Rebecca Day

LAS VEGAS - ActiveVideo Networks, a Silicon Valley cloud-based interactive services company, is the latest in a list of companies vying for the application provider role in connected TVs. ActiveVideo joins Yahoo, Vudu and others in seeking partner relationships with CE device makers for Internet application platforms that extend over multiple channels including TVs, Blu-ray and game players and smartphones. It’s fast becoming a crowded field.

LAS VEGAS -- Vudu, a darling of specialty A/V channels, is going high volume, the company is announcing at this week’s CES. With a movie library of some 20,000 titles, the streaming content provider is starting its own Internet application platform to take on Yahoo, adding four new CE hardware partners and expanding current agreements with Mitsubishi, LG and Vizio. The end result is that “Vudu will be in millions of devices by the end of 2010, a scale we could never have hoped to achieve by selling our own box,” Executive Vice President Edward Lichty told us.

Bowers & Wilkins cut by half the number of SKUs in its flagship 800 series of speakers as part of a streamlining effort in conventional speakers at the same time the company is expanding its automotive, headphone and multimedia speaker lines. B&W eliminated two models of surround and center- channel speakers from the 800 series to steer clear of duplication in its custom installation line, Vice President of Sales and Marketing Doug Henderson told us. “To avoid the GM model of expanding and not trimming back,” Henderson said, “you have to cull the number of products.” At CES, B&W introduced the 805 Diamond speaker, incorporating the company’s Diamond tweeter that’s said to improve efficiency and boost dynamic range at the top end. The 805 ships next month at a suggested retail price of $5,000 a pair. Cutting back on home theater speakers gives the company room to expand in other areas, Henderson said. The company recently launched its headphone line with the $299 P5 and will follow it later this year with a noise-cancelling model and in-ear phones. “We're about using the reference-quality performance of our freestanding loudspeakers and applying it to headphones,” Henderson said, “because for many people today, headphones are their speakers.” B&W also showed a Jaguar XJ Premium Sound System comprising 20 B&W speakers. The Jaguar XJ with B&W sound package will be available in March.

LAS VEGAS -- While most of the pre-CES TV buzz centered around 3D, Sharp came to CES promoting an expanded color strategy called QuadPixel and a new 68-inch screen size. The company’s new line of Ultra Brilliant Edge-lit Aquos TVs adds yellow to the RGB color filter, resulting in colors never seen before in the industry, Sharp President Mikio Katayama told journalists at a news conference here Wednesday.

Dolby Labs last week set up temporarily in a 175-square- foot demo space in a pop-up Wired holiday-season location in Manhattan. Dolby’s “surround sound lounge” is part of a broader branding campaign that the company kicked off Oct. 1 to increase awareness of its product reach.

Savant, which designs Mac-based control and entertainment solutions for the custom home and commercial markets, opened an experience center in New York this week. Savant bought the 2,500-square-foot space at 88 Mercer St. in Manhattan’s SoHo district two years ago, choosing a location just down the block from an Apple store. Apple has no financial stake in Savant, but Savant has qualified as an Apple “proprietary solutions provider,” said Craig Spinner, Savant’s marketing director. He said his company may pursue cross promotions with the nearby Apple store, but nothing is in the works. Whatever benefit the experience center gains from being close to the store won’t be from casual foot traffic. The center has a third-floor space open by appointment only to Savant dealers, partner electronics vendors, and interior designers. It’s meant to provide a comfortable place for dealers, partners and designers to bring prospective customers to learn about the marriage of design and technology, Spinner said, and to show the benefits of full home automation in a lifestyle setting. Dealers and partners can also use the space for private events. The showcase includes vignettes of a living room, dining room, bedroom, kitchen and office. Each area is outfitted with a Savant controller that manages lighting, temperature, shades and AV equipment. The 800-square-foot theater was designed by Theo Kalomirakis. It features limited-edition Thiel speakers with Les Paul speaker back panels. Other product partners include Bay Audio, Chief, Continental Seating, Furman, Lutron, McIntosh, Middle Atlantic, NuVision, Samsung JKP Projectors, Steinway Lyngdorf, Steinway Piano and Stewart Filmscreen. At the high-rent location, Savant is touting a low buy-in price for a starter multi-room audio and control system. The company’s Protege system starts at $5,000, including an embedded iTunes server and distributed audio for four sources to eight zones. Spinner said Savant offers the capabilities of higher-end systems from Crestron or AMX but uses drag-and-drop programming instead of proprietary coding to shave hours off design time. The systems can be controlled by an iPhone or iPod Touch as well, eliminating the need for a high-end touchscreen controller. Savant does offer larger high-end touchscreen controllers, including a 9- inch model in the design center that shows off the company’s TrueImage control. TrueImage is based on capacitive glass technology and uses actual images of each room instead of menus or icons. Users can dim and turn on or off room lights, lower or raise shades, or power audio and video components on or off by touching the image of the light, thermostat or A/V equipment pictured in the room. A separate section of the Savant space, geared to the commercial market, is being built.

Boasting an increased engineering staff and no debt, Crestron founder and president George Feldstein on Monday cut the ribbon on the company’s new “experience center” at opening ceremonies in Rockleigh, N.J. The 8,000-square-foot facility next to Crestron’s headquarters includes a factory, testing areas, a training center and an R&D center. On a tour of the R&D center before the ceremonies, Feldstein told reporters that his 40-year-old company has added engineers over the past year, scooping up local talent let go by layoffs and company closings, bringing the total number of engineers to 350. According to Jeff Singer, marketing communications director, residential orders for high-end custom electronics control, lighting and A/V systems have grown to 49 percent of the company’s business, which also includes government, defense, education and corporate markets. The new experience center, available to dealers, interior designers, architects and sales staff by appointment only, demonstrates all facets of the corporation’s technology. On the residential side, the showroom features Philips Color Kinetics LED lighting, Digital Projection HD projectors and Stewart Filmscreen screens along with Crestron’s control products. An eight-seat home theater was designed by custom theater specialist Theo Kalomirakis and includes a 143-inch Stewart screen.

Monster Cable founder Noel Lee issued a call to arms Friday to retailers to breathe new life into the flagging high-end audio industry. Lee brought his company back to the Audio Engineering Society convention in New York as an exhibitor after a long absence and proclaimed to reporters that high-end audio had gone to “hell in a hand basket.” Lee decried a finding that nine in 10 iPod owners use the standard earbuds supplied with their devices. The headsets don’t deliver the nuances and high-end sound that audio engineers have put into the recording process, Lee said. Monster used the convention as a launch pad for a new series of high-priced headphones aimed at the pro and audiophile crowd. Monster is calling the new headphones, due in stores in November, Turbine Pro In-Ear Speakers. They company said they offer a new kind of listening experience. The prices are $299 and $329, the more expensive model including Monster’s ControlTalk headphone cable, which gives users playback control and hands-free operation when used with the iPhone and other smartphones. “Why can’t retailers make money on big speakers?” Lee asked rhetorically. Convenience and portability have trumped sound quality, he answered. He blamed the industry for not connecting the dots for consumers and explaining the benefits of good sound. He observed that customers may never hear what recording engineers are attempting to produce in the studio because audio has been “polluted” by compressed music and cheap playback equipment and because they have never been exposed to anything better. Monster hopes to change the situation by offering high-end headphones and audiophile-grade demo material from its Monster Music line, Lee said. The company recently attended a Best Buy seminar in Kansas City, where a prominent message stated that retail needs to lead the audio cause. “We're calling on every retailer to follow suit,” Lee said.

Bose debuted its next-generation SoundDock system for the iPod, claiming performance improvements owing to advances in Bose waveguide technology that deliver audio performance not previously possible from a one-piece system. The $599 SoundDock 10 will be available next Monday. Though iPod-certified, it also uses a new interchangeable docking architecture that’s designed for compatibility with other music players. According to Lino Pucci, group product manager for Bose, the patented docking architecture is designed to make the SoundDock 10 future-proof as new music players and technology emerge. The first swappable dock in the line of interchangeable docks is a $149 Bluetooth model that’s designed to enable cell phone users to stream music files to the SoundDock 10. Citing Bose policy against disclosing specifications, Lino declined to detail the improvements in the SoundDock 10 over the SoundDock Series II and SoundDock Portable products in terms of amplifier power, dynamic range or frequency response. He said the SoundDock 10 is the first product to take advantage of the new waveguide, which was shrunk from 75 inches to 52 inches to fit into the compact enclosure without compromising audio performance. The other SoundDock products remain in the line. The tabletop system packs an auxiliary input for other audio devices as well as a composite video output enabling consumers to view photos or videos when connected to a TV. A remote control is included.

ATLANTA -- Speakercraft is debuting high-end control systems with a scalable distributed AV control system called Nirv to bring custom-level control to a more mainstream consumer, the company said Wednesday at the CEDIA Expo. Due next March, Nirv is expected to come in at half the cost of higher-end systems from companies like Control 4, Speakercraft said.