sorry too too late we're leaving it we're leaving it at that i was just gonna say be more pro yeah nice be more pro yeah give the give the people their money's worth you know what they're actually hiring you for you know what i sleep easy at night because i know i've done the best i possibly can with the information we've all had to us but now we've just got a document that's

pulled it all together to show us what to go and search and what's the important bits of it because you know i fall down rabbit holes all the time. Yeah. You start to look at propagation loss. And, you know, you can fall down a massive rabbit hole with that. Stick to with an RP-22 and you'll do well. For sure. All right. Well, we'll leave it at that. Guys, thanks so much for taking time out of your afternoon to come chat with us.

It's hard to line up the time zones, but we did it. Especially on Friday the 13th. I mean, it's a spooky episode. Oh, it is as well as well i hadn't realized i've had quite a good day as well i wanted to wait till the end just to make sure we didn't jinx anything so it's iphone pre-order day i mean come on is that what you guys are talking about no no not this year i i take mine for two years think of anything yeah i thought about that i was to ask too, is any of this worth talking about when we have the Apple Vision Pro? I mean, isn't that just replacing home theaters?

Yeah. Let's get rid of the screen. Done. Let's get a headset. I mean, it's only $3,600. I mean. What happens to you when you take that clammy muggy thing off your face?

You blink and rejoin reality. Listen. How can you have a glass of wine? If it's not an RP23, I'm throwing that in the trash. Like you better have RP glass of wine if it's not an rp23 i'm i'm throwing that in the trash like you better have rp you better put it in there i i i'm not sure we've actually i'm not sure we've actually spoke about that in rp23 i hope i hope we haven't i think they've only been in they've only been out in the uk for about five minutes you guys had them for longer

um but the big thing is i always think put a film on sit there with your partner sit there with your kid you know what i might have a drink and it's really hard to do with a vr headset on you might miss you know that's true yeah cameras are off a little bit so until they fix that i'm i'm out you know yeah version two obviously exactly yeah directly into the eyeballs or something some of the lasers or something they can just energize the molecules within your eyeballs to make it seem like you're seeing what you're not seeing. It's coming, guys. Or maybe they just put a kind of a little press to vape.

For me, that'd be great. It's not a good habit, but it's better than smoking, right? That's right. All right, guys. Well, thanks so much. We appreciate it. Yeah, thanks for joining us. Absolute pleasure.

Lovely. Cheers, guys. All right, that's our interview with Owen and Tom I'm not going to say his name thanks TJ

but great conversation thanks guys for coming on the show I really do appreciate being able to sit down and chat with you

on Friday afternoon it's our Friday afternoon their Friday night so yeah they were nice enough to take their time out

and chat with us, um, from across the, across the pond. All right. Uh, we don't have anything in the mailbag this week. Um, actually do. We have a very complicated, uh, what was it? Zig Z wave question. Z wave question, but we're going to punt that to Gavin whenever we let him out of the basement. So maybe he'll come out next week or something. Who knows? We're definitely punning on that one.

I read it and I'm like, nope, nope. I can't answer this. And we tried chat GBT, but it gave us a really long answer too. And I was like, and I feel like I probably could answer it, but I think Gavin's just the correct one to answer it. So I feel like he's done this before, right? Like he recently did this. He knows.

Because he just upgraded to the long range stick, I believe. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So Chris, just hang on. Hang tight. he has he knows he just upgraded to the long the long range uh stick i believe yeah yeah all right so chris just hang on hang tight cabin's coming back for episode 500 it's gonna be huge episode we're gonna talk all about just this question this is question that's all that's it nothing else uh very cool well we do have a pick of the week and uh this is you know i i found this somewhere and i wrote you know close enough because it's it's got one of these i think this is you know i i found this somewhere and i wrote you know close enough because it's it's got one of these i think this is yeah this is the exact um usbc usba and outlet charger that i i bought the first first go around because it only has one outlet on it and uh it's got uh three

usb things are two usbas and one usbc and someone has figured out that the USB-C plugs conveniently right into, I guess that's probably the neutral port of the outlet, which is kind of saying something, because that's a tamper-resistant outlet. It shouldn't do that. I'm looking at it. You can't jam anything in hard enough. It's going to go in, you know?

You're going to break something, but, you know, it'll work. hard enough it's gonna go in you know you're gonna break something but you know it'll work well it's funny uh you're getting a little more 30 30 watts out of that one though i think you're you're close but so far away still keep trying uh it's it's crazy like i i am the the new iphones and everything came out right and like um of course you know i'm on this like plan that with apple where I just basically pay each month or whatever. And they gave me the phone and I don't know, it works out. It's cheaper than going through AT&T or any,

anything. So like it's, it's way better of a, of a plan. And you get like Apple plus or no, no Apple care, Apple care for free, not free.

I mean, I'm sure they charge you for it, but like, Oh yeah, it's, it's, it's a built in it's it's it's a built-in though it's all in one you don't have to worry about it right if i wanted to buy the

phone and purchase i'm sure it would be a lot it would be cheaper but not like we were looking at at&t's plan i think somebody did the math on it it was like for the what eleven hundred dollar phone it was like twenty seven hundred dollars you would end up paying like they totally rip you off at at&t so don't don't do that uh if you can get on this plan how is that happening though because we get i i do not know it was that's crazy because we have a zero percent interest uh or zero percent rate through them for the phone you just pay whatever the monthly phone whatever the phone is broken down monthly for at&t yeah i'm gonna have to go look up the story it was it was an insane amount of money for because that's who we have unfortunately yeah unfortunately that's who we have too and it you know at least

the phone works because the service doesn't so yeah uh but yeah with all the usbc stuff coming out i'm like i need some headphones too i guess because the headphones now have usbc like the the cases for the air airpods or whatever they have they have it now i'm like i should probably upgrade it's probably time right i think it is gotta get some nice nice anchor cables as well oh yeah i've been buying them in fun colors i usually just buy like the the plain black and gray ones whatever the braided braided yeah those are nice i'm buying these like these nice blue and green ones recently. It's improved my life. Anchor is always hitting it out of the park. Are these anchors?

Yeah, of course. That's all I buy. Yeah, they're hitting it out of the park with all of their battery chargeable things. I have this battery charger thing that has a screen on it now. Oh, isn't that amazing? It's beautiful. When I first got it, I was like, this is the silliest thing ever. I don't need a screen on it.

But it's so nice to be able to tell how much is left on it and how fast it's charging your devices. Right. And when you plug it in, it tells you how long it's going to be until it's charged. And it's just a little OLED screen that they popped on the thing. It doesn't probably take any energy to run. And it just lights up and tells you, hey. It's fantastic.

We're charging this phone for you. There you go. You know, those are pretty. Look at those pretty blue. Oh, there. It's fantastic. We're charging this phone for you. There you go. Those are pretty. Look at those pretty blue. Oh, there's purple ones too. Isn't that nice? I need some pink ones to match my pink pony club iPhone though. I bought some green ones and some blue ones.

Yeah, yeah. All good stuff. Good job, Anchor. Anchor, you're also the pick of the week. Just not your security cameras. And not this outlet thing, because I'm pretty sure that outlet was their outlet. Whoops. And if you have any feedback, questions, picks, tweets, comments, great ideas for show, give us a shout out.

Our email address is feedback at hometech.fm, or you can visit hometech.fm slash feedback and fill out the online form. All right, project updates. Yay! It's the best time of the year. Gavin, GPT, what have you been up to? I have a few projects going on this week. I finally got my new 3D printer. I was really jealous of the Prusa MK4S

that got released shortly after I bought my new printer, so I bought this one as well. I haven't told Rose yet, but I think she'll be fine with it once she gets some shelves or something out of it. That's all I have for this week. I'm just really enjoying listening to these episodes Seth has released while I've been traveling.

I can't believe Gavin GPT is buying more printers. Wow, Gavin. Just ridiculous. I told you not to do that. That did sound like something Gavin would say. It prompted itself. I didn't even type that in. It just came up with it by itself.

The AI already knows Gavin from his vast internet history. Gavin as a service is going to be amazing, guys. We're telling you. As soon as we can get it all hooked up, yeah. It's going to be amazing. All right. This Ubiquiti camera thing that's going on.

At Cedia, they announced that they were going to do Onvif support. I think it hit, what do they they call it early access which is their beta and i installed it and then quickly regretted ever doing that the beta is very buggy but i don't know like i did i did get one of my cameras in and it didn't work but it did get the picture but only like a frame every i don't know five minutes or so it seemed like it was really struggling did you have any better success um yeah so i got the i got my cameras added as well it doesn't seem to be very good like it just um it's not true like whenever i go to see it it doesn't refresh and so it's it's like five hours ago or something yeah that's what i was doing it wasn't yeah so that that part kind of sucks um and honestly like the the whole benefit of it i guess is that i can see it all in one spot

but i don't get any motion detection or anything because it doesn't doesn't support that yet and so it's one of those things that like it's cool but it's not really useful in my situation because i want to replace blue iris and i need motion detection to do that. Um, so it is kind of cool. It's there, it's working. Um, one of my biggest pet peeves right now is that I have a couple cameras that I have not added into protect. And like every time I open protect, it asked me if I want to add those cameras and I say no. And then the next time I opened protect, it asked me again, do you want to add these cameras? And I'm like, it asks me again, do you want to add these cameras? And I'm like, no, I don't want to add these cameras, Ubiquity.

So that's my biggest pet peeve at the moment. Other than that, it is working. I'll be a little janky. You could probably go into the settings there and turn off the Discover third-party cameras. I wonder if that would also turn off your cameras, because that's like the Discovery part. Oh, yeah, maybe that and if that i don't know maybe it'll turn off the other features but you know it is a beta they've got work to do i think i think this is the actual

second the second beta yeah and the first one was um was uh like sending people's uh nvrs into reboot loops so it would crash and reboot over and over again so they rushed this one out um but clearly they've got they've got a ways to go and and there's probably a lot of uh of use cases uh or like different resolutions or specific resolutions that the nvr might be looking for that you have to go and set on your camera. So it matches up. I tried to match like what some of the specs on the cameras that I have are. So it would be like, Oh, you know,

it's, it's kind of the same, but I don't, I don't know what compression they're using or, you know, anything like that. So I don't know. It will be interesting to,

uh, it will be interesting once they get this all up and going. I I'm kind of upset with myself for doing this, this early access thing though. Cause I'm like upset with myself for doing this early access thing, though. Because the iOS app is not connecting anymore. You have to have the early access iOS app. Wait, for real? So I can't see my cameras?

Yeah, I'm pretty sure I couldn't see my cameras. It just wouldn't load. It would load and then crash. I don't know if that's true, because I don't think I have the early access Unify Protect app. No, I don't either. I have the regular one, but I can't know if that's true because I don't think I have the early access Unify Protect app. No, I don't either. I have the regular one, but I can't see my cameras. It won't connect to the thing.

I don't have that problem at least. Well, lucky me. It just reconnects over and over and over again. And then it's like, hey, this NVR is not available. We're just going to give up. And it defaults back to something else. Well, Ubiquity is known for their stellar software performance so yeah they'll they'll fix it yeah that's why i i've switched back

to the you know you can't i guess you have to like switch back but it doesn't like automatically downgrade so i'm gonna have to wait for i don't know maybe some bug fixes will come along and i'll upgrade to another early access and then quickly switch it back to like oops did not mean to do this i am so sorry uh but yeah i'll have to keep an eye on it because what i don't want to have happen is for them to release this you know version five or whatever it's supposed to be and i'm stuck on it forever i can't i can't go back like i'm on a version six and like oh it's just as buggy my app keeps crashing and i need to be on the early access or whatever anyway uh cameras why can't anyone get them right yeah they are difficult they're like printers for some reason yeah cameras and printers exactly exactly uh i i i have um i was in the middle of uh

updating or or finally getting to the last piece of equipment that needed to go in for this lightning strike that happened at an old client of mine. And I don't know, maybe a couple of months ago, six or seven months ago, we put in an AV Pro Max 24, right? And popped it in. It's one of the very few switches that you can get,

the matrix switches that you can get that have the ability to do 24 zones. And I need 24 zones for this house. Like it's a big house. There's only like, I don't know, nine or 10 sources. But still, there's 20 some odd zones. I think I was able to combine a few of them. They've over time deleted rooms.

And so there was actually more than 20 zones at one point in time or 24 zones. And it's since come down. But I really needed all 24 zones in this particular case. And I had everything kind of like ready to go. And I went to order this AV Pro Max 24. They were on back order for a while. So it's been like three weeks. I've been waiting for this thing to come in. It finally comes in.

And TJ, I pop out, you know, all of the, you know, 24 RCA cables out of this thing, right in it finally comes in and tj i pop out you know all all of the you know 24 rca cables out of this thing right like pulling them all out like there i have to label them all too because you know you can't pull them out they all look the same and then you just screwed yourself yeah so um i have to label them you know taking the time carefully doing this figure you know it's going to take me an hour and then i go over to the box and pull the new one out it's the same black box i slide it in the two ru space it's supposed to go in and i put in the the four racks here as i walk around to the back and it's it's a completely different layout all the wires have changed on me there is not only a max 24 a there's a max 24 b and a max 24 c and um i guess they've they've

revised some of their equipment and uh you know bad on me for not looking at it before i got there but yeah that stinks it said on the outside of the box max 24 but i don't know i i i guess this would work either way work like what's talked about it is that I use the Planet Waves cables on jobs. Like six years, 10 years ago, that's what I used. And so like these were all kind of like cut to length at some point for where they needed to go. So then you're all like having to go back and pull slack out of cables and re plug in things because not only did the like the inputs if you see the inputs like the first set of inputs would have started at input three which is way over on the left hand side doesn't say it's on the output different layout too especially when you're working on

tight space like that yeah yeah you see the outputs i mean now now the input number one as far as analog audio is concerned is nine it's way over so yeah different layout good definitely came out to hurt but um i still like the switch and what they did i guess on the c there's a little tiny little little baby screen on the front um i'll try and send a picture of that too and uh what one of my complaints was with this thing was that it didn't have any lights or anything on the front of it. So the client would call and be like,

hey, something's going on. And I'm like, what is the switch on? And they're like, I don't know. There's no lights. I can't tell. So now there's like a little screen with a button that says info. And you press the info button

and it lights up and tells you what it is, which is how I discovered it's a, well, one, it has a new screen and it's a Max 24-C. so it's right there in the model number that the others one didn't have so uh anyway that was that was a fun learning experience uh today and what should have been an hour job did not take an hour it took much longer to do it was an important lesson on why you always leave slack in your wire somewhere. Yeah, well, this is

like the third one of these and the second or third set of amplifiers at this house because of for reasons. Yeah, well, technology changes. You never know. Yeah. It breaks. Eventually, I just rewire the whole thing and I don't know. There'd be plenty of slack.

Nah, it's somebody else's problem. Yeah, yeah yeah you'll be retired soon stuff yeah exactly well i think they're moving too so see like this is a lightning strike it's an insurance job like you know they they're building a new house somebody else has taken that one uh somebody will somebody will inherit these problems that we i won't have to worry about anymore so there we go and that's that'd be perfect anyway that's all i got for projects you're working at the pink pony club what are you doing yeah i don't have a lot going on i'm leaving for missouri this weekend so i'm kind of just like getting the house cleaned up and stuff but yeah we were working on a uh working on a project this week um i got uh contacted to install security system for somebody

that involved six cameras and uh they waited till two or three weeks before like construction was supposed to be finished to contact us it's good time um so yeah we had to go in this week to cut some holes in places and luckily the dry rollers were on site so they literally fixed the holes as we went it was great um but it was funny we're working in the building and they're they're painting the outside pink and uh somebody from the city comes in and said hey do you know who's in charge i was like no why and he goes oh they're painting the the building pink and they're not allowed to do that and he's like i want to tell somebody before it's too late you posted a picture it's clearly too late like they were done oh yeah like the whole building was basically pink i think they were

painting like one or two other portions. But I was like, you might as well just let them finish because they're pretty much done anyway, dude. So, yeah, we'll see how long that lasts. But it's in, like, some downtown part where I'm assuming they have some kind of building codes or something. That you're not allowed to just paint whatever you want. But, yeah, we'll find out what happens. You got the CDHOA to worry about. Yeah. That is a pink building. I mean, a it's a nice pink it's very pink well yeah i don't think it's like too harsh

or anything so i think they actually did a good job um that was actually an old bar um and it like always smelled awful when i went in there so this is definitely a big improvement uh it's a it was a bar called uh old bag of nails i think it's like an irish pub or something like that um and just like it's one of the places that smelled like it's been there for like 100 years even though it hasn't uh so this is definitely much better yeah it'll it'll be an improvement i guess there we go and they'll have a new security system to go so that's right very cool yeah that's that's all i have going on this week. We're going to Missouri, driving there on Saturday. So when I check in next week, Seth, I'll be somewhere else.

And you'll have a home assistant job under your belt, right? A professional. That's right. A professional. First one, yeah. Yep. We're going to check out Springfield, Missouri. It's not the Springfield you've been hearing about in the news recently.

It's a different Springfield. A little further away. I'm close to that Springfield that you hear about in the news what are they uh but we're not going there we're going to we're going to a different one it's a completely different one completely different one uh well who knows a 10 hour drive 10 hour drive to springfield i cannot that's a long it's not it's a long drive it's not that bad well and it's like it was one of those things that like we were gonna fly originally but i don't like flights in america are a racket so if you're listening from a different country you probably have better access to like flights than we do um it was 900 for both of us to fly to missouri

and like it was a layover uh no bags and uh non-refundable unless you paid like an additional $200 per ticket so I was like well I'm not gonna spend like $1,500 to fly to Missouri wow yeah that's that's a bit much so that's why we that's why we decided just to drive I was like we'll just put that money into new tires and stuff for the car and we'll just drive exactly because I'm a Midwesterner we don't we drive everywhere you know what 12 hours 14 hours who cares we got time let's drive florida doesn't seem like a big state but it's a it's a long state and it's like to get from the bottom where i live all the way up to the top and leave like if you wanted to leave the state it takes it takes i don't know six or seven hours i don't know maybe not that much it's a long time i'm

pretty sure it's like six hours from orlando to like tallahassee oh yeah yeah it's it's a good it's a it's a long haul and if you if you're trying to go like down i-10 and get you know out of the state towards you know mississippi alabama you know and and go go west that's that's a long drive it's just and the way they made the roads in Florida, they're not fun. There's nothing on the left and right side of you. It's just like trees and stuff. Oh, yeah. No, it's not good.

Well, there's a stretch of 75 that has weird signs on it about stopping at some truck stop. But don't stop at the truck stop. It's probably not going to be as good as it looks on the signs. You know what's funny? Springfield, Missouri has like, I don't know, like 100,000 people, but they have a Buc-ee's there too. Oh, look at that. I mean, what the heck? Don't stop there.

I'm not. I don't plan on it. Go to the Sitco across the street. You'll be fine. I just need sheets or Wawa in my life. Ah, yeah. Yeah, there you go. There you go.

All right. We want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports the show but especially those who are able to financially support the show through our patron page if you don't know about the patron page head on over to home tech.fm support to learn how you can support home tech for as little as a dollar a month any pledge over five bucks a month gets you a big shout out here on the show but every single pledge every one of them gets you an invite to our private slack chat the hub where you and other supporters of the show can gather every day and there was there was gather every day. And there was, there was some good discussions in here.

There was Intel discussions that's going on. Jimmy found a funny ad that Yuffie misspelled smarter, which is matter. It's matter. Yeah. We just found out they're from Boston. Oh, that could be that too.

Yeah. That was terrible. Boston accent. I'm sorry, but people from Boston, all sorts of stuff going in there this last week. TJ, your images of integrators phone app is so on par like that. Yeah, that was that was from the pink building. Like I've like shoving my phone in these holes and taking videos to like see what's in the hole and stuff. Go to go to look at my uploads later on in the day.

And I'm like, man, there's just like 50 videos of me looking inside walls some people have pictures of the kids but you know there was a time in my life where it was like all dusty components the back of the components you know like oh yeah so you could see you have your camera you take a picture you're like all right where there's the hdmi cable let me see if I can squeeze that in there yeah yeah that's awful well but i do have some other news too i forgot we we adopted a dog seth what yeah we've been fostering dogs for the past like several years because you've been taking all these dusty videos all this all this uh pink building uh no we've been we've been fostering dogs for like three or four years now we finally adopted one so we'll post a uh a picture of him right now his name is capone uh we're

thinking about changing his name we just can't figure out a name for him all right well if you have any suggestions for tj's name uh for his new puppy let us know feedback at home uh or you know there's probably a a donation or a support amount if home tech has such support like you can put whatever you want in there doesn't have't have to be a dollar. It doesn't have to be five. You can put whatever you want in there. TJ will name it something. I'm sure there's a dollar amount. If you donate $20, I will heavily consider

naming the dog whatever you would say. Heavily consider. There you go. Well, next week, Gavin will be back. 500 episodes? That's kind of crazy to think about that's crazy seems like a lot how long have we been

on it for I don't even know I have to go back and look ask ask Gavin GBT he'll probably tell you oh good idea yeah should be fun but that's gonna wrap up this week everybody have a great

weekend we'll see you next week till next time you