John Sciacca

Having the right tool makes any job easier — or even possible — and when my company’s vans show up for an installation, they are loaded down with a huge array of gear to help us overcome virtually any hurdle. Between specialized drill bits, to hand tools for terminating an assortment of fittings, to fiber-optic cameras for peering into walls, having the right tool on hand can make the difference between a job well done and an impossible one.

Every tradeshow has that one standout product that seems to be able to do just about everything. At this year’s CES, I gave that award to Kef’s LS50 Wireless ( read about them here) for outstanding achievement in a streaming loudspeaker. The award for most do-it-all product at CEDIA this year has to go to Meridian for its new 251 Powered Zone Controller, a product capable of satisfying the audio demands of numerous situations, and doing it all while keeping a British stiff upper lip and delivering Meridian’s world class performance.

The 251 is the latest product in Meridian’s new 200-series, and it does so much, it’s almost easier to say what it doesn’t do...

Typical whole-house audio systems require “home-running” all of the speaker and control wiring to a central location which then connects to a stack of electronics – sources, distribution switches, amplifiers, control system – that normally resides in a large rack. While there is nothing wrong with systems designed in this manner, they are typically best installed during construction when extensive prewiring can be done, and can be difficult to add onto. Many also feature pre-configured source and zone amounts, such as 6 source to 6 zone, meaning it can be difficult (ie: expensive) to add a single additional zone to a system. Russound showed some real out-of-box thinking at CEDIA by introducing the company’s new MBX-AMP, a completely scalable Wifi streaming audio amplifier that can be placed anywhere in the home yet link-up to become part of a system supporting as many as 32 audio zones!

Control4 is reaffirming its commitment to high-performance audio distribution by launching the new Triad Multi-Room Audio line-up at CEDIA. This new line-up features two audio matrix switches, a high-resolution multi-channel amplifier, and the new single zone Triad One, all designed from the ground up to deliver high-performance, high-resolution audio throughout the home.

According to the company, over 65 percent of system owners enjoy multi-room audio, and Control4 demonstrated its seriousness about delivering a high performance solution when the company introduced its EA series of controllers which made 192/24 high-resolution audio available to every Control4 owner and added native support for Tidal music streaming. In a further move to provide a high-performance, end-to-end audio solution from “source to speaker,” the company acquired Triad in February of this year, a company with a 30 year heritage in performance audio.