Has anyone seen or heard that you can now buy [email protected] and [email protected] from A$I, after getting certified from a third party (Haus).
Wonder what products are going to be available?

Its just the new stand alone $499 Savant smart remote.

not sure why anyone would be concerned about Sonos... You can that stuff everywhere.

Why would anyone buy sonos from ADI? So painful. I am direct, but would use Amazon in a hearbeat over them.


And why would anyone buy savant















From ADI?

I got the e-mail and my first thought, because of their pricing, was that I would be able to pay full price for Sonos online and they would still want to charge more. I was looking at some surveillance cameras and can buy them for less at B&H Photo, so I called the manufacturer, who told me that not only is B&H an authorized seller, they buy them from A$I. I called A$I and asked for a quote that included two DVRs, ten cameras, two camera power supplies and some camera accessories- I could have taken the price from their website and multiplied that by the quantity- they used to give a discount for complete systems but now, they don't seem to give a rat's ass how much someone buys. I have bought more from them this year than any other year and I still feel like a prom date that had too much to drink the night before.

It's the grass is greener on the other side. Alarm guys do low voltage. Audio and networking is low voltage, therefore, "we can do that". Besides, what do audio guys know about alarms? Slam dunk.

Personally, I have yet to come across an alarm guy who was not petrified over networking. One alarm guy assured me that his alarm system would never work properly unless it had its own, dedicated Internet service. (I can believe that in his case because he fixed IP addresses and every time that I visited the installation he had moved his address -- usually somewhere within the DHCP range.)

It just means that hopefully in 1-2 years, we will be replacing some Savant remotes that were never installed/programmed quite right. :)

Savant
Sonos
ADI

I recently had the not so pleasurable experience of installing one of the new $499 Savant remotes. If anyone is going to be doing these, you might want to know:

I'm positive it's functionality will improve drastically in the future but beware of this sad initial effort.

"Features include"
There's no way to add custom macros to an activity - not even something as simple as telling Zone 2 on a receiver to turn on with another activity. Heck, they don't support the multi-zone feature of a receiver at all that I can see.

No way to organize the sequence of how rooms show up
No way to organize the sequence of how sources show up
No way to edit how the soft buttons show up on the LCD screen for a source
No hard number buttons, page up/down buttons or "MY DVR" buttons - the first two are very annoying to me - especially page up/down buttons
No way that I know of to l learn in a command

Similar to Logitech, the remote's hub uses wifi only, so if you're wifi network changes, you'll get a call - that will cut the connection for the Savant app and any Sonos boxes you are trying to control. The actual remote talks to the hub via bluetooth.

It does automatically find and allows you to attach to Sonos zone players on the network. Impressively, it manages zones in exactly the same way as the Sonos app, BUT, all you can select is favorites or saved playlists - you cannot access any music services directly, add Pandora stations etc.

No way to manage discrete commands - I learned this when the Sony AV receiver I was using was responding to toggle power commands, so if it was out of sync power-wise it stayed that way - there are no options to tell it to use discretes. It does have a "help" feature just like Logitech where it tries to fix the situation with a series of questions, but even Logitech lets you go into the power commands and direct it to use discrete commands.

It's kind of like a Logitech remote with 80% less customization.

I do like the use of the wireless IR blasters to avoid all the IR bugs - but that also means no similar components in the same cabinet or room; then again, that isn't really the goal for this unit I guess.

Why would one deploy a product that is this new without testing it in a controlled environment? We know better at this point in the game.

Savant doesn't think you do

Target is obviously worried about sonos at ADI

Neither does any other manufacturer, but the gullible keep doing it over and over. Then publically bitch about it still being in beta.

I've stated here before that Savant is like a big Harmony system. This is it in full bloom I guess. Used to, I would call my local Savant rep to advise, but, my Savant rep would change every month.

I didn't. The customer went out and bought it and I agreed to set it up for him (after telling him I had never done one before so wasn't sure how it would turn out). However, it never occurred to me it wouldn't at least have basic features like Zone 2 control, which is all I needed from it at the least - super simple system. However, this limitation resulted in the sale of an additional Sonos amp for me. Thank you Savant!

If Savant is lucky a large dumb company will buy them and then obviously kill the product once they realize what a mistake they made.