How to Enhance Your Home Theater with Smart Cinema Room Lighting

Home theater design is all about adapting your room to enhance your new speakers, projector, and screen. Every aspect of the space can be adjusted to give you the best audio and video quality possible. For the latter, much of the focus is on creating the right lighting environment. Through blackout shades, stylistic adjustments, and smart control, we help you design a viewing experience in your Wilmette, IL home that mimics the one in a commercial theater.

You've invested in brand new high-end speakers and the best-rated AV receiver on the market. You've installed a whole house audio system that makes it easy for you to pull up your favorite music in any room of your Lake Forest, IL home. Once you hit play, though, you're disappointed to find there's static coming through your state-of-the-art system.

It’s easy to blame your brand new equipment or the people that installed it. Often, though, it's not an entire revamp that you need, simply a change in music. When you upgrade your stereo system, you're going to get much crisper, powerful sound. But if you're listening to poor sources—say an overused CD player or MP3 file—the system is simply going to magnify their flaws. For this reason, it's critical that you connect the right source components when installing your whole house audio system. 

SEE MORE: Best Speaker Options for Your Whole House Audio

CD vs. Turntable

Physical music sources like CD players or turntables are the least popular when it comes to whole house music systems for a simple reason. You need to manually access your source component if you want to change the album, taking away from the benefit of having centralized access. That being said, we're not saying you have to throw away your CD or vinyl collections.

According to a study by ECN Magazine, 70 percent of pet parents feel guilty when they have to leave their pets alone to go to work or on vacation. Home automation systems have become a way for owners to take care of their pets’ wellbeing without having to be in their Kenilworth, IL home. Whether it’s making sure fish aquariums have the right environment or the cat isn’t getting into the pantry again, owners can get peace of mind with these smart home features.

SEE MORE: How to Give Your Smart Home a Personal Feel

Your Personal Animal Channel

Why scour the internet for cute dog and cat videos when you can look in on your personal favorites? With a home automation solution, you can watch live surveillance footage from your smartphone at any time. See if your dog is still by the door waiting for you to return or check if the cat left you any gifts in the litter box. You can search from room to room and zoom in to get a good look at what your pets are doing.

Upgrade to a Smart Doggy Door

Discover the Best Floorstanding, Audiophile & High-End Speakers of 2024

There can be a discernible divide in the audiophile world between those enthralled by the art of high-end audio speakers and those who immerse themselves in the science of it. Whether you're setting up a home theater or looking for the perfect pair of bookshelf speakers to complement your amplifier, the choice of speakers plays a pivotal role in acoustics and overall sound quality.

Consider the size of your room and whether you need a subwoofer to boost those lower frequencies. For vinyl enthusiasts, pairing speakers with a high-quality turntable ensures that every note and nuance is crisply reproduced, especially when each speaker’s tweeter is finely tuned to deliver impeccable clarity and detail. Some people want to know all about the process that goes into a speaker. What materials were chosen? How were the drivers placed within the enclosure? Others focus on listening to various models to see which sounds best. Ultimately the goal is the same: powerful, clean sound.

In this blog, we explore the details that go into a high-performance speaker. If you’d rather hear it to believe it, contact us to schedule a test drive of our top loudspeakers.

Real estate trends are shifting in favor of tech-savvy solutions that give homeowners unprecedented control over their property. A recent study by Coldwell Banker Real Estate LLC found that 44 percent of homeowners want a move-in ready smart home. What’s the best way for builders in the Wilmette, IL area to keep up with this growing demand for smart technology? They can partner with their local Control4 dealer who will work with them during the construction process to lay the framework for a custom smart home solution.

SEE MORE: Why You Should Hire a Professional to Install Your Smart Technology

Clients Are Expecting Homes With Custom Solutions

When it comes to smart technology, expectations may vary widely from project to project. Some clients may simply want surveillance cameras they can monitor remotely. Others want a fully integrated solution that gives them intuitive control of lights, entertainment, climate, security and more. Our Control4 systems range from 1-room to whole house options so homeowners can choose whichever fits their distinct needs. With our initial wiring installation, it's easy for them to expand in the future if they want to add new technology to their smart home system.

Help Create a Foundation for the Future 

The holiday season has finally arrived! Everyone’s ready to come to your Highland, Park IL home to celebrate, so what are you doing to prepare? Start off with some late spring cleaning and much-needed decorations. Then why not add some music to set the right ambiance? Through your whole house audio system, it's easy to get the party going with the right music selection. Keep reading to see how your home audio can get you through the holiday season.

SEE MORE: 5 Great Speaker Options for Your Whole House Audio

Get the Holiday Spirit Going

From a tap on your dedicated touchpad or smartphone, you can get your favorite Christmas carols playing throughout your home in a matter of seconds. Your whole house audio system gives you centralized control of all your favorite music. What does this mean when it comes to getting the ultimate holiday playlist going?

For one, it’s easy to choose from different audio sources. Start off with some of your favorite Christmas albums playing on the turntable then switch over to your “White Christmas” Pandora station. Once you know the music you want to play, it’s time to choose where you want it to go. You can have it play in just your dedicated game room or throughout your home.

Home theater design is all about creating the perfect environment for the images and sounds from your favorite movies to flourish. Every little corner of the room is taken into account to make sure your speakers, screens, and projector are given the necessary space to shine. When we're brought in on retrofit jobs to fix old DIY home theaters, we often come upon the same design mistakes that can result in blurred images, muffled sound and an uncomfortable viewing experience. Below we go over some of these common challenges and how we can help you overcome them.

SEE MORE: 4 Steps to Designing the Ultimate Home Theater System

1. Uncomfortable Seating Arrangements

As you begin work on your home theater system, you need to figure out how you want to use it. Will it be primarily used by the family? Then a communal couch where everyone can huddle together under a blanket may be the best option. If you’re going to use it with friends, it may be more comfortable if everyone has their own leather recliner. If you don’t consider this from the start, you may end up with an awkward arrangement that ruins the viewing experience.

2. Fitting All the Necessary Speakers

Making the winter bearable in Lake Forest, IL is all about being well prepared. Everyone knows to don a few more layers of clothes when they leave the house and makes sure their cars have the necessary snow tires. Now you can also use your home automation system to prepare your household for any weather. Through intuitive control of your technology, it’s easier to keep your family safe, comfortable and entertained this winter. A smart home helps you get through the dipping temperatures and darkening days with the following features:

SEE MORE: Host the Perfect Holiday Party With Smart Control

Stay Safe with Smart Lighting Solutions

Now that the days are getting darker, it's important to make sure your home is well-lit at all times. Schedule your lights to turn on as soon as the sun sets and turn off once the sun rises. You can also have lights linked to photo sensors to make sure landscape lighting is on as needed during inclement weather; photo sensors ensure artificial lights only go down when there's sufficient natural light available.

Snow, sleet, and ice can cause even the most experienced of Chicagoland residents to have nasty falls. Diminish the risks by having pathway lights on all the main walkways. Install motion sensors at the start of walkways so they light up as you walk past, making it easier for you to see if there are any wet patches up ahead.

You can experience further integration, control, and customization with the latest Control4 O.S. 2.9 software. Whether you want to personalize your user interface, add your preferred smart devices or literally tell your system what to do, it’s all possible with the home automation company’s latest upgrade. As your local Control4 dealers in Barrington, IL, we’d like to show you some of the coolest features revealed earlier this year at CEDIA 2016.

SEE MORE: Product Spotlight: A Look at Control4’s EA Series

Integration with Alexa Voice Control

Since it hit the mainstream market with a pair of Super Bowl commercials earlier this year, Amazon’s Alexa has become one of the most popular systems in the smart home market. Through voice commands, you can turn devices on and off or ask questions just like you would Siri on your iPhone. Now you can use those same voice commands in your home automation system.

Clients can access individual devices that are compatible with Amazon. Tell the lights to dim down or the thermostat to lower a few degrees. The coolest thing about the latest integration, though, is the ability to activate your Control4 smart scenes to manage multiple components at once. Say “Party On” and the lights change color and your pre-planned playlist begins playing.

As technology continues to evolve from the radio to today’s streaming devices, one thing has remained constant: no form of entertainment is more beneficial to your family than music. A combined study done by Sonos and Apple earlier this year found that families that listen to music are happier and spend more time together. Maybe that's why whole house audio solutions are some of the most popular in the smart technology market, even above security and custom theaters. Which is why it’s so important you have a system in place in your Winnetka, IL home that offers high-quality audio and convenient control.  

SEE MORE: 5 Great Speaker Options for Your Whole House Audio

Easy Control of Entertainment

The digital music era has made it easier than ever to find the music you want within a matter of seconds. Through media libraries or streaming services, you can have thousands of songs at your disposal on your desktop, laptop or tablet. Where many families are still falling behind is getting that music to play in high quality throughout their homes. Without an easy way to send those songs to their speakers, they’re stuck playing music on their mobile devices.

Whole house audio offers a comprehensive solution to this problem. We place all your speakers and source components under the same intuitive user interface. Using the control device of your choice—a touchpad, smartphone or tablet—you can choose the song you want and play it anywhere even if you're not in the same room. You can even select all your home's speakers at once, immediately filling your entire space with music.