Cake Boss Buddy Valastro Brings Down The House At CEDIA 2011 Birthday Celebration for the ELAN g! Entertainment and Control System

America’s favorite baker and television’s unchallenged Cake Boss, Buddy Valastro, brought down the house last week at CEDIA 2011 when he personally delivered a custom designed birthday cake to The AVC Group exhibit to help ELAN® Home Systems celebrate the first birthday of its revolutionary g! entertainment and control system.

Nearly a thousand show attendees followed Buddy as he accompanied his confectionary replica of the ELAN HR2 handheld remote controller from the exhibit hall loading dock to The AVC Group booth. Once there, fans mobbed Buddy, and the cake, to take pictures with their cameras and smartphones. “I don’t think we’ve ever seen anything like this at a CEDIA Show before,” said Paul Starkey, President of ELAN Home Systems, “at least not in my history of attending this show. I don’t think anyone will ever forget it!”

Indeed, Buddy Valastro was also taken back by the emotional reaction of the show attendees, many of whom surged around the stage and, for a time, overwhelmed it! “I’ve always wanted to attend this show,” he told the assembled audience. “I love all of this technology and I appreciate all of the benefits it brings to people of all ages, particularly the ELAN g! System. The g! system has transformed the way my family lives at home and it has revolutionized the way I run the business at our new Carlos Bakery commercial production center in Jersey City, New Jersey. I always tell people that if I can operate g! anyone can operate g! It’s so intuitive and easy to master.”

Amplifying Buddy’s message, Starkey noted that, “In one short year, the ELAN g! System has established itself as the benchmark for entertainment and control quality, reliability, user-friendliness, ease of installation and profitability that our competitors can only dream of matching. It provides dealers with precisely the kind of entertainment and control system they need to succeed in today’s economy — a profitable and easy-to-install system that scales the waterfront from single-room entry level to whole home mega-mansion installations.”

ELAN also chose the occasion of its first birthday celebration at CEDIA 2011 to strengthen the g! product line with the market introduction of an expanded series of home controllers, the latest Version 5.2 software, and a 10” touch screen.

Niles SI-1230 12-Channel Power Amplifier Inducted Into CEDIA Product Hall of Fame at CEDIA Expo 2011

The Niles® SI-1230 12-Channel Systems Integration Amplifier was inducted into the CEDIA Product Hall of Fame last week at CEDIA Expo 2011 in Indianapolis, Indiana. According to CEDIA, "The Product Hall of Fame was developed to show the origins of the residential electronics industry and track the progression of product development and technology."

The SI-1230 Systems Integration Amplifier is a 12-channel power amplifier that delivers exceptional sound quality and offers unique configuration features that solve common whole-house distributed audio challenges.

“We developed the SI-1230 Systems Integration Amplifier to help the professional systems designer simplify and optimize today’s complex installations through an array of application specific features that enhance flexibility and performance,” said Mike ‘Sparky’ Detmer, President of Niles. “Niles continues to lead the custom audio industry in both design and innovation, and our passion for excellence has now been recognized with the SI-1230’s induction into the CEDIA Product Hall of Fame. I accept this honor on behalf of everyone here at Niles. ”

The SI-1230 is a 12-channel amplifier that delivers a solid 30 watts per channel RMS into 8 ohms and 37 watts per channel RMS into 4 ohms. The massive Multi-Tap Toroid power transformer features six independent secondary transformers for each of the six amplifier modules. As a result, the SI-1230 delivers twenty percent more power than its predecessor, the SI-1200. This extraordinary power supply design provides the energy necessary to deliver solid, deep, controlled bass response to a house full of speakers.

In addition, Each of the SI-1230’s six adjacent output pairs are bridgeable, allowing for up to six 80 watt channels by sliding the bridging switches located between each pair to the “bridged” position. This enables you to allocate more power to specific locations, such as large rooms or outdoor applications.

ELAN Home Systems' HR2 Awarded 2011 Resi Award for Best Remote Control

ELAN Home Systems last week was awarded the 2011 Resi Award by Residential Systems magazine in the category of Remote Control for the ELAN HR2 Remote. The award was presented to ELAN at the 2011 Resi Awards CEDIA Expo Reception in Indianapolis, Indiana.

"With ELAN g! we set out to create the best whole house system, making sure that the whole family could enjoy it," said Paul Starkey, president of ELAN Home Systems. "The HR2 is the most logical extension of that system because everyone has and uses a remote control. We aimed to break the mold of whole house control - and together, the ELAN g! Series and the HR2 remote do just that.”

Each year, Residential Systems magazine presents the prestigious Resi Awards to honor the best products exhibited at CEDIA EXPO, based on their industrial design.

“This year’s Resi Awards finalists demonstrate, once again, that innovation and elegant design need not be sacrificed during challenging economic times,” stated Residential Systems editorial director Jeremy Glowacki.

The sleek ELAN HR2, the company’s first ever remote, features the ELAN "g!" engine and hybrid use of backlit buttons with a 2.4" OLED touch display. This provides all the function of hard buttons and a touch screen packaged in a stylish remote that weighs a mere 8 ounces. Nearly a year of development went into the remote's shape and button layout, and that plays out in a very pleasing and easy-to-use button configuration, with a crisp clear touch display of the g! icon controls. This delivers quick-touch access to media, climate, lighting and security subsystems. Its ergonomic design is easy on the hands and eyes, and is ready on pickup thanks to a noiseless accelerometer and instant-on electronics. Integrated Wi-Fi and IR ensure rich metadata content as well as speedy local control of sources and TVs.

Beyond function, a major part of the remote's appeal is the gentle and artistic sculpting of the bottom and back so that depth quickly goes from one inch in the palm to a half inch midway up for an easy and balanced grip. Its Lithium Polymer battery provides superior battery life with the display on or on standby. A stylish charging base is included and keeps the HR2 in a handy upright position - ready to grab-and-go with a minimal footprint.

The industry's most intuitive new control solution - "g!" - is what powers the HR2, and it is a welcome advance over the complexity of its predecessors. "g!" features uniform, icon-based control from favorite devices including TVs, touch screens, touchpads - even PCs and iPhones. The standardized GUI interface works across more than 11 platforms, so that the trendy g!Mobile app users love on the iPhone appears and works similarly on ELAN's HR2 and all other g! touch controllers as well as users' televisions and mobile devices. Individual "apps" for each subsystem allow the user to control security, climate, lighting, media, irrigation, pool/spa, messaging, video and photos with the flick of a finger. Access through the system's IP backbone is fast and secure through any ELAN home interface or globally with mobile Internet enabled devices like the iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, Netbooks and PC Tablets.

ELAN HR2 Handheld Remote Control:

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• All the speed, response & graphics of a touch screen
• All the ease-of-use, simplicity-of-programming & affordability of a remote control
• 43 backlit Hard buttons 3 additional programmable buttons
• 2.4" OLED display
• Noiseless accelerometer for activating LCD and backlight
• 802.11g communication provides robust metadata feedback
• IR blaster for line-of-sight control
• Quick & easy programming using the ELAN Configurator
• Compatible with all g! System Controllers
• Ships standard with battery and charging base
• Controls all AV sources with metadata feedback for supported devices
• Controls security, lighting, and climate with metadata feedback
• Supports all drivers that run on other g! interfaces

Sunfire Atmos Awarded 2011 EXC!TE Award By CustomRetailer Magazine

Sunfire®, a specialist in the design, manufacture and marketing of luxury home theater products for the worldwide custom specialist and retail markets, today was awarded a 2011 EXC!TE Award by CustomRetailer Magazine for its new Sunfire Atmos subwoofer. The award will be presented to Sunfire on Sept. 8 at the 2011 EXC!TE Awards Party at CEDIA Expo 2011 in Indianapolis, Indiana.

“The Atmos sets a new bar for small, powerful, accurate subwoofers. It is relevant for today’s consumers who demand high performance and reliability out of a small cabinet,” said Mark Weisenberg, Sunfire General Manager. “Our engineers started from scratch and developed a incredibly tough aluminum enclosure that accommodates the tremendous air pressure generated by the woofer.”

CustomRetailer Magazine presents its annual EXC!TE Awards to the best products available to the industry. Each year, CustomRetailer invites nominations of products that stand out for being innovative, high-performing and solutions-oriented for the custom installation professional. Past winners stand out as particularly impressive, considering the unique challenges custom installers face every day on the job. The impact these products have had on the industry is felt in the installers' productivity, the dealers' profitability, the clients' satisfaction and the industry's vitality.

The Atmos features a custom designed 6.5” woofer paired with a unique new asymmetrical cardiod surround, allowing over 1.5” of excursion. Resembling the variable thickness of the human heart, the surround provides superior control of the 6.5” driver, reducing distortion and increasing fidelity and reliability. The Atmos outperforms many 10” and 12” models.

Quietly containing the monstrous, cool running 1400W amplifier using Sunfire’s exclusive Tracking Downconverter technology required space-age engineering, which is why Sunfire used FEA (Finite Element Analysis) to design the Atmos, including the aluminum cabinet and the drivers as well as redesigning the Tracking Downconverter amplifier. This patient attention to detail gave the Atmos unequalled fidelity and high output, all out of an impossibly small aluminum extruded cabinet.