Personal Touch

In the early days of multi-room audio, homeowners gladly took what they could get: AM/FM radio, a CD player, and maybe a tape player delivered to a few zones around the house. From remote keypads, they could control volume, advance tracks forward and back, and choose radio station presets. But they had to store presets in their own memories, too, since there was no return data to tell them which station they were hearing.

Later on, Category 5 wiring to and from keypads enabled consumers to get limited feedback from the tuners, CD players, and cable TV music channels. You knew you were listening to, say, CD No. 3 in the changer or preset No. 5 on the FM dial. But if you couldn’t remember that it was Kim Carnes who sang “Bette Davis Eyes,” the display couldn’t help you.

The digital era has changed everything. Our iPods feed us the names of the track, artist, and album that are playing. XM Radio and Sirius give us those plus the scores for the baseball and football games we follow. It’s no longer enough just to hear music or entertainment. We want to know who, what, when, and how much time is left. After all, it’s the Information Age and we expect our electronics to keep up.

Add to that the variety of music sources we want at our fingertips, and the old sound systems are no longer suited to the task. The successful multi-room systems of the future will pack the flexibility and bidirectional communications required by current and future digital audio sources.

Niles Audio’s new distributed audio system provides flexibility for users without the need for programming by installers. Niles Audio has a leg up on the future with its latest distributed audio system, t he IntelliControl ICS (Integrated Control Solutions). Unlike conventional multi-zone systems, IntelliControl ICS can be personalized to a homeowner’s specific audio needs. If you want to know the name of the Bonnie Raitt song playing on XM Radio, the display on any ICS interface—whether it’s a touchpanel, wall-mounted keypad, or handheld remote—will read out that it’s “Trinkets” from the Souls Alike album.

It’s not just about convenience. Menu-driven digital sources demand user interaction for consumers to be able to operate the device. To browse through a category of satellite radio stations, you need to be able to see the category you’re in. To get to the MP3 player list of playlists, you have to get to the Playlist menu first.

For both new and retrofit projects, IntelliControl ICS operates via a GXR2 receiver (below) and remote controls (left), keypads, and touchscreen controllers. “Older multi-zone systems pretty much came the way they came,” says Frank Sterns, president of Niles Audio. “You’d stack a CD player and radio on it, and in order to customize it you had to write custom software for each touch-screen or keypad to make it do what the customer wanted. It was very expensive because of all the programming.” Niles addressed the cost issue with a system that eliminated all the programming by offering a set group of sources, but that limited the flexibility for the user. “You could have AM/FM and then three other sources that were infrared-controlled,” he says. “Installers didn’t have to do any programming because it wasn’t very flexible.”

Sterns says IntelliControl ICS brings back flexibility for the user without the need for programming by the installer. The system uses Ethernet-based Web server technology to go out and look at connected devices and then automatically draw the proper interfaces for whatever equipment is connected to the system.