In response to the growing demand for installed home systems, the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) and the Custom Electronic Design and Installation Association (CEDIA) have formed a joint committee, R10 Residential Systems, to create industry-recognized standards for the design and installation of residential theater systems. The committee, which was launched late last year, has already issued its first document, CEA/CEDIA-CEB22, Home Theater Recommended Practice: Audio Design Bulletin, a bulletin intended to help electronics systems contractors optimize the audio design of high performance home theaters.
“R10’s focus is the installation of technologies in a residential environment,” says committee co-chair Walt Zerbe. “There have been plenty of standards on how you make something and how something should talk to something else, but there haven’t been any on how I put that properly in a home. How do I get the most out of that projector or that television or that speaker? Should I put it here or there, do I need one or do I need two? So that’s what we really focus on, so that the end user experience is the best that it can be.”
While manufacturers and industry experts have come up with their own guidelines on how to install specific pieces of equipment or how to build a home theater, no one has created standardized recommendations for designing a home theater space or installing the various components that make up a home theater system. R10 will be addressing this gap in the marketplace by creating standards and recommended practices that will provide guidelines for high performance home theater lighting, video reproduction, air conditioning and heating, and systems integration.
When the committee was formed, it also inherited responsibility for CEA-2030, Multi-Room Audio Cabling Standard. R10 is working on revising the standard, which describes the cabling and connectors needed to distribute analog and digital audio signals through a home.
“We’re expanding it to accommodate larger types of structures and multi-room systems, but we’re also adding things like job documentation and labeling. It’s something that not a lot of people in our industry have always done such a good job at, and maybe they need a little bit of standardization to help them do it,” Zerbe says.
The new version of CEA-2030 is expected to be released next year.
R10 has also started work on a new project standardizing blueprint icons for the construction industry. Installers, builders and associations such as National Association of Home Builders will benefit from a complete standardized set of symbols.
R10’s standards and recommended practices should not only appeal to system installers, but also to homebuilders. “They are very hungry for standards that can help them when they pick an installation company or somebody to do some technology in their homes, that it gives them great comfort to know that there is a recommended way to do this stuff and it is a standard or it is a recommended practice from recognized people like the CEA or CEDIA,” says Zerbe.