It appears to be a one-story bungalow, but this house is loaded with useful and efficient electronic features.

When your new home is going to be a one-story bungalow, you start thinking about maximizing your space—as well as many other things in your home. That’s what the owners of this Toronto area home decided before construction had begun. Although most builders recommend waiting a year before making major renovations, this couple decided early on that their home’s basement would house a media room and a networked office for their home-based business.

The basement additions would increase the couple’s living space to a much more comfortable 4,500 square feet. But they weren’t done maximizing their resources. And they needed help in determining what kind of electronics systems would work best for them. In talks with Toronto-area custom electronics company Definitive Sound, the homeowners realized they could maximize the efficiency and function of each electronic component—and that they could enjoy convenience and home entertainment throughout the main floor as well.

"The owner liked the concept of having technology in the house, but also wanted it to be easy enough for his wife to use," says Anthony Lobo, a co-founder of Definitive Sound. "It was also important to hide a lot of the equipment." The result is a convenient whole-house control, lighting and audio system, a data network linking two home offices and other areas, and a comfortable and unobtrusive high-end media room—all of which maximize the available space and functions of the electronics involved. The homeowners can plug in a laptop in various locations to share files, call up CDs from their music collection or MP3s from their computers anywhere in their home, check the video from the front door camera, even check the lighting and temperature in other rooms.

But all this didn’t come without its challenges. Definitive Sound couldn’t even wire the house for these conveniences until after the builder and the original electrical contractor were finished. And that made the job of wiring for whole-house audio and lighting on the main floor much more difficult—and messy.

"We were going around the entire house, ripping 2-foot holes in the walls where there were 12-gang light switches," says Lobo. Definitive Sound had to run control wire for the lighting system and even reroute wire to the speaker locations throughout the house. The homeowners lived in a hotel for six weeks while this was being done.

In this case, the house’s bungalow style with one main floor helped, as there was attic space to route the necessary wiring. And all the while, maximizing the amount of the equipment and its functionality was a primary concern.

Efficient Control Definitive Sound used Crestron products not just for whole-house home control, but also for the lighting control and whole-house audio systems as well. (See Focus, below.) Using Crestron for home control, lighting and audio distribution had its obvious advantages, because the systems work so seamlessly with each other. But there were other benefits as well.

"The Crestron lighting system allows control for just about every light independently," says Definitive Sound co-founder Jeremy Arding, whereas some other lighting systems tend to work with groupings of individual lights. That’s why this house has 56 zones of lighting, including as many as 10 separate "zones" in each room.

Via in-wall LCD touchpads in the master bedroom and kitchen, for example, individual lights anywhere in the house can be turned up or down simply by dragging a finger on a graphical bar that represents the light level. The temperature in any room can be checked on the 3.8-inch LCD screens as well, though the system does not operate the heating and ventilation. Because of the limited size of the house, having these advanced controllers in two locations serves most of the main floor easily. In other rooms, 12-button keypads that control the lighting and audio are used.

The controllers enable several preset scenes to be enacted throughout the house, such as pathway lighting from the garage and front hall to the kitchen, and a home button in which lights come on mid-level in the great room and hall, and lights and a radio station turn on in the kitchen. There are also his and her reading settings in the bedroom, and bath and shower settings that adjust the lighting and music levels in the master bath.

A Niles amplifier provides 30 watts per channel to Sonance in-ceiling speakers in eight zones. A single-point in-ceiling speaker that plays stereo from one enclosure is used in the master bath to save space where it’s often difficult to mount more than one speaker. There’s also a 15-inch Sharp LCD screen near the vanity in the master bath, for viewing the news while prepping and pampering.

In the bedroom, a pair of Klipsch speakers are used to augment the audio from a 32-inch Sony TV, and the in-ceiling Sonance speakers are used primarily for whole-house audio. Perhaps the best thing about the whole-house audio system is that the homeowners can enjoy both their extensive CD collection and the MP3s stored on their computers. The CDs are organized via an Escient TuneBase system that works with a 400-disc Sony CD changer and provides playlists by artist, genre or album via any TV or touchscreen.

"They had a fairly big CD collection, but they said that in the last few years they weren’t getting the most out of their system," says Lobo. "Now they’ve probably bought another 200 CDs, and they say they have listened to more music in the last year than in the past 15 years."

An Integra THX Surround Processor housed in the basement media room enables the streaming of music files throughout the house, via Integra’s innovative Net-Tune technology. The processor can stream MP3s from a networked computer through the whole-house audio system. This, too, can be operated from any TV, and preset playlists can be enacted through the Crestron controllers.

The home also has four networked computers and multimedia jacks available for mobile computers to be plugged in near the kitchen or in other rooms, though Lobo and Arding report that the homeowners tend to keep their work to their basement business office and the main-floor personal office. But whenever they want to roam and still be connected, they can do so via an Open House and Linksys network.

They can also tell who’s at the front door via a weather-resistant Netmedia outdoor camera, with the video visible on any TV. And when the doorbell rings, instead of relaying a chime through the whole-house audio system, any audio is automatically muted and one of several WAV files plays through the Crestron keypads and touchpads. "That’s an example of our engineers wanting to get the most out of every piece of equipment," says Lobo.

Media Room Highs Just because things may be efficient, doesn’t mean quality has to suffer. That’s especially evident in the basement media room, where Lobo says the homeowner wanted the technology to remain unobtrusive, but was very concerned about the audio quality.

The homeowner wanted the finished basement to look like any main floor of a house, and so the ceilings are 9 and 10 feet high, and the media room is a spacious 14 by 20 feet. After looking at dedicated theater-like spaces, though, they decided they wanted more of a casual room where people wouldn’t have to be disturbed if someone got up and left the room, for example.

The cherry centerpiece of the media room is a beautiful wood cabinet custom-built by Arborlea Residential Design Group, which brought Definitive Sound onto the job. The cabinet appears to flush-mount a 64-inch Pioneer Elite rear-projection HDTV, which can pull out for servicing. The image is so crisp and the cabinetry so well-made that most people think the behemoth rear-projection CRT (cathode ray tube) set is a plasma-based screen, says Lobo.

One might think that racks of equipment flank the screen behind the cabinet doors, but open the doors to the right, and there’s a wet bar. On the left, there’s room for DVD and CD storage. The equipment rack actually pulls out from a raised panel in the side wall.

Snell speakers for the left and right channels are in the far left and right sections of the cabinet, which look like solid wood doors. The panels inside the frame, however, are actually fabric that matches the wood tone identically. The Snell k.5mk2 monitors were specifically chosen for this room because the owner wanted high-quality audio, and there were concerns about how speakers would sound firing from within cabinets. The Snell monitors, Lobo explains, have switches in the back that adjust their settings for use inside a cabinet so the bass will sound better. This "crossover" switch basically adjusts what bass frequencies are sent to the woofer, to compensate for the more boomy sound that can be caused by placing a speaker in a cabinet.

"The clients also have pretty eclectic tastes. He likes classical music, jazz and music from the ’50s and ’60s, and she likes country music. And we thought the Snell speakers were perfectly geared for that," says Lobo. "A lot of their stuff is built by hand and designed for in-cabinet use." Snell speakers are also used for the center channel, subwoofer, and side and rear speakers in a 7.1 (seven channels and a subwoofer) configuration.

Integra components were also chosen because "we felt their equipment sounds and looks great. When you think about the power they have and THX, for that price it’s a bargain," says Lobo. And all the audio and video are controlled by a wireless 6-inch Crestron touchscreen.

Definitive Sound even tried maximizing the expansion space, leaving space in the rack for possible future components such as a DVD library system or an expanded surround processor. Now that’s maximizing your space.

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Equipment List

Kitchen
Crestron CT-1000 ColorTouch 3.8-inch Touchpanel
Sonance 622TR 61¼2-inch In-Ceiling Speakers (2)

Dining Room
Crestron CNX-B12 12-Button Keypad
Sonance 622TR 61¼2-inch In-Ceiling Speakers (2)

Main Floor Office
Crestron CNX-B12 12-Button Keypad
Sonance 622TR 61¼2-inch In-Ceiling Speakers (2)

Master Bedroom
Crestron CT-1000 ColorTouch 3.8-inch Touchpanel
Crestron CNIRGW Infrared Gateway
Sony KV32FS100 32-inch Flat Screen TV
Sony DVPNS315SM Single-Disc DVD, Silver
Sony SLV-N88 VHS VCR, Silver
Sonance 622TR 61¼2-inch In-Ceiling Speakers (2)
Klipsch ProMedia 2.1 Speaker System
Integra CHAD Remote Control

Master Bedroom
Crestron CNX-B12 12-Button Keypad
Sonance 623SSTR 61¼2-inch In-Ceiling Speaker
Sharp LC15B4US 15-inch LCD TV

Front Door/Hall
Crestron CNX-B12 12-Button Keypad
Netmedia SCE2 Indoor/Outdoor Color Camera

Main Hall
Crestron CNX-B12 12-Button Keypad

Family Room
Sony KP46WT510 46-inch CRT Rear-projection TV
Sonance 622TR 61¼2-inch In-Ceiling Speakers (2)

Basement Office
Crestron CNX-B12 12-Button Keypad
Sonance 622TR 61¼2-inch In-Ceiling Speakers (2)

Basement Library/Cigar Room
Crestron CNX-B12 12-Button Keypad
Customer-supplied Mission Bookshelf Speakers (2)

Basement Kitchen
Crestron CNX-B12 12-Button Keypad

Basement Hall
Crestron CNX-B12 12-Button Keypad

Basement Home Theater
Pioneer Elite PRO-720HD 64-inch 16:9 CRT High
Definition Rear Projection TV
Integra DTR-7.3 THX Surround-Sound Receiver
Integra DPS-5.3 Single-disc DVD/CD Player
Sony SLV-N99 VHS VCR, Black
Panamax Max 5300 Power Surge Suppressor and Line Conditioner, 11 outlets
Snell Acoustics K.5mk2 61¼2-inch Bookshelf Monitor(2)
Snell Acoustics CR.5mk2 Center Channel Speaker
Snell Acoustics AMC360 51¼2-inch In-Wall Speaker
Snell Acoustics QBX Sub 10-inch 100-Watt Powered Subwoofer, Black
Crestron AV2 Control system
Crestron ST-1700C 6-inch LCD Wireless Touchpanel
Crestron CNTBLOCK 8 port Network Terminal Block
Transparent Audio/Video Cables
Middle Atlantic Racking System
Whole-House Audio/Video System
Crestron CNX-PAD8 Audio Distribution Processor
Niles SI-1230R System Integration Amplifier
Escient Tunebase 200 CD Management System
Sony CDP-CX455 400-disc CD changer
Panamax Max 5300 Power Surge Suppressor
Transparent Audio/Video Cables
Liberty’s Crestron Cresnet Cable

Whole House Lighting
Crestron CAEN-7X2 Automation Cabinet
Crestron PAC2 Automation Control System
Crestron CLX-1DIM8 8-zone, 1-Circuit Dimmer (7)
Crestron CLT-1DIM8 Termination Block (7)

Networking
Open House H236A 36-inch Enclosure
Open House H36A 36-inch Enclosure Cover
Open House H619 Master Hub
Open House H838BID CATV or Antenna to 8 TVs
Bi-directional for Modulation

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Seeing The Light

How do you combine audio and lighting systems seamlessly in one control system? For Anthony Lobo and Jeremy Arding of Definitive Sound in Mississauga, Ontario, it’s a one-word answer: Crestron. The company used Crestron’s lighting system and its CNX-PAD8 eight-room audio distribution controller, all operated by—you guess it—Crestron controllers.

"The beauty of the Crestron system is that the interface system is so much nicer, and it works so much more seamlessly than other systems," says Definitive Sound co-founder Jeremy Arding. "On some other systems it’s hard to adjust individual lights. The biggest Crestron panel handles 108 loads per panel, so you can have one panel instead of having a lot of different panels tied together. And when you integrate Crestron’s multiroom audio with other Crestron programs, it works great."

Three different Crestron controllers are used in this house. Several 12-button CNX-B12 keypads for lights, audio and preset scenes are used throughout. Two CT-1000 touchpads, each with a 3.8-inch LCD screen flanked by 10 "hard" buttons, are located in the kitchen and the master bedroom suite. And a one-way wireless radio-frequency 6-inch ST-1700C touchpanel is used for audio/video and lighting control in the basement media room.

Arding and Lobo report that Crestron’s lighting system was still in beta testing at the time they were installing it in this bungalow.

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Highlights

Whole-house lighting and audio systems work together seamlessly.
Good planning allows for efficient use of all electronic equipment.
Aesthetics and performance are married in a family-style media room.

Steven Castle is a Senior Editor and the resident wit of Electronic House magazine. Email Steve at scastle@ehpub.com.

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