Construction Industry Trends
February 2006
A Look at High-tech Home Trends: Q&A with Walt Zerbe
 |
| Issue Table of Contents |
|
|
Walt Zerbe is audio product manager with structured wiring company On-Q/Legrand and chair of the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) Multi-Room Audio Cabling Working Group, which developed one of the organization’s most popular standards, Multi-Room Audio Cabling Standard (CEA-2030).
Q: Is it true that the standard only took six months to develop from start to finish?
Yes. I was told it was the fastest standard ever developed.
Q: Why did it go so quickly?
We had a tremendous amount of interest in developing the standard. Organizations like my company, On-Q/Legrand, had already been using a standard called TIA 570 [Residential Telecommunications Infrastructure Standard, developed by the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA)], which describes how to install wires for phone, video, and other services. We’ve used TIA 570 to help builders feel comfortable with what was being wired in their homes and to ensure installers were comfortable knowing how to wire a home. While it’s helped the structured wiring industry gain penetration, TIA 570 devotes only about a page to audio, which really in this day and age isn’t enough. We said we should write a standard that talks about multi-room audio and how to wire for it. With this standard, the builder can feel secure knowing that he has an infrastructure in the home that will support 99 percent of the devices manufacturers are making today.
We had about 32 people who volunteered to work on the standard, including manufacturers of electronics devices, speakers, and wire. We also had integrators and people with marketing expertise on board. We had a group of people who really wanted to participate in the process.
Q: What is included in CEA-2030?
The document is basically a very comprehensive listing of definitions, wire types, and construction variables. For example, if you’re placing speakers outside, it tells you how to do it, and warns you that they could be a conduit for lightning into the house. It’s all about teaching installers best practices for the installation of multi-room audio. But it can also educate the builder on what he should expect an installer to do and if an installer follows these guidelines, he knows that his houses will be wired so that his customers can enjoy almost anything they want to put into them.
Q: Why do you think interest in multi-room audio is growing?
Audio is going through a rebirth, and one of the main reasons for the rebirth is the iPod. There have been 30 million iPods sold, and people are revisiting all their music because they’re now putting it on the iPod. They love it, but they don’t want to be limited to just listening to it through their headphones.
Home theater is also a big contributor. People who are buying high-definition TVs now have a good picture, but are saying, hey, something missing—it’s the sound. Wouldn’t this be so much nicer if I had a good sound system, with flat speakers built into the wall to go with this nice flat TV that’s on my wall?
Q: Are you seeing more equipment being built to take advantage of multi-room audio?
Absolutely. Companies are selling more and more source devices that plug directly into multi-room audio systems. And it’s not just iPods, but also stand-alone equipment designed specifically for multi-room audio. There are even satellite radio units that look like components such as DVD or CD players and are designed to be mounted with all your other equipment and distributed throughout your house with your multi-room audio system.
I believe in-wall speakers are now outselling free-standing box speakers. The driver is built-in audio. We want to enjoy this stuff in our homes but we don’t want to look at speakers standing on the floor with wires running to them. We want to neatly put our iPods or satellite receivers in a dock and listen to music anywhere in the house.
Q: Has there been a lot of interest in CEA-2030?
The last I heard is that it’s already become the second best-selling standard for CEA. That speaks for itself that people are finding value in it and purchasing it.
Subscribe to eNewsletter