John Sciacca

Tons of people use Amazon Alexa Echo smart speakers around their homes as an inexpensive way of utilizing voice control for a variety of tasks, and while the Echo is great in this role, it kinda sucks as an audio speaker. Klipsch wants to do something about that with its new KVA-40 and KVA-110 Echo Input Amplifiers that keep everything that’s good about the Echo while kicking the audio performance up several notches.

You can usually tell how popular – or good – a demo is at CEDIA by how steady and long the line is, and on the last day of the show, when many integrators had already left Denver to return home, one of the booth’s that was still drawing a steady crowd for its surround demonstration was Klipsch's sound room where the company debuted its new Pro Cinema Home surround system. And the experience was definitely worth the wait!

In a classic game of total one-upmanship, Ascendo Immersive Audio brought its SMSG 32 Subwoofer to CEDIA, with a immense 32-inch driver that basically called out all the other “large” subs at the show and told them to make it a sandwich. And the crazy thing? This is only the third biggest sub the company manufacturers!

With automation controllers designed to run projects of any size, having a system failure can be catastrophic. In a large project, the failure of the main controller or processor could mean that lights don’t work, security integration fails, surveillance cameras would be unreachable, and all the home’s entertainment systems would also go offline. To ensure that these mega-projects keep working through either snow, rain, heat or gloom of night, Control4 unveiled its latest flagship controller, the CA-10 Automation Controller.