ADA has been offering Trinnov-based external room correction systems for a few years before incorporating them into the Pre/Pro. For the first time, Trinnov showed its own equipment for home use at CEDIA. The photo below has CEO and principal developer Arnaud Laborie on the left and Curt Hoyt, Director of USA Operations, on the right.

Curt has an active thread on the AVSforum website supporting questions for the first-generation Trinnov system on the Sherwood R-972.

This year’s products use the third generation of the algorithms. One is a stereo unit with four channels to support active speakers. The others support from eight analog I/Os and move in increments of four to 16 in and 32 out. The additional I/Os are available by adding expansion boards.

Professional digital I/Os on the Trinnov pro equipment are absent from the home units. I scanned the convention floor for a multichannel high-resolution digital audio interconnects with HDMI level encryption, but could not locate any. Given the number of years since HDMI 1.1 appeared, I think we may never see it.

Trinnov is doing its best to make the ADCs and DACs transparent with an A-weighted SNR spec quoted as 118dB at 96kHz sampling. These units need an external PC or touch screen for control and displays.

Pioneer

Pioneer introduced a second-generation version of its entry-level speaker system designed by Andrew Jones (pictured above). Andrew is best known for his work on more expensive speakers produced by the Pioneer subsidiary TAD. The floor standers are $250 a pair and the small book shelves are $130 the pair. The floor stander uses three 5.5 inch woofers in a 2.5 way design. 2.5 way designs are difficult to manufacture at any price. Genuine three-way designs are almost always more successful, but it is impossible to offer one at this price. The price limits the number of crossover components. Despite this, Andrew claims the speakers have excellent measured performance due, in part, to a 300Hz rolloff of the bottom two woofers. Independently published measurements of the first-generation bookshelf speakers were better than expected at this price point. It will be interesting to see what has been accomplished with the larger design challenge of the floor-standing speaker.

Simplifi Audio

Simplifi is a distribution company for a number of brands of speakers and electronics from Europe. They had booked a large, CEDIA sanctioned, hotel room in the Weston. Unfortunately two of the staff members were sick so the room could not be opened. The company was limited to a small on floor display.

Simplifi showed the $1100 DSPeaker Anti-Mode 2.0 Dual Core 2 room correction system. It has two filter banks. One application is to apply correction to a full range speaker. Other applications are discussed at the DSPeaker website.

Since it is a stereo unit it has digital I/O along with analog I/O. Digital inputs include USB and SPDIF. The block diagram of an all digital implementation is shown below.

Note the redundant data converters have been eliminated. External multichannel room correction systems do not have digital I/O for reasons outlined in other sections of this CEDIA report.

An analog microphone connects to the Anti-Mode 2.0 Dual Core. Individual microphone calibration files are not provided. The system allows up to 8 multipoint measurements.

Virtually all of the user interaction is carried out by using the remote control guided by a small, but high resolution, TFT display on the front panel. A number of advanced features include limiting the frequency of the room correction, adding room gain and an adjustable target curve above 1kHz are set with the remote control and TFT display. Up to 16 users adjustable parametric equalizer sections are said to be available.

Frequency response plots (pre and post calibration) can be viewed on the TFT display as shown in the stock photo from DSPeaker.

No external PC is required to see the plots although the unit transfers measurement files to a PC using a USB cable. Third party REW acoustic analysis software reads the files to provide larger versions of the plots

Dr. Michio Kaku: keynote address

CCNY theoretical physicist, Dr. Michio Kaku, gave the keynote address. A regular on the Discovery Channel, the History Channel, and PBS, Dr, Kaku is known for his skill at distilling new developments in physics and cosmology for the layman. Dr. Kaku’s research also involves predicting trends based on the latest research in science. The keynote topic was  “The Intuitive Home of 2016: What’s After the Smart Home.”

The keynote address was presented the day prior to the show’s official opening. Those who had come early to Indianapolis were mostly setting up displays of the floor, attending CEDIA training classes or were members of the press. The first group would have unlikely had time to attend and the last group would have gravitated to Sony’s press conference, which ran concurrently with the keynote address. Nonetheless, the ballroom was overflowing with 300 people in attendance. I will not summarize the talk here, but will use it as a pivot to the next product topic.

TiVo backup system

DVRs store programs on hard drives. Like all products with hard drives, they tend to crash. When they do, all the shows you have recorded are gone. Until now, these devices could not back up the drives. Since DVRs now store hundreds of hours of standard-definition recordings, there is often more good stuff stored, like Dr. Kaku’s programs, than can be possibly watched a couple days after the program aired. A lot you save to later. Dr. Kaku’s programs require a commitment of time; this is not background entertainment. When the drive crashes, later is never. I can testify to this as this occurred with one of the DVRs supplied by my cable company.

 TiVo introduced a backup system in conjunction with Netgear.

It is a genuine automatic backup scheduled as one would do on their home computer. TiVo systems can now store 300 hours of HD programming, which translates to 2000 hours of SD. More information on the interface between the two products is at:

www.readynas.com/?p=4324

The combination of larger Netgear units and multiple TiVo boxes allows for whole-house video distribution. This often requires a CEDIA dealer to set up correctly. I did not examine that aspect of the system.

WISA Association

Klipsch, which has its corporate headquarters in Indianapolis was not at CEDIA this year but had a very large presence in past years. The absence was especially strange given all the advertisements Klipsch had at the airport. An experimental Klipsch active speaker with a DSP crossover was shown in one of the enclosed, on floor rooms, by the Wireless Speaker & Audio (WiSA) association.

WISA promotes the 7.4 high resolution (uncompressed 96kHz/24bit) transmission standard developed by Summit Semiconductor. At CEDIA WiSA announced that it has set up an interoperability testing program.

The WISA reference board placed inside the speaker includes the wireless receiver, DSP based crossover, two DACs and two switching power amps one for the woofer and one for the tweeter. The sonic results from the many different types of speakers that have been demonstrated using this reference design has been excellent over the years. A DSP crossover followed by individual amplifier driving each speaker provides many advantages over a passive crossover driven by a single external amplifier.

Yamaha

The $2500 Yamaha A-S2000SL integrated amplifier, shown above, may look like and feel like it is from the early 1980s but its internal design is totally modern. Every knob is wired to the microcontroller although some have end stops that make them feel like an analog pot (see below). Each potentiometers is wired as a potential divider that sends a DC voltage to a DAC on the microcontroller.

When the pots are used in this way all the analog signals are confined to the back of the unit as close to the I/Os as possible. Buttons on the A-S2000SL are also connected to the microcontroller. Unlike a real unit from the 80s the A-S2000SL has no phono stage or tape monitor switch.