that will NEVER happen.. i shall repost some pictures and a quote from the crestron rep that i knew before he became a douche aka crestron employee

i called him because i knew he got a job at crestron. i sent him all the info on the job ( including pics ) and told him the clients entire system does NOT WORK What so ever. the guy paid almost 200k for his system ( due to krell and other lovely expensive items ) and the original Crestron authorized dealer would not come back out to fix it even though he was paid in full and i quote the crestron reps reply was "thats not our problem"   i will NEVER EVER EVER EVER EVER sell Crestron EVER. Any company who doesnt care about their consumers and kicks out the competition from their Cedia booth = pathetic..  ( i witnessed it first hand ;) )   i cant wait to laugh at any dealer selling prodigy who wants to step up and compare to my Control4 systems 


<3

at least the wires are labeled.

julie.. sadly most were labeled wrong.. i gutted some of the gear.. his family room has a Control4 controller and remote until he decides what he wants to do.. i talked to 2 crestron dealers that i know and both want 30-40k to fix and reprogram his system....

lol....cause the price is less and you sell it as a comparable product. I client with knowledge of both systems and an open wallet would be your first.

I am a decent sized RTI dealer and I can say that I have never lost a job to Crestron either but that has more to do with the market we are in than whether or not RTI is better than Crestron.

Funny you mention being kicked out of the Crestron booth. When we were Phast dealers we were one of the top dealers in the region 1 year and AMX paid for our trip to CEDIA. We had badges that said "AMX VIP" on them. I think it was Indianapolis but i can't remember.

We were at the Crestron booth checking out the latest greatest. The Crestron guy told us all about the product and then noticed my badge. Thats when his smiley face went away and he started talking to someone else :).

well actually.. on many of the jobs im not that much cheaper.. i charge MSRP for Control4 and my labor rates arent cheap by any means but my work stands on its owns as do my system uptimes..

a properly designed anything can be amazing.. i just prefer Control4.. they have great products and great employees..

my avg sale is well over 100k for a system so its not that im always cheaper..

Sounds more like just a shitty rep. We are a small company that has worked with Crestron for some 8 years now. I have had product overnighted when needed, whether it was our fault or theirs. I have also had Crestron engineer's on site for am early glitchy Adagio system.

I keep seeing people mention they are small so Crestron will not look at them, we small and always have been small.

If you take a look at the CEPro Top 100 list, you'll notice that about 30 of them are Control4 dealers. Although certainly not a bible, it is an interesting sample of the industry and worth taking note of. More than a few of them are selling Crestron AND Control4.

Crestron is simply acting like the good company they are....why leave that revenue/market share out there? There's obviously a need for a Control4 type product in the industry and you know Crestron can create a competitive version if they really want to do so. It's got to burn their a$$ when one of their dealers sells a c4 system, or when one of their dealers also picks up the C4 line.

Control4 is the first company to come along and really make serious inroads with a product at that price point. There have been others, but none have sold the number of systems and signed the number of dealers as C4 in this amount of time. Crestron has just taken note and opened up their eyes and done something about it.

I know Lutron is also going hard after C4.

Yesterdays special features are todays entry level bells and whistles. This is a constant fact with consumer electronics and control systems are not immune. C4 is growing (as they should be) because they target a market that continues to grow. The entry to mid level homes.

This doesnt mean that Crestron or the high end market is disappearing. What it means is that the entire industry as a whole is expanding (just like it always has). The higher end is still there and as CE pricing falls more and more people are able to afford our products and services.

A $100k system yesterday can be done (and better) for 1/3 of that today. If Crestron didnt create an entry level product they would have found themselves sitting alone at the top of a very small hill. While lower end control systems cant compete with full blown Crestron systems, they do a great job of mimicking the low and mid level Crestron systems.. at a much lower price.

|While lower end control systems cant compete with full blown Crestron systems, they do a great job of mimicking the low and mid level Crestron systems.. at a much lower price.

EXACTLY!


Agreed!

I'm willing to be that if you called C4 and say hey, I'm not a dealer but this client has a f'd up system will you come and fix it, you have a chance of getting the same response. A good rep would say, "I'll get you in touch with a dealer in your area."

I think when you are dealing with companies that deal with product that is ONLY sold to CI's, we ARE there customers, not really the end user, because the product they sell to the dealer isn't the same product (after programming and integration) that we sell to the end user.

Crestron is a great company with great products and even very good technical support. But over the last 5 years (or so), I've noticed that Crestron has been a company that is more reactionary than visionary.

Example: Adagio was released as a product line to placate the many dealers who were complaining to Crestron that they were losing bids due to their high price and complex (and expensive) programming- even before the recession. At the time, Crestron was aware of Control 4 but I don't think Adagio was necessarily released to compete specifically with Control 4. Prodigy, however, is COMPLETELY a reactionary product to Control 4. If anything, they are giving Control 4 a ton of credibility in the market by releasing Prodigy to compete with them. It's amazing to me that a company like Crestron that has been around as long as they have now find themselves playing catch-up.

Control 4, on the other hand, continues to innovate and more importantly position its products by addressing things people really need, such as energy management and conservation (among many others)- and are doing so at a very fair price and simple integration. They seem to be very tuned in to what dealers need to stay competitive across the board.

So while I believe both companies are good and each have their strengths, it's Control 4 that seems to be focusing on the future, where Crestron has relied way too long on their name and nothing else and now find themselves in a hole that will be very tough to dig out of (at least in the residential market).

I am not sure any of the above is accurate. Adagio is less expensive then a full blown Crestron system and not particularly more expensive then a C4 system, device for device. Nonetheless, the is much about C4 that allows it to be successful at the lower price points. In many ways it's good value but not great value.

Is there anything like Digital Media from C4? You have no where near the number of items in the SKU and that can be seen as both strength and a weakness. The coming TPMC3x is rather cool. But cool only goes so far. Ultimately, price points matter and so does one's dealer base. Crestron sees lots of dealers out there who might not be able to suppot a full blown system but could do quite well doing the basic systems. Should they cede the market to other manufacturers, particularly in this economy?

Not many manufacturers have their on FCC test facility in house. It may not be profitable but it does allow them to get devices to market quicker then most competitors. They have their own UL test bench. This is more common but you know C4 doesn't. What Crestron seems to be doing, an EJ's aluded to it, is to allow existing dealers to play at lower priced systems and to attract dealers to its bannor who might have sold Niles, Speakercraft, C4, Vaux or other entry line. It is easily programmed so you don't need expensive programmers.

But they also don't wish to canibalize existing sales. They did this successfully with the Adagio, though I know too many dealers who could not tell what was what or when to up or down-sell.

Put an other way, there is very little that is new. Savant has cool grahpics. C4 has a low entry point. Crestron is rock solid and offers solid products that work and who typically provice good solutions to common installer issues. The PVID is a brilliant soluton, as was QuickMedia. Their surround processors were better than decent and in many ways competed with systems much more expensive. Everyone likes to brag about their team. You sign on to Crestron you praise Crestron. You become a C4 dealer, you become a c4 fanboy. It's inevitable and predictable, with the requisite exagerations that fanatics bring to the table. But to suggest that Crestron has done no innovating over the last few years whereas C4 has is to distort the picture just a tad.

Alan

Since when are you so understated?!?

I have to agree a bit with Crestron being somewhat reactionary, at least in the residential market, where a wider range of sources are becoming more popular and content is coming from internet services.For instance, Escient, Control4,Tivo,Denon,Sony,Yamaha,Logitech, etc. have seen the value of Rhapsody support.Where is Crestron on this??? Am I to understand that internet streaming and its services will go away and clients will start buying their music?