Scott Wilkinson

Audio demos at trade shows are nearly impossible to conduct without noise from the show floor intruding. And hotel rooms are hardly ideal venues, either. So it was with great fanfare that Procella announced it would have the world's first THX-certified demo room at CEDIA. The free-standing room was first assembled and certified off-site, then broken down and reassembled—and re-certified—in the convention hall.

At CEDIA, Digital Projection introduced a product so new, it doesn't even have a name yet. It's a 1080p, LED-lit DLP projector expected to list for about $10,000 and designed for extremely short-throw situations—in the demo from which this photo was taken, the projector was directly above a 6-foot-wide Stewart Studiotek 130 screen at a throw distance of only 12 inches! The light from the lens bounces off an integrated mirror and onto the screen at a severe angle, which means there must be some pretty sophisticated geometric processing going on. It also provides wireless HDMI connectivity, though the rep I spoke with didn't know which type. Unfortunately, it was difficult to judge image quality in the brightly lit show-floor environment.

New at CEDIA from Wisdom Audio was the STS passive subwoofer with dual 15-inch drivers. At five feet tall and three feet wide, it looks huge next to the SWS "suitcase" sub as seen here, but it's actually surprisingly small for what it does—130dB SPL at 20Hz (-3dB at 15Hz) with a sensitivity of 101dB/W/m and the ability to handle power up to 5kW!

Bob Farinelli, president and CTO of Elan Home Systems, discusses what people need to think about when considering a whole-house A/V system; distributing audio via line level, speaker level, and S/PDIF digital; long HDMI runs; wired vs. WiFi IP distribution; wall-mounted keypads vs handheld remotes; eliminating audio delay in "party mode"; and answers to chat-room questions.

Run Time: 45:20