Being a Crestron dealer for some 8 years I have not ran into the issue of no preamps or amps... Having all one product line is also better for our discounts, having backups, service, product intercommunication's...

Funny how nobody around the sites are begging for drivers to be updated with Crestron.

I have sold both product for some time now and your analogies leak like a sieve.

Its not that I think Crestrons bad or that they cant deliver, its just that I have been doing this for over 30 years, and I remember another smug can do anything company called "Phast" that sold a zillion big automation systems and then promptly disappeared into the bad business abyss, nobody thought they would go under either. 

So here we are in the midst of this techno control system revolution, I expect in 3 - 5 years that even URC will be past where Crestron is now, RTI and control 4 might even be way ahead of Crestron by that time, who knows for sure, but if this happens, this would mean that Crestron will be in even more of a pinch to make ends meet, they might even get bought out. Crestron might do a lot worse than just allowing their products to be sold on CDW.com. or AV alive.com [Link: avalive.com] laugh at the old timer here, I have seen it happen at least a dozen times since I started back in the 70's, and this is what scares me about this proprietary attitude of having to have the same sticker on every part.

Sh#t will and does happens, Crestron is at the top of the food chain which means they are the most vulnerable, if all the antelope depart for greener pasture and Lions follow only find a gazillion other predators already there they are going to starve.

Further, you have no idea how many customers that bought Crestron, or Elan.....had me come and tear it out because they hated it, not because it did not work, but because it was so ridiculously counter intuitive, they refused to touch it. Well gee they could have hired a different programmer to come out there, well they did that and thousands of bucks latter they still hated it.

Which brings me to my conclusion, I know how powerful Crestron is, and I know they are starting to get a clue in the remote control area, the TPMC-3X is a good example of this even though it is $1800.00,  but the bottom line is, Crestron cant beat RTI's diversity of hand held remotes and interfaces at the price point they come in at.

Touch panels and extended bi directional features will always secondary in my book, its the RTI remotes that people like, its what they are used to, its intuitive, its the part that gets used  more than any other. You all know this to be true and its why so many Crestron guys use RTI remotes with Crestron systems, because they are the best part of the whole system.

Crestron was around long before Phast and many years later they are still kicking so don't bother going there. When you buy 50 or more of a high end product and your failure rate is pushing 50% bring it up. That is why I did and why I am so pissed!!

I'll agree that the RTI when working kicks ass. But if you did pull out a Crestron system for an RTI back bone you did a disservice to your client. I have done several whole house systems with RTI and many more with Crestron.

I am currently working a job well into the 6 figures and am hoping to use the T2c with Crestron. But have already had to steal 2 remotes from the project to get in the hands of other clients.

How many loaners can one keep on hand. How many loaners can one keep on hand??

RTI - You make a lot of sense.

I too have had many clients with those big Star-Trek like Crestron/AMX controllers in the living room or even the dedicated theater and absolutely HATE it and just want "a Tivo remote....  Why do I have this big thing..."

Well, RTI, URC, etc. perform much better in those type of practical applications.

However, to be fair I do nothing with Crestron I'm not up on the latest so perhaps they've sorted out the handheld aspect a bit.

I just maintain for all these companies - Tivo made a huge impact on the real folk  out there - well-to-do or not.  The Tivo platform is the benchmark for my clients....

Anyway, off topic again...

I don't know, I think you and two other guys are the exception, I do not know of anyone else reporting that level of failure anywhere? And I was asked to come and remove the crestron stuff and now the customer is a happy camper, because his system is now remote not touch panel based, wherefore his technophobic wife can now easily use the system

I also had a period of crappy Q&A from RTI, like Roddy.

Things have gotten better.

I have taken out "dated" Crestron systems, and replaced them with RTI systems, simply because the customer made the huge expense for Crestron once, and now with the market these days, simply cannot afford the excessive price tag of that system.

That does not mean the customer needed the Crestron system or shouldn't have gotten the RTI system. It means that they only need to be able to listen to some music, or sit down, watch some TV or a movie & not have to have a lesson or cheat sheets to do so.

I love Crestron & love the power it has, but I appreciate RTI and respect its power for price tag ratio (when it works).

Also keep in mind that todays URC and RTI is better than Crestron from 10 years ago. I remember when a Crestron touchscreen was the ONLY option for controlling a simple 1 room system. Today there are many less expensive options.

Seriously, you're comparing Crestron with Phast? Crestron was here before Phast. Crestron works, Phast didn't.


How many engineers does URC and RTI have on staff? I doubt if both of them combined have close to what Crestron does. Crestron is continuing to improve the high end. For the most part, URC and RTI are not inovating, they are copying.

|...and this is what scares me about this proprietary attitude of having to have the same sticker on every part.

|Why do you keep saying this? The only Crestron parts you need are the processor and sometimes an IR receiver or gateway. Everything else can be from different manufacturers. They are less proprietary than either URC or RTI.


Well, you have already rebutted your own statement. It was not Crestron, it was the programmer(s). What if they had tried RTI with an installer who sucked?


Then just use an RTI remote with a Crestron system. It's not too hard to do. In my system I have a Crestron TPMC-8x, TPMC-4xg, RTI T3 (which is now displaying the white screen of death), and an RTI T2-C.


So what's your point? You have the flexibility to do this with a Crestron system. Can you use a Crestron remote (or URC or any other brand) with an RTI system?

I think that RTI is great. It is very easy to program and very easy to make it look nice as well. I have an RP-6 in my family room. However, to think that it is as powerful as a Crestron system is reaching.

CJ

The issue with Phast was over-promise under-deliver and hardware quality control. Sound familiar?

yah, and I think it sucks cuz I really, really like the RTI products and software. They suck at getting parts out on time and i'm nervous about the their QC, but my personal failure rate of products is only at 25% (still unacceptable IMO), although there was a battery issue that was replaced, however it may have just been the customer not the batter, but if it was the battery then the percentage is higher.

I think RTI HAS to get their new Zigbee processors out and expansion pieces for the XP8. While they are less expensive then Crestron, they are beat by Prodigy and C4 when it comes to entry level automation.

I believe Crestron has 300 engineers on staff. And most of us know that with Crestron and a good programmer you can use any hardware you want as well as 3rd party controllers. Or even your computer, its not a new concept.

And when you say RTI/URC is catching up to Crestron spend a week or so looking at Crestron's offering. Everything you guys talk about doing with RTI, many of us have been doing for years with Crestron. Yeah, they had some fugly remotes for a while. Which is why many of us, including me, have used RTI remotes with Crestron's backbone. Which could of easily been accomplished with systems that people tore out...

You do know that Control4 is the same guys who brought you Phast don't you? Perhaps they learned from their mistakes and are trying to do it right this time around.

I still don't understand all the pissing and moaning over RTI, I do some very large systems, with small jobs in between, we have a very low failure rate, and everything typically works as planed.  As i have said before having more two way drivers for us is just fluff.

There will be box car load of two way drivers to play with arriving over the next year and a half and I am more than happy with that time line. I expect to have an expansion module for the XP8 by December which will coincide with the next software release.

Any buggy problem T2C remotes that have been in the field for a while , can usually be fixed with the available firmware upgrade, battery problems seem to be a thing of the past. K4s rock now that they have increased the clock speed and fixed the bugs. 

We have new lower priced panels coming, a 10 inch panel, and more cool interfaces. Maybe they wont be here for another 6 months or a year, but so what, they are coming, and it will be a great day when they do.

But for now I am very happy with how things are progressing

I know all about Will West and ControlPhast. Big Papa and I played golf with him at Cedia the year before last. The balls were moving really phast that day...

When we loose the kind of money we have on a product, even new stuff is going back. I will piss and moan. One of the most active threads on integrationpros.com is in regards to RTI failures. So we cannot get away with covering ones eyes and pretending the problems do not exist. I personally know dozens of dealers who threw up their arms and walked away from RTI in the recent past.

You know as I do, we loose at minimum 2 hours of labor for each defective remote. Plus admin costs, keeping extras in stock, shipping, and referral loses. We are well into 5 figure losses with one vendor.

We just spent several hundred more dollars on RTI batteries to boot. We have hundreds of old Pronto's out there, which I have not touched in years now. And I am at easily a 10 to 1 ratio at swapping out bad batteries of RTI to Pronto. I just pulled out another bloated batteries this week. Past 90 day so it is out of warranty though...