The Wireless Speaker and Audio Association (WiSA) room contained products from Klipsch, LG, Fostex—and what is billed the first WiSA-certified mass-market 5.1 speaker system, from Enclave Audio.
The coolest bits of technology can often come from someone looking at the same problem everyone else has but seeing a new and better way to fix it. Every been awakened at 3 AM to the dreadful CHIRP! from a smoke alarm? Ever heard the chirping and then had to wander around the house trying to figure out which detector it is that is making the infernal racket? What if you were away at work or on vacation and your house caught fire…wouldn’t you like to know about it before you came home to find the smoldering ruins of Pompeii where your home theater used to be? These are all problems solved in a brilliantly simple manner by Roost.
While its pixel-splitting Beyond 4K sets were the ones that grabbed the most attention at Sharp’s CES press conference, there are other 4K TV highlights to be seen in a visit to the company’s CES booth.
If you have a home, then you probably have a lawn. And if you have a lawn then you probably have an irrigation system. Even with programming and some crude scheduling, these are dumb devices that essentially haven't been changed or seen any real technological updates in years and just run until you remember to tell them to stop. I can’t tell you how many times I wake up to hear my sprinkler system running as it competes with a massive South Carolina rainstorm. Or how I try and remind myself to turn the system off for winter – and back on for summer – but inevitably forget to do it until multiple cycles into the new season. Fortunately, technology in the form of Skydrop is coming to bring some intelligence and Internet control to irrigation controllers.
Like every other major TV maker at CES, Sony is demo’ing high dynamic range content. And like every other HDR demo I’ve seen at CES, Sony’s makes conventional, non-HDR displays look grossly inadequate in comparison.