Members of the Central Indiana Section gather for a post-tour picture at CEDIA headquarters.
The Central Indiana Section held its first in-person meeting since the start of the pandemic with a tour of CEDIA (Custom Electronics Design and Installation Association) headquarters in Fishers, IN. The event was generously sponsored by CEDIA and AES member Gavin Haverstick. Host Steve Rissi from CEDIA provided some context on the association, its focus on residential technology, and its dedication towards education and industry advancement.
The tour began in CEDIA's experience center, which showcases cutting edge technology for the home, including advanced video, audio, lighting, power, and automation systems. The first room featured a large pair of Meridian Audio loudspeakers with onboard digital processing, a decoupled mid and high-frequency enclosure, and integrated class D amplifiers. The second room featured an on-wall audio-video installation with miniature line arrays from K-Array. Another highlight of the experience center was the adjacent glass-walled machine room, housing the center's automation systems, media players, and amplifiers, as well as dedicated power with a massive toroidal isolation transformer.
The crown jewel of the experience center is CEDIA's bespoke 9-seat home theatre, with a Barco projector and Dolby Atmos audio. The room includes fully isolated exterior shell and a 300-pound cement-core door to provide sufficient mass for acoustic isolation. Likewise, the projector is isolated in a dedicated projector booth and amplifiers, processors, and media players are all housed in the isolated machine room. Steve presented a variety of material from major motion pictures to showcase the audio and video clarity. This extended listening period allowed attendees to move throughout the space, listening to consistency from seat to seat and at the perimeter of the room. The room utilizes a distributed array of four subwoofers to homogenize low frequency response across the listening area, which was very apparent as one moved to the boundaries from the seating area.
The tour ended with walk through of CEDIA's unique training facilities. Aside from typical classroom and workbench space, CEDIA headquarters features a number of "laboratories" for experimentation with home theatre setup. These rooms allow students to configure screens, loudspeakers, subwoofers, acoustic treatment, and even seating to measure the effects of changes in configuration. Another unique training area featured a variety of typical residential and light commercial construction wall segments for students to practice cable pulling and mounting of any variety of audio, video, or home automation devices.
