You should post pics in the "What did you to today thread".

Congrats brotha!
I think I'll start asking tonight so she says yes by Monday.

As for the rest of this thread, I'll remain silent.

I guess Prodigy is working already - and it hasn't even shipped yet. Look at all the C4 guys tear each other apart! LOL!

I will add that as probably the only person here who has stood in both the C4 metal testing box and the Crestron UL box that to try to compare them as the same is identical to trying to compare C4 to Crestron.

Crestron's box is at least 10 times the size, is a true UL RF testing rig with the same electronics and antenna arrays that UL uses in their testing rigs. It not only tests RF leakage but actual RF signal strength, direction and many other rf things. It is also calibrated to UL standards and is a true UL testing rig with UL approval granted from those tests.

The C4 metal box allows C4 to test the RF radiation of their devices. No more, no less.

Instead of shipping out the products to UL for testing, waiting days for the results and then having to make changes, get in the back of the line again and resubmit for approval, Crestron pays the UL guy for the day of his time. UL tester runs as many tests as Crestron wants on site with their engineers present and gets immediate approval. Plus, changes can be made on the fly and retested and approved in the same day. For a C4 dealer to ask why that is important shows why they are a C4 dealer in the first place.

i really don't see why this is so special.. wow they are saving DAYS.. watch out now.. how many new products per year require testing that they release? this has NOTHING to do with current products on the market soooo its kind of pointless...

and lol @ the why im a C4 dealer comment.. please prove what products directly were effected by Crestron having their own RF room vs sending products out for testing.. Explain in detail which products and how much faster they came out also please provide proof with your findings.. KTHX

example:

Dimmer 1 would of came out on march 1st but instead it came out on march 20th etc etc ;)

This is laughable, and a complete waste of time. That's the only thing that I have figured out from this entire post...

Some dogs are all bite and no bark.

You guys better watch out or edizzle will put you in his signature. He has a bigger di@k than you guys and his dad can beat up your dads. Just face the facts.

They're laughing at us at AVS. Who's man enough to walk away from the keyboard?

bisyb, man that is funny as hell.

vinny, we all know where you stand. you stated that a Crestron CNAMPX 12X60 has the same power and characteristics as a combo DA system from niles, russound etc. i dont think i need to say anything else about you.

I dont get the part about the control4 guys tearing each other apart? now I'm really lost. its like finding a piece of coax thats kind of sticky at the end, you knew it had a piece of electrical tape with marking on it, but it fell off.

Maybe you Crestron guys have a little more insight to prodigy. This is a serious question, not harping. I am assuming it will have to interface with some media storage device or find tracks on the LAN. I think for the money it looks like a great piece, but it dosent look as if it has the ability to digitize a source and send it to another controller? Also I didnt notice any audio outputs on it. In comparizon to the C4 product, It dosent look like it will be able to find tracks on the network and play them back? Would this mean you have to have a media controller at every single location? I'm not bagging, just curious.

I have a guy from crestron coming over on the 11nd of August, so I'm gonna hear him out about "Prodigy" I'll let you guys know if he has anything interesting to say

FCC testing is extremely expensive, especially when you're introducing dozens of new products a year. Charges from certified testing centers are per-test. As someone else pointed out, the FCC doesn't test for free. If the product fails testing (which is common), jump in line and pay up again.

A company has to sacrifice one of its valuable, highly compensated engineers for the day each time they take a product out to the nearest test center (which could be half a day's drive away). They have to pay thousands of dollars for the test. They lose time waiting in line for a free spot in the testing schedule. If the product fails, then wash, rinse, and repeat this entire sequence.

I guarantee that Creston's profitability is positively impacted by having their own testing facility. Even if they only save two weeks per product (which is a very low-side estimate), they conserve valuable resource time, cash, and get to market faster. I'm sure members of this board have run into situations where they have needed a product two weeks earlier than it actually shipped.

spec no device until you have one in you hand.

To get this back on topic, sort of, which is to say to get back to exchanging information as opposed to snide remarks at each other, having an internal FCC test facility is very expensive, which is why few companies, even Cisco, have one. When you send a device out to test, wait in line you only find out that you've failed and have to reverse engineer why and then fix it. Send it back and hope you pass. Having the test facility in house is akin to having a full spectrum analyzer, that allows you to check the RF performance at a job site. You can use trial and error to decide WiFi channels or you can use the scope to tell you what channels have the least interference. You can attempt to move the WAPs around to minimize interference or you can just throw time at the problem.

Ultimately, you generally can get to the same result. Having the tool allows you to get there quicker. Does speed always count? I can promise you I wish I could afford --and justify the cost of a 25k eye pattern analyzer for HDMI. Full blown WiFi costs a minimum of 5k and the time to learn the software. There are less expensive solutions, some of which I own and use. I'd prefer to trouble shoot using deductive reasoning rather than inductive reasoning.

Everyone does their own cost benefit and most of us farm out what is too expensive to do in house. In most CI cases, "farm out" means we spend time rather than capital, but it's still money only we tend to see time as less dear than actual greenbacks. Trust me, Audio Authority and Cisco both would want a FCC test facility in house. You don't have to have one to bring products to market. Most companies don't have one and send out to labs for testing and approval.

Crestron is also not the only company to use OEM as a basis for their product offerings. Considering the size of Crestron's product SKU it is a very reasonable business decision to partner with URC or Universal Electronics. Not everything needs to be invented in house. But Crestron has announced that it will be bringing much of this development in house. Big deal."

There is much that C4 has done which is clever but what is their "innovation?" Other then introducing new price points to automation, partly obtained by importing Chinese manufactured to specification products, what "innovation" has C4 introduced? Their remotes can be found in Niles Audio's SKU, their ability to natively steam mp3s from a hard drive can be matched by lots of other products, including CQC. There are any number of third party applications I can put on to a Crestron system to do the same thing. Autonomic Controls offers one solution, ControlWorks an other. Crestron has it's own AV steaming server coming to market as well. None of this is really innovative so much as offering new features.

However, the Crestron CHV-TSTAT is arguably the among the best thermostats made and probably the best controllable thermostat on the market. The PVID is among the more ingenioius solutions to component video distribution permitting inexpensive wire to perform the work of much more expensive RGB cabling without signal degridation. If we look at their products and software, not merely their remotes you get to see that Crestron has done quite a bit more "innovation" then you are giving them credit.

But they also want to increase the number of dealers and they want to introduce their brand into price points their traditional systems were too expensive to play in. The danger is that inexperienced or greedy dealers will attempt to do too much with the system and end up with unhappy clients. But a competant dealer using the system as intended may just end up with happy client and manufacturer.

C4 is the dominent player at the low end of the market. That is not to suggest that it's a bad system only that its intended market is not mega-custom jobs. They targeted the 7500-20k price range, but that doesn't mean you could not do a larger job. You just needed to use the graphics they came up with, the products they wrote drivers for and sell the feature set they offered. That is not all that different from what Crestron attempted with Systembuilder or I suspect what is being attempted with Prodegy.

Sorry for the misspellings. I'm on a machine without spellcheck

Alan

Here is a Control4 install that a Control dealer was proud to post. He posted this on a public forum, [Link: c4forums.com];