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Q&A; with Robert Bliss
Will the iPad shake up the touchpanel remote control market? Almost certainly, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing according to one of the world’s most renowned installers.
Way to go Aidan! Congratulations on your discovery and deserving award.
Is there anyone that has use this 3D adapter kit, How good or bad do this adapter do ?
Good points John. For me it sort of helps to answer my question but for different reasons. That is: in those instances where i have a fully DDD recording on LP, the CD will probably serve me just as well. I will note that many early CDs sounded bad because they were made from compressed-for-lp slave copies of master tapes or (in the case of some “twofers” (2 albums on one disc) a smaller size file was used to squeeze all the info on a single disc (zappa’s overnight sensation/apostrophe disc was way tinny sounding and fared much better—after complaints—breaking them out into two discs at fuller CD resolution
Regqrding the sound of vinyl vs CD and distortion “hidden” in the LP, more times than not I was amazed to find out that distortion I heard on vinyl—and which I attributed to my less than perfect condition pressings—were actually on the original recording. I was surprised hearing certain records by Zappa, The Velvet Underground, Dylan, The Moody Blues and others on CD for the first time and discovering that my LPs didnt sound so bad after all ... it was the way the recordings were made!
I do believe that analog masters contain more sonic info than 44.1/16-bit clones would be able to capture. But I have to assume (unless someone explains otherwise) that for recordings made natively in the digital domain, then those recordings are what they are…. they’ll never be anything more than what the original was recorded at.
So there is probably no good reason to keep a digitally recorded LP if I can get it on CD these days… unless of course it contains a mix that was later changed/remixed
Hi Mark,
This has been my life’s work since about 1978. We had some of the first digital multitrack recorders that 3M ever built, and a huge part of my life was supervising the cutting of analog (and later digital) tape masters into vinyl, following those lacquers through electroplating, and then the actual pressing into vinyl. We had our own pressing plant, so I got to see it all happen every day, from trombonists coming through the front door to record jacket fabrication and excess vinyl re-grinding to make audiophile records.
The bigger point is not which sounds “better”—it’s what sounds most like what the mixer heard when he was working on it in the control room. If you had the privilege, as I did for years, of sitting beside a mixer listening to control room monitors and watching as he went for a particular “sound”, often worrying himself about the accuracy of the speakers and the room acoustics, you would understand that the whole goal was to try to replicate what he heard.
Analog tape was very good at that, but always lost a bit of transients, and increased the noise floor a bit, simply because of the limitations of tape. Indeed it was often quite difficult to tell whether you were listening to the console output or the one-second-delayed playback head of the 2-track master.
When digital mastering came on the scene, first on videotape (we used black and white U-matics, which is why the weird sample rate of 44,100 came to be—it’s a multiple of the horizontal sync frequency of black and white videotape) we were all amazed at the transparency. What we heard coming back from the digital deck was an identical sonic clone to the console itself, indeed showing the limitations of the console electronics.
Many consumers, however, had grown accustomed to the tracking and tracing errors and distortions that vinyl records inherently have. No vinyl record truly sounded like what we were hearing on the mix console; it was several layers of distortion removed, with the distortions coming from the cutting angle of the cutterhead, the “de-horning” process which cut off the bottom of the grooves so that the vinyl would release from the stamper, and the inherent noise of the vinyl medum itself.
A CD is a much, much closer replica of what the original mixer heard on his board than an LP could ever be. Now does that mean that you would rather experience what the mixer heard or experience what an LP listener of the era heard? That’s actually a very serious question. Almost no one who didn’t work in recording studios heard “clean” audio, and it was a very foreign sound to consumers, resulting in a lot of reluctance to accept digital media. Consumers simply didn’t understand that they were, for the first time, hearing what we had heard in the production control rooms. In many cases, the noise floor and distortion of the vinyl helped to cover up the limitations of the original master—making the CD sound “worse”.
I hope this helps, but I fear it may only add to the confusion.
NW. I bet a tactile transducer connected straight to the desk couldn’t even do that.
I have the streaming-only service. One thing that ticks me off is - I am using a web-based service, right - but there are no web-based methods of contact with Netflix - go ahead, try to find a “contact us” that isn’t a phone number! No email, no chat, nothing!
I wanted to complain about how they had lured me into their service, only to start dropping some titles I had expected to be able to watch (such as all of the, admittedly limited, selection of James Bond flicks).
I also wanted to complain that for weeks, the “Recently Watched” listing was missing.
Wow i would be pissed if i was a Netflix user pisssssed. Here is a secret people. Corporations only get away with what you let them get away with. Hit their pocket book and they will suddenly start whistling another tune.
I don’t work for Netflix and I think the author of this article is a huge baby-man with an entitlement complex.
If you don’t like it, then cancel your subscription. It’s their company and they can charge what they like. Get a life.
More interesting to me is how you got that deal in 1998, when Netflix didn’t have any subscription plans until 1999, and unlimited usage didn’t start until 2000. Netflix was just a DVD rental store on the ‘net where you paid a flat rate for a movie rental and if you kept it for longer than a week you paid a late fee.
To call the introduction of the iPad a revolutionary development in the world of home automation and remote control would have been an apt description back when the world “revolutionary” actually meant something. Whatever you want to call it, though, it’s undeniably huge: a 9.7-inch touch screen that retails for a fraction of the cost of dedicated touchscreen remotes and does so much more out of the box. It’s no wonder that some custom installers are a bit anxious about the iPad and how it will affect the sales of touchscreen remote control and home automation systems.
Robert Bliss: It’s going to propel it forward. No doubt about it. This is the single greatest thing that’s ever happened to Crestron and the other control companies. People who didn’t realize what home automation was—the average consumer—they’re going to see people controlling their lights and shades and entertainment via the iPad in movies and TV shows, or maybe even at their friends’ homes. And they’re going to want to do it, too, not realizing that the iPad isn’t doing the hard work; the Crestron or Control4 processor and control system is. The iPad is merely a peripheral.
It’s going to get easier. The new infrastructure that Crestron will introduce with its Pro3 Processor will allow many more people to be able to program for Crestron in the future. And maybe you could argue that that’s a bad thing for guys like me. We’ve benefited from the fact that it’s so difficult to master. But no matter what the market’s like, a good installer will always find a way to stay one step ahead of the market and provide things that others can’t.
Robert Bliss Jr.—CEO and founder of Bliss Home Theaters and Automation Inc. in Westlake Village, CA, one of the most prestigious and successful custom installation firms in the US—is anything but anxious, though. He and his company are embracing the iPad fully and, as usual, staying one step ahead of the changes it’s surely making to the way people think about home control.
HomeTechTell: You and I were discussing an installation of yours a few weeks ago and you mentioned that you were replacing all of the Crestron touchpanels in the home with iPads. What is Apple’s new toy doing to the custom installation market?
It’s a brilliant peripheral, though. I think Apple’s slogan is perfect: you already know how to use it. If I took someone who had never been in a smart home and gave them an iPad with a home control app, they would intuitively know how to control the lights, the shades, the distributed audio, the home theater, almost immediately. The only client training you have to do is reminding them to charge the thing.
HTT: I know this doesn’t really apply to the consumer, but as an installer, aren’t you worried that the iPad is going to eat into your profit margins?
RB: Well, there’s no denying that it does. But that’s the wrong way to look at it: I’m not necessarily trying to sell the iPad to the same guy who would have bought the TPMC-8X. The market we’re reaching for now is the guy who hears that you can control your lights with the iPad, but doesn’t know how. Suddenly, we’ve got a completely new sale for the home automation market. This isn’t an existing client; this is a new client. We’re putting iPads in homes that never would have had a touchscreen remote control before, and we’re also putting in the infrastructure behind it, and doing all the programming.
HTT: Is it easier to program for the iPad than it is for the touchpanel remotes of old?
RB:
HTT: Are the different control companies approaching this transition differently? Are some embracing it better than others?
RB: Absolutely. Control4, for example. Don’t think that Crestron hasn’t taken notice of Control4’s modules. Even someone who isn’t a super-savvy programmer can already program a Control4 system. They’ve made it so easy. It’s like working with an Apple computer: You’ve got these widgets and things you drag and drop where you want them.
And Crestron has said, “Whoa, we’ve got to start doing this.” But that’s the great thing about competition. Look at what the iPhone did for the cell phone market: It has pushed everyone else to create stellar phones. And Control4 is pushing everyone else to innovate in this space. They realized they had to blaze their own trail to stand out in the market, and they made an even more installer-friendly system.
HTT: You mention the iPhone—are you using it in installations the same way you’re using the iPad?
RB: The iPhone is a great little control device that really expands the range of home control. Say you’re just getting home and it’s dark: we have a button on there that fires up the lighting in the public area—different scenes depending on the time of day. Or, you can be three hours away from home and turn on your air conditioning system so your house will be cool when you get there. Moving home control to these Apple devices is really a game changer for our industry, and the installers who think about how to best embrace these new tools are going to succeed. The ones who worry about diminishing profit margins on the hardware won’t.
For more information, visit:
Crestron.com
Control4.com
BlissHTA.com