We’re back, live and in-person: Crestron is gearing up for CEDIA® Expo 2022 in Dallas. The booth is big and beautiful. We’ve booked some terrific training. And we’re ready to see our customers and colleagues face-to-face once more.

Space precludes us from mentioning everything you’ll see (and hear), but here are a few of the can’t-miss highlights:

Crestron Home OS

“We were ready to bring the Crestron Home platform to CEDIA for the first time last year  — and then the pandemic continued to cause issues,” explains Michael Short, Crestron’s director of residential and hospitality marketing. Since its initial rollout, however, the platform has seen 15 major updates, including hundreds of new products and solutions added to the operating system. It’s also picked up countless numbers of industry awards.

“In addition to the offerings from Crestron integrated into the platform, thousands of drivers — or extensions as we call them — that bring third-party products to the platform are constantly being added,” says Short. Recent updates include everything from coffee makers to sprinklers to NFT digital artwork control, and they all illustrate a fundamental premise of the Crestron Home® OS: It’s an open platform. “We’ll have a gallery of extensions at CEDIA Expo,” Short adds.

That platform was built with an eye toward one modern, consistent user experience on every device, providing an aesthetically pleasing, intuitive consumer-first approach to the interface. “Nothing makes us happier than seeing an end-user ‘get it’ on the first try,” says Short.

Wellness Solutions (Including Human-Centric Lighting)

Recently, one of the most talked-about aspects of the Crestron Home® platform is its new integration with Crestron’s tunable LED light fixtures that will be available to order in the last quarter of 2022. Most notable: These fixtures can be quickly configured to follow circadian rhythms that mimic natural light. The concept can be taken one step further by integrating Crestron’s SolarSync® sensor, which communicates the outside color temperature in real-time and transmits those lighting conditions to indoor lighting. Shading is, of course, an integral part of the right lighting solution, and features from battery power to a line of new fabrics make this part of the wellness solution more robust than ever.

Crestron’s partners offer their own wellness solutions, too. An example: The Delos® line of air quality products can be easily integrated into the home platform. And another aspect of “wellness” is peace of mind, provided with help from access control and home security to energy control and battery backups should the weather take a turn for the nasty. “For the first time ever at any Crestron exhibit, we have an entire area dedicated to these wellness solutions,” says Short. “The display illustrates a complete picture of how far one can take the wellness solution within Crestron Home — in fact, some might say it’s a ‘wellness platform’ now.”

Entertainment Everywhere

One advance drives another: As Crestron’s DM NAX™ line of Audio over IP products began to pack more punch (along with additional features), speakers that matched the quality of the audio chain became necessary. Enter Origin Acoustics. Working with the Origin team, Crestron built two new speaker lines from scratch, both featuring Origin’s first-in-the-industry time-saving “bayonet ring” installation system. The first offering — the Reference nameplate — comes in at a very competitive price point with premium materials and superb sound. The Ultimate line features top-of-the-line materials such as ceramic-coated aluminum dome tweeters and carbon-fiber woofers and subs that can handle whole-home and surround-sound audio with aplomb. These in-wall and in-ceiling speakers and subwoofers check in with very low-depth profiles — which is especially hard to believe when one hears the oomph of the Ultimate subs.

There are video solutions here, too, with native Crestron DM NVX® endpoint integration. “Our AV over IP approach offers scalability and flexibility and no compromise when it comes to content,” says Short. “It’s the same Crestron solutions that the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One™ Team use in their facilities to deliver race-day experiences.”

There will be more, according to Short: “We’ve readied a number of new audio releases that will be rolled out for the first time at Expo.”

Work From Home Solutions

Given the decades of experience Crestron has in the enterprise world, it’s not a giant leap to scale that technology and experience down from corporate HQ to the home office. “If we can make work more productive for hundreds of employees at a clip, we can certainly do it for one,” says Short.

And the right remote work environment is another aspect of what’s come under the umbrella of “wellness” – in fact, Short had this to say in a recent post on the Crestron blog entitled Paths to Wellness: Three Keys for the Home Office:

Imagine a scenario in which every aspect of joining a meeting is automated. Start a meeting, the lights dim, and shades drop so you’re not backlit while on camera. Ambient music is shut off. The climate adjusts, perhaps dropping the temp by two degrees or so to keep you a bit more alert. You might even have a status panel just outside that door reading “On call” with a bright red light.

“We invite you to step into our ‘home office’ at the booth and experience this for yourselves at CEDIA Expo,” says Short.

MDU Solutions

“We’ll have — also for the first time — an entire wall dedicated to MDU solutions with the Crestron Home OS,” says Short. “Dealers will be able to learn how to build a base package and then scale that configuration to dozens or even hundreds of units with ease,” he adds.

Again, this solution is another example of Crestron providing the core of a solution but partnering with other firms to take the solution and experience to the next level. Crestron has joined with Bodhi, adding comprehensive, property-wide management to Crestron Home that enhances owners’ or guests’ comfort, security, and satisfaction while saving staff and energy costs. “It’s really simple to set up a Crestron MDU solution and deploy the code and the same system to every apartment you’d wish to integrate, meaning scaling is easy, and of course offering upgrades is even easier,” says Short.

Top-Flight Training and Discussions

From panel discussions centered around the advances in the connected home to manufacturer product training, the Crestron team is prepping to help dealers take deep dives into the topics we’ve mentioned above. Among the offerings:

• Director of Business Development Michelle Guss will be presenting “Health and Wellness in the Home — A Technology Overview,” as well as offering a broader “Insights” class as an intro to the topic,

• Solutions Engineer Toby Ortiz will helm “An Introduction to Crestron Home” (which is precisely what the title implies),

• Senior Technical Trainer Garrett Oster expands on that concept with “How to Customize Crestron Home for Your Clients,”

• Solutions Engineer Jamie Stott tackles “Fully Tunable Lighting, Powered by the Crestron Home OS,” and,

• Ekin Binal (Director of Product Management, AV Solutions), Thomas Brady (Product Owner, Audio Solutions), and Richard Sasson (Global Director of Training) team up for “The Future of AV over IP.”

Actual Human Interaction

“The ability to actually handle the products, feel the quality, experience our solutions, understand the smooth responsiveness of the touch screens — that aspect of a trade show is immeasurable,” says Short. “And face-to-face interactions? The ability to network the way we used to before the pandemic? Everyone’s thrilled about the return of those aspects.

“It’s something you just don’t know how much you miss until it goes away for a bit.”

Find out more and register for CEDIA Expo now.