The Next Revolution in Home Entertainment - IP Based Multi-Room Distribution

The Holy Grail of distributed audio; unlimited zones and unlimited sources, cost effectively. That milestone will be achieved, and soon, through the combination of digital amplification and IP based distribution systems. There are systems available today that use one or both of these technologies, such as Oxmoor's Zon system and Netlinks' Netstreams product line. The trend will only continue to grow.

The beauty of this approach is that digital music is data, and, as such, can be distributed easily via an Ethernet network. The traditional concept of zones virtually disappears, as each amplifier on the network gets a unique IP address, enabling an audio stream to be routed to it. When combined with a digital music server, the number of zones is limited only by the ability of the server to serve independent audio streams.

The advent of cost effective digital amplification, produced by companies such as D2 Audio and Flying Mole, allows a small, highly efficient audio amplifier to be located close to the speakers, either in the room or mounted in an electrical box. The logical evolution of this approach is to collocate amplifier with the speaker, creating an active speaker. Additional benefits are realized by incorporating the speaker as part of the circuit. This enables the designer to engineer the speaker and amplifier circuits for optimum performance as a system.

Low powered designs of this nature could take advantage of power over Ethernet (POE), simplifying system wiring by allowing a single CAT-5 cable to be run from the router to the speaker. This would not supply a large amount of power (about 15 watts) due to the constraints of the 24ga conductors used in CAT-5. However, the efficiencies gained by an integrated speaker / amplifier design would mitigate this concern to some degree. This type of system is sufficient for background music applications in many residential environments.

Higher power systems can use the existing speaker wire, in the case of a conventionally wired system, to carry power. It can / does use the existing control cable, since many systems have been wired with CAT-5 to the volume control location, for the data.

The bandwidth of a traditional 10/100 network allow, for all practical purposes, an unlimited number of zones and sources in a residential environment. Partly because of this, Audio Over Ethernet has been used successfully in the commercial audio and sound reinforcement world for a number of years now. Cobranet, from Cirrus Logic is the most popular commercial AOE system used today. Another popular system is available from Digigram. These systems both use the MAC layer of Ethernet and are not actually using IP for transmission.

For both residential and commercial applications another primary advantage of using Ethernet is the ability to use the medium for transporting both audio and control signals down the same wire. This increases flexibility and reduces cost for both installation and material.

As was true in the commercial world, the distribution of audio (and soon, video) and control via Ethernet will continue to proliferate in residential distributed audio applications. The combination of flexibility, cost effectiveness and capability are to attractive to be ignored.

Steve Faber has almost 15 years in the custom installation industry. He is a CEDIA certified designer and Installer 2 with certifications from both the ISF and THX. His experience spans many facets of the industry, from the trenches as an installer and control systems programmer, and system designer, to a business unit director for a specialty importer of high end audio video equipment, a sales rep for a large, regional consumer electronics distributor, and principal of a $1.5M+ custom installation firm. Steve is currently is senior sales engineer for Digital Cinema Design, a CEDIA member firm in Redmond, WA. See much more on how to get the most out of your home theater and automation system at: Home Theater, Control and Video Distribution

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Drawing Cartoons - Design Your Own Comic

There is so much variety in the world of art and this is what attracts so many people to painting and drawing as a hobby. Some people continue to paint and draw in their spare time, finding it a relaxing pursuit and for others, the hobby may turn into a passion as they tap into their creative side. It can even become a lucrative pastime eventually if nurtured enough. To add a fun element to your creative pursuits, why not consider drawing cartoons and designing your own comic?

We have all read various comics when we were children, and we enjoyed following the stories of our favourite characters, their development was as important to us as the characters contained within the pages of a book.

Assuming that cartooning is something that you already do or would enjoy doing, then the very first thing that needs to be done is to start to plan your comic thoroughly by considering the following:

* Theme of the comic
* Name of the comic
* How many stories?
* Develop each story
* Design your characters
* Frequency

Drawing cartoons is great fun in itself but by having a project as fascinating as your very own comic, you have the opportunity to start from scratch and develop your comic into a project which has its own dedicated readership. Once you have decided on a particular story, you need to develop the characters within the story and this means drawing the characters so that they are instantly recognizable. You must be able to draw these characters quickly and easily because the story will be continued every week or month, depending on how often you wish to run the comic.

Deciding how many stories will be within the comic is important as you do have to consider how long it will take to draw every single story throughout.

If you wish to obtain a lot of exposure regarding your comic, you can arrange to have your own website and publish it online. This is an easy process but will ensure that you start to develop a regular readership and who knows where this project will end up. Drawing Cartoons requires specific skills in itself and by regular practice you will soon see how quickly, and dramatically you improve.

What if I teach you how to get started with drawing and painting with great ease following simple steps?

Follow these steps for your perfect creativity flow.

Grab my free ebook from http://www.paintonmycanvas.com

'Murtaza Habib' has helped hundreds of newbies to start their painting courses, now you can do it too...

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