Simultaneously, Crestron customers are asking for more natural and effortless ways to control and manage their lighting, comfort, entertainment, and more. Armed with this feedback, Crestron designed the next evolution for its Home OS control platform, featuring a completely new, intuitive interface for the client while further speeding and simplifying installation for dealers.
Crestron Home OS 4 offers interoperability and control of both Crestron and thousands of third-party smart devices and delivers a new level of user-friendliness, functionality, customization, and whole home control from a remote, touch screen, keypad, or mobile device for everyone, including residents, children, and even house guests.
"Since launching four years ago, our team has been relentless in our mission to refine and evolve Crestron Home to provide the best possible home control experience on the market,” says Michael Short, senior director, residential & hospitality marketing at Crestron. "Homeowners are much more knowledgeable and discerning when it comes to the technology in their home. Their expectations for home control, connectivity, and device security and privacy have soared since 2020. These demands drive requests for custom solutions in increasingly popular Crestron categories, such as home entertainment, lighting control, and smart shading. Crestron Home OS 4 ushers in gorgeous new aesthetics and delivers all new functionality to existing and new projects."
As the market created more options in terms of light control - one of the categories that consumers first learned to associate with "smart home"- Crestron Home OS 4 now unifies multiple lighting protocols and devices within a single home automation platform. The user experience delivered via Crestron DMX-C fixtures is now extended to an entire world of additional lighting devices.
Dealers can add essentially any lighting device into a Crestron Home system running the new OS 4 by writing a new driver or downloading the recently added drivers from the Crestron library. Crestron has launched Philips Hue smart lighting as its first example driver and has released new easy-to-use APIs to the driver development community, allowing for an expansive range of third-party integration possibilities alongside Crestron’s significant lighting update.
This new feature replicates the experience of native Crestron tunable light fixtures. Through the Crestron Home platform, homeowners have full control of the color of their lights, including hue, saturation, color temperature, and light intensity. Alternatively, they can opt to synchronize lights with their natural circadian rhythm or match the natural light outside. The same simple dealer experience of curating tunable lighting directly from the Crestron Home app is easily created for the entire home.
In a Crestron Home system, the lighting fixtures work in harmony with all Crestron shading options, including the newly announced lithium-Ion battery-powered shades, to allow homeowners to manage all aspects of lighting and shading throughout their residence.
Crestron Home OS 4 has a new sophisticated user interface, with updated graphics and icons coupled with filters and room lists that make the Crestron Home platform simpler to navigate. The addition of more filters on a single screen allows the homeowner to find functionality in any room or zone with fewer taps. The update also takes homeowner preferences to a new level, offering the most granular system customization that has ever been made available to the end-user. The updated end-user schedule feature allows them to schedule events and automate tasks without a call to the dealer.
Additional Crestron Home OS 4 upgrades include new voice control functionality for Xfinity systems. Crestron touch screens running OS 4 can now also provide whole-home paging to make announcements to the entire household or a select group of rooms.
"Crestron Home OS 4 is a monumental update designed to provide an unparalleled experience. We're excited to bring this next-level solution to market and can't wait to see how OS 4 will be received when it debuts at CEDIA Expo 2023," Short concludes.
New Audio Solutions
At CEDIA Expo 2023, Crestron is also using the opportunity to introduce three new audio products, expanding its successful DM NAX Audio-over-IP technology line. Completely new is the DM-NAX-4ZSA-50 GaN amplifier, the spiritual successor to the C2N-AMP-6X100/4X100 model, now delivering DM NAX technology at a lower price point. This 4+1 zone streaming amp (that’s four amplified zones with a bonus line output for an audio-visual receiver) offers incredible performance, with streaming, the latest GaN amp technology, and local inputs, all wrapped up in an elegant, passively cooled, surface-mountable half-rack box that’s a mere 1 RU tall. With eight channels rated at 50W (RMS) each, this silent, fanless amp features five dedicated media players, four audio inputs (two for analog sources and one each for coax and digital), and two network ports. The DM-NAX-4ZSA-50 offers native Crestron Home platform integration.
Crestron will also debut its DM-NAX-XSP surround-sound eARC solution — the company's first decoding DM NAX digital signal processor — to bridge streaming TVs to a multiroom audio distribution system. By leveraging ARC/eARC, the device can grab the high-quality audio content from smart TVs and tie that to your DM NAX solution. By linking two of these units together, the first can extend the ARC/eARC signal over IP to a rack where a second unit can feed a traditional AVR from there. An ideal solution to expand immersive audio formats to ceiling speakers. The device offers multi-channel audio inputs with a two-channel DM NAX downmix out with 8K HDMI inputs and outputs, along with two network ports, one with PoE.
Finally, Crestron will introduce the DM-NAX-BTIO-1G, the first of a number of audio accessories coming to the DM NAX platform. The DM-NAX-BTIO-1G is a wall plate with Bluetooth communications and analog input/outputs that allows to easily add Bluetooth audio to any DM NAX Audio-over-IP, DM NVX AV-over-IP, Dante audio network, or AES67 AoIP system. The DM-NAX-BTIO-1G acts as something of a “wildcard,” as it supports any audio source to bridge to DM NAX technology.
All of Crestron’s latest solutions, from audio to shading to the new Crestron Home OS 4 platform, will be on display at CEDIA Expo 2023 in Denver. Crestron will showcase all the updates in their booth (#1901) at CEDIA Expo 2023.
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