Music in eight rooms and looks to match the iPod.

The iPod has had the same transformative effect on multiroom audio that the Mac had on computers: Both changed an unfriendly, daunting entity into something the average person could relate to. While many manufacturers have brought the iPod’s basic functionality to their remotes and keypads, few have captured the look and feel.

Count NuVo Technologies among the few who have escaped the black hole of generic white faceplates.

Your iPhone now controls everything those big home automation touchscreens can — from anywhere in the world.

A recent innovation is going to make your life a whole lot better — or a whole lot worse.

It all depends on how you feel about the iPhone.

Lutron’s AuroRa system drops the price on automated lighting control—so you can stay in bed where you belong.

Why are we all working so hard? We quit getting up to change the TV channel back in the 1980s. We stopped running to grab a call on our wired phones around then, too. But we still lift ourselves off the couch to turn down the lights. We still walk around the house turning all the lights on when we get home. And we still go room to room before bedtime to make sure all the lights are out.

Lutron seeks to solve this conundrum with AuroRa, a basic lighting control system that lists for $725.

The Crestron Experience Center in Las Vegas is one of the few places in the world delivering hands-on demos of the wonders of home automation.

With its new Las Vegas Experience Center, Crestron—which in home automation is perhaps even more pervasive than Microsoft is in the computer business—seeks to make its creations more accessible to dealers and customers. The Experience Center is one of only a few places in the world where one can witness home automation at work.

Masters of Metal

Plastic is often unfairly derided in today’s world. Without plastic, we wouldn’t have Barbie dolls. Or Tupperware. Or Hyundais.

But sometimes plastic’s bad rep is warranted. Most in-wall speakers are made from plastic, and that’s one reason some of them don’t sound good. Unless the plastic is impregnated with a stiffening substance, it tends to vibrate in sympathy with the speaker drivers. The result is often smeared, unnatural sound.

Of course, you couldn’t make cheap in-walls without plastic. But Newport Audio isn’t interested in cheap in-walls.

No, home theater design companies don’t just fill your living room full of foam. Here’s how one firm satisfied three very different clients.

When you mention the word “acoustics,” most people envision a recording studio, or maybe a performance space. They start to think about walls of gray foam in strange crisscrossed patterns.

Eccentrically shaped wooden thingamajigs of unfathomable purpose. And puzzling analysis devices connected to countless microphones. To the uninitiated, acoustics sure doesn’t seem to have much to do with the average American living room - but it does.

iSpeakers

There’s a problem with engineers: All they care about is engineering. In many industries, the best-engineered products are often among the least attractive and hardest to use.

Paul Barton, founder and chief engineer of PSB Speakers, could be considered the poster boy for meticulously engineered but visually bland products.

That has changed. Well, the latter part.

Little Bottom

Buying one of the new all-in-one soundbar speaker systems—or any other set of small speakers—is like buying an economy car. You convince yourself you can live with the compromises, but as time passes you realize something’s missing. With the economy car, it’s power. With the small speakers, it’s bass.

Of course, adding a subwoofer can bring big bottom end to any speaker system.