Labeling and Certifying Your Cables

Proper Labeling – If there is one thing that my integrator and I would do all over again, it would be to certify and properly label all of the cables in my home, during the ‘wiring phase’. This would have saved us a tremendous amount of time (days) and money. I can’t even begin to tell you how much pain and time it cost us not having properly labeled and certified cables. My Integrator’s plan was to do this done from the very beginning, but the installer that he assigned to my job chose to label my cables with numbers and then create a reference table, which he kept to himself. Sometime after my house was dry walled, this installer got fired, and as retaliation, he chose to conveniently lose this table, leaving us back at square one. It also turned out that, although he originally put numbers on both ends of the cable, when he cut the cables to stuff them into their appropriate wall boxes, he did not label the cables again.

Recommendation – Since we know what each cable is intended for prior to wiring the project, and adequate label printers are available almost anywhere, starting as low as $29.00, the way to go is to label each cable in plain English: i.e. ‘Dining Room Amplifier’, ‘Living Room Touch Screen’, or ‘Patio Speakers’. This way, if a new installer is assigned to finish the job months later, there is no guessing involved. The label maker that I bought is made by Brothers. I bought it at Office Max and it cost me $39. I then ordered special ½” label tape that is designed for application on cables. When labeling equipment that is black, like power supplies or rack mounted equipment, we used white-on-black tape. For all other label needs, we used black-on-white. Now it is so easy to see what is connected to what, and if we want to make a change, there is no guessing or ringing out cables involved.

Certifying Your Cables – There are a couple of ways to certify your cables documented and undocumented. The first is to simply test all of your cables during the ‘wiring phase’ of the job. The second is to test them, then print out the results to serve as documentation for the integrator and the customer, that all cables have been tested and passed during that phase. Although it is not required, it wouldn’t hurt to test the cables again after drywall to insure that none of the cables were damaged by other contractors on the project. In many commercial projects, this is a requirement.

Many installers believe that a simple continuity test is sufficient. It is not. That was OK for telephone, but now that we are installing devices that require significant bandwidth from your network, like IP Audio and IP Video, it is extremely important that these cables are terminated properly and that their integrity is intact, so that you can maximum performance from your network.

The difference between a reliable system and one that is plagued with problems is usually in the wiring and termination. My installer was able to demonstrate to me that a bad cable that passes the ‘network’ test with a simply continuity cable tester, can fail when tested with a proper network cable tester.

Recommendation – Test all cables during the ‘wiring phase’ of your project, before drywall and consider testing them again after drywall, if budget allows. Printing the test results of all of the cables is a great option, and may even be required on some projects.

If my blog has been helpful to you in any way, please drop me a note. I would love to hear from you and learn what other parts of my ‘building an IP home’ experience would be helpful to you: hermansblog@netstreams.com.

Is it Christmas yet?

Last week we released a new version of DigiLinX Dealer Setup software to our authorized dealers that takes our DigiLinX system to a whole new level. Our NetStreamers have been working very hard and the result is very exciting. The following is an outline of the new products that we introduced recently or began shipping.

Favorites – This is the feature set that we have all been waiting for. Favorites allows dealers to setup ‘one button’ macros for their end-users, so that can launch a host of actions by the selection of onscreen buttons. i.e. An Evening Favorite button tells our Lutron lighting system to set the lights to a predetermined level and it turns on our jazz music. Our HBO Favorite turns on the TV, selects the correct channel, dims the lights, and sets the system to a predetermined volume. Favorites takes DigiLinX to a whole new level and it will only get better from here as our NetStreamers add more customization to Favorites and DigiLinX over time. A very cool feature introduced is that I can make Favorites my home page and even change the name to something else.

Streaming Music Manager (SSM) – This product is a rack-mount or set-top product that plugs into the network, then auto-discovers PCs, MACs, network storage or other devices that touch the network, which contain uncompressed (WAV / PCM) or compressed (MP-3) shared audio files. The SMM then proxies up to six uncompressed streams of music.

My nephew and I just installed my SMM a couple of weeks ago. In my house, I have my music and video stored on a network storage device and this product is exactly what we needed. The most exciting feature for me is that the SMM finds the music on our home network, no matter where it is stored, PCs, MACs, or Linux machines and network storage, and consolidates all of our music so that my family and I don’t have to remember where a particular song or album is stored. We see one list and we can chose our music by Song, Album, Artist, Genre, or Playlist. I am told that, in the near future, we will be able to create playlists, dynamically, by just clicking on songs that we want. I can’t wait.

One final SMM feature I want to tell you about is that when we plugged our iPod into one of the SMM’s USB ports, we were able to auto discover it on the network and extract up to six (6) streams from the iPod, along with its meta-data, so that each family member could listen to their own song from the iPod, at the same time as other users were listening to their song of choice. Very cool indeed.

DoorLinX – This is going to be the world’s first IP-based ‘door intercom’. I am told that this starts shipping this month (Nov-2006), and it can’t come a moment too soon. My wife is tired of the hole by the front door and our visitors having to knock on the door very loudly in order for us to hear them. However, I believe that it will be worth the wait.

Our IP Intercom system is the best intercom system that I have ever heard because it comes out through the room speakers and not a $2.00 speaker on a wall intercom or on a phone. Besides the obvious ding-dong, DoorLinX will give us some additional features. We will be able to select any MP-3 that we want to use as a ringer and tell it what rooms or hallways to ring into. In the future, DoorLinX will be able to play different ringers at different times of the day, or different days of the year. I can’t wait until it can also ring my phone to let me know that the UPS guy is there when we are not home. I could then answer the door and ask him to place the package on the side of the house or in the garage, after I open the door for him remotely.

MediaLinX Pro (MLA4000) – Today to integrate a legacy source product (an audio or video product that does not speak TCP/IP such as CD players, tuners, DVDs, etc…), and have that available for listening on the network with native products (music servers, PC, etc…), a NetStreams dealer must connect that source to the network via a media converter product, which NetStreams calls MediaLinX. Until now, an installer had to purchase one MediaLinX per source. NetStreams will soon bring out a 4-channel version of MediaLinX that will also bring with it some new features that dealers will be able to take advantage of to create more cool and compelling applications. This includes controlling curtains, screens, and more.

Well… that’s it for now folks. Although Christmas is less than two months away still, it sure felt like Christmas this week. You can expect that I will be playing with all of these new options and features this weekend.

In my next blog entry I plan on telling you about wiring for the house of the future – today. This allowed me to build a full IP-based home, ready for all of those wonderful IP products on the way. I am especially excited to see and ready for IPTV (more about this in another future entry).

The State of the Industry

I read an article today in the September / October issue of Robb Report Home Entertainment & Design about "networked control" and it struck me how far behind the consumer electronics industry is in thinking about TCP/IP. (Note this edition is not yet posted on their website but the print issue is beginning to circulate. Go to your newstand and look for this magazine. I find it very insightful!).

Yes, controlling audio, video and home automation products over TCP/IP is a no brainer. Frankly, we all should have moved towards this years ago. My company was beginning to work on this 7 years ago, back when we were the incorporated as GE Smart and were a joint venture with General Electric and Microsoft.

Why do I say the industry is behind where it should be? It seems to me that too many people in our industry think about TCP/IP in the sense that it is just another protocol, like RS-232, RF or IR.

CE Manufacturers of high end equipment started putting RS-232 connectors on their devices in 1997. In the Robb Report article, Jared Lewis (an installer) is quoted as saying "If you think about it, we never got there on RS-232. I mean, you're just starting to see RS-232 on entry level to mid-grade components." And this is now 2005!

To think that our industry may take just as long to transition to a complete IP-Based system (not just IP-Based Control) makes me worry about the future of the CE manufacturer. Our counterparts, the PC Manufacturers, move much quicker on a new technology, especially when they identify a significant enhancement which will improve the value proposition for the consumer. (The key here is improving the value proposition significantly!).

Sure, you could use TCP/IP to control products, but TCP/IP was designed to deliver content too. It's not impossible to do that. At NetStreams, we've proven that with our DigiLinX system, which has been selling for several months now. A whole host of media server manufacturers have enabled their Ethernet connections so that audio is distributed over TCP/IP (more about that in a later post).

Simply controlling A/V equipment over TCP/IP is, in my opinion, not a compelling value proposition to the market. However controlling AND distributing the entertainment content is very attractive to the consumer. Why? Well to name a few reasons:
- Audio can be distributed to multiple rooms digitally and with high resolution (over TCP/IP)
- Multiple songs can be listened to from one hard disc drive based media server (over TCP/IP)
- the system is extremely flexible and scalable

There IS a difference between IP-Based Control and a complete IP-Based system. For those investing in a new system in their home, make sure you're compatible for the future.

My First Blog Post

My name is Herman Cardenas and I am Chairman and Founder of NetStreams, a company based in Austin Texas. NetStreams was formed with the idea that all consumer electronics (your TV, DVD player, Speakers, PC etc) in the home will distribute their entertainment content and communicate with each other using TCP/IP (the same language as the internet).

Why TCP/IP? It's the same language as the Internet. The architecture makes it easily expandable. It's an open protocol, so it's easier to configure a system to communicate with and control a variety of products from a variety of manufacturers. And it's the same language that the computers in your home use to talk to each other.

No Question -- IP is the future.

With this vision, Netsteams created and shipped DigiLinX, the world's first IP-Based Multi-Room Audio system in the market. (IP-Based meaning that the system distributes audio, data, and control over TCP/IP).

So what's so difficult about creating an IP-Based Multi-Room Audio system? Well the biggest issue that NetStreams overcame is the ability to synchronize the audio. Synchronization of high quality audio is important in a Multi-Room Audio system. Why? TCP/IP was primarily developed to distribute data, and never designed to be real-time. Imagine if I'm sitting in a room with 3 people and I send one email to all of them. We're all in the same room, but one person might get it before another person and so on. With audio, if you're listening to the same song in the kitchen and the dining room over an IP-Based system without synchronization, you would hear a strong echoing effect when you're walking from one room to another.

Maybe you're wondering why I wrote this blog? Well... several reasons....

• I wanted to share, with interested people, my thoughts on the future of home entertainment and technologies, as wellas my personal experience with the same.
• I know that from my experience as a home builder that choosing the right technology and wiring for your home (whether it's a new build or a remodel) is a confusing and frustrating experience for many, so I thought I might be able to help.
• And of course, I'd like to hear your comments and ideas.

Best,

Herman