Inside BB King’s $1.4 Million Tour Bus
 For legendary blues guitarist BB King, the thrill isn’t gone when it comes to touring. The 83-year-old “King of the Blues” is still on the road with his famous Gibson guitar “Lucille” performing 100 concerts per year.
And King gets from gig to gig on more than just a simple set of wheels.
King rides in a $1.4 million, 45–foot luxury motorcoach that has more than $200,000 worth of electronics inside, making it a center of inspiration for laying down tracks, reviewing audio and video, keeping up to date on news and communicating with his fans and crew. But, most importantly, he’s entertained by a first-class A/V setup.
The interior design of the Prevost XL motorcoach was done by Superior Coach Interiors in Nashville, Tenn., while the electronics were installed by Digital Home Lifestyles of Phoenix, Ariz.
The tour bus, which took 100 hours of design time and 300 hours of installation time to complete, has seven miles of of cabling from Liberty Cable, five miles of Cat5 wiring and 3,000 feet of CresNET. The pre-wiring was done before the walls on the tour bus went up, requiring large bulks of wiring in channels and luggage bays that run the length of the vehicle.
King has a music and video server system that allows him to access a collection of more than 20,000 CDs, 6,000 DVDs and “more VHS tapes than I have ever seen,” according to Daniel Henderson of Digital Home Lifestyles.
Electronics Galore
The electronics on the bus would make any electronics lover blush. There’s a distributed audio/video system with eight zones of video and nine zones of audio. The front and rear lounges have 7.1 surround sound systems that are fed through a combination of dedicated and distributed sources. The sources include:
* 4 DirecTV HR21-PRO DVRs (1 dedicated to the rear lounge, 3 for distributing audio and video)
* 4 Kaleidescape 1080p players (1 dedicated to the rear lounge, 3 for distributed A/V)
* 1 Kaleidescape 3U server
* 1 Crestron iPod dock that is distributed throughout the coach
* 4 individual iPod docks for each bunk
* 1 Crestron XM tuner (distributed to all zones with feedback on all the touchpanels
* 1 AM/FM radio (distributed with feedback on all the touchpanels)
* 2 Integra Blu-ray DVD players (1 dedicated to the rear lounge and 1 dedicated to the front lounge)
* 1 PS3 and 1 Xbox 360 in the front lounge
* 1 Sony Professional DAT Player (dedicated to the rear lounge)
* 1 Aiphone back-up camera (for driver’s touchpanel)
* 1 Aiphone PTZ front door security camera (distributed to all TVs and touchpanels)
The coach has a 12-inch touchpanel in the rear lounge, an 8-inch panel in the front lounge, a 6-inch panel for the driver (also for backup camera) and 4-inch touchpanels in each bunk. There also is a 12-button keypad up front. All controls are hardwired.
Other electronics include:
* 7 Crestron touchpanels
* 8 HDTVs, including two 37-inch LGs with Triad LCR speakers
* 13 Lutron motorized shades
* 6 motorized windows
* A proprietary 12-relay lighting control system designed by Digital Home Lifestyles
* 64 zones of lighting
* Loudspeakers in the luggage bays for music during load-in and load-out
* Temperature sensors
* Surround sound systems with Focal and Triad custom speakers
* 8 headphone jacks that can be used to listen to any source
There are multiple satellite dishes (auto-tracking) to enable eight tuners (four dishes with two tuners each) and occupancy sensors for the bathroom. King also has an emergency button in the lounge in case he needs something.
Power Management
King’s electronics require six separate 20-amp circuits and are powered in three different ways: 1)They can be plugged in when the vehicle is stopped; 2)They can run off the engine’s inverters; 3)They can run off a generator.
That constant switching can wreak havoc on the electronics without proper power management. To solve it, the integrator developed some proprietary logic for the Crestron APS unit for switchover sequencing of the power.
The system remotely communicates with Digital Home Lifestyles to let the company know about failures. King can even press a button on the touchpanels to send an email requesting a service call.
BB Loves Technology
BB King is a content hoarder and techie who always wants the latest gadgets, music and movies. Before he had the Kaleidescape servers, he had a tiny table that was cluttered with five portable hard drives and a laptop plugged into a CD recorder.
Henderson says King had 200 movies on the Kaleidescape servers and 100 TV shows recorded on Tivo within the first month of owning the tour bus.
“The coach is his (and the crew’s) home away from home,” Henderson says. “They don’t sleep in the coach, they stay in hotels every night, but they spend a significant amount of time in there.”
Click here to look Inside BB King’s $1.4 Million Tour Bus.
by Jason Knott
http://www.electronichouse.com/article/inside_bb_kings_14_million_tour_bus/C117
Custom Installation Services, LLC – Home Entertainment Audio and Video services in North Carolina.
Posted in Automation
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Tagged 20-amp circuit, 7.1 surround, a/v setup, am/fm, AV Components, back-up camera, Blu-ray, cat5, cds, Cool Homes, cresnet, dat, digital home, Digital Media Servers, directv, dish network, Displays, distributed audio, dual tuner, dvd, dvr, email, focal, freemans, gadgets, generator, gibson, hard drive, harmony, HDTV, headphones, Integra, integrator, iPod, Kaleidescape, keypad, laptop, Lg, liberty cable, lifestyles, lighting control, logic, loudspeakers, lutron, motorized shades, multiroom audio, Multiroom Video, portable, power management, ps3, receivers, rg6, security, Set Top Boxes, sirius, sound systems, superior coach, surround sound, temperature sensors, tivo, triad, vhs, wii, xbox, xm
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Good News, Bad News for Electronics Recycling
 E-cycling awareness increases, but how do you get rid of your stuff?
There’s good news and bad news about electronics recycling, or e-cycling, in a recent survey of more than 1,000 Americans published by Pike Research.
The good news is that consumer awareness of the e-waste threat is increasing, and 76 percent of respondents stated that recycling is the most appropriate way to handle unused, broken, or obsolete electronics equipment. That’s good.
And the bad news? Consumers have few incentives to reuse or recycle their used electronics equipment. It is still too easy and inexpensive to throw e-waste in the trash. An optimistic estimate of average recycle rates is only about 15 percent.
That’s not so good.
According to Pike’s report, e-waste is the fastest-growing segment of municipal solid waste; it accounts for between 3 percent and 5 percent of incoming materials. And approximately 75 percent to 85 percent of electrical and electronic equipment is sent directly to landfill burial or incineration.
Projections for e-waste are increasing, on average, by 3 percent to 5 percent per year. Pike Research estimates there will be over 60 million tons of e-waste at the decision point for reuse/recycle or landfill in 2013.
Even many “recycled” electronics are merely shipped overseas and dissembled by third-world country workers dangerously exposing themselves to the toxins contained within our electronics. Many of the plastics are burned in pits, emitting noxious and harmful fumes. Several states have adopted electronic recycling laws, but no regulations exist for responsibly dissembling and disposing of e-waste, though many electronics recyclers take the Basel Action Network (BAN) pledge to only use responsible vendors and not to ship the products they collect overseas.
The silver lining?
The recycle rate could go as high as 50 percent or more by 2013, the Pike report says, depending on government intervention and economic incentives provided to consumers. “Assuming a recovery rate of valuable materials at 45 percent of the gross quantity of e-waste available, approximately 14 million tons of raw materials could be available for new product manufacturing during 2013,” the report states.
“Consumer behavior needs to be modified via a combination of awareness, incentives, and constraints to begin to change ingrained habits. Surveys by OEMs and advocacy groups indicate a majority of consumers do not know what their options are when a piece of equipment reaches the end of its useful life.”
Despite the widespread ignorance that exists about electronics recycling, consumers have several options, including free manufacturer and retailer take-back programs, electronics recycling sites, low-cost professional e-cycling companies, buy-back programs and occasional collection programs by municipalities.
Other findings by Pike Research:
* 37 percent of consumers felt that electronics recycling should be free, and an additional 35 percent stated that electronics should be collected and processed as part of a curbside recycling program.
* Only 14 percent felt that the cost of electronics recycling should be borne by consumers at the points of purchase or recycling. Some 10 percent supported the concept of “producer responsibility” where the manufacturer pays, an approach increasingly being adopted by many OEMs.
* The average consumer has 2.8 pieces of unused, broken, or obsolete electronics equipment in their home or storage area.
* The average consumer surveyed estimated that the cost of collecting, hauling, demanufacturing, and recycling a single piece of used electronics equipment is $12, however Pike Research’s analysis indicates that the true cost is more than $20.
by Steven Castle
http://www.electronichouse.com/article/good_news_bad_news_for_electronics_recycling/C155
Custom Installation Services, LLC – Home Entertainment Audio and Video services in North Carolina.
Posted in Uncategorized
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Tagged audio advice, audiogone, buy-back, cell phones, curbside recycling, defective product, e-bay, e-tailers, electronics disposal, electronics equipment, electronics issues, electronics recycling, extended warranty, free recycling, manufacture, obsolete electronics, on-line, playstation, retailers, Sony, used electronics, warranty
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Best Products of 2009
 12.08.2009 — It’s pretty safe to say we’re all glad that 2009 is almost over and we can look ahead with some optimism.
Despite the economic woes, 2009 wasn’t a total failure. There were many great products released that ran the gamut from Blu-ray players to projectors, receivers, subwoofers and more.
These products revealed several trends that are expected to grow in 2010, including adoption of Blu-ray, 2.40:1 home systems, migration to two-channel audio and more.
We’ve rounded up the Best Products of 2009 and broken them down by several categories:
* Best Overall Products
* Best Video Products
* Best Audio Products
* Best Blu-ray Player and Movies
* Best Accessories
* Best Video Games
Click here to view the Best Products of 2009
By Robert Archer
http://www.cepro.com/article/best_products_of_2009/
Custom Installation Services, LLC – Home Entertainment Audio and Video services in North Carolina.
Posted in Audio Systems, Automation, Blu-ray, Flat Panel TV's, lighting control
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Tagged 2.40:1, accessories, audio, audio advice, Blu-ray, electronic house, flat panel tv, Home Automation, home builders, home specialties, home systems, i-phone, i-pod, indian trail nc, innovative systems, Marantz, martin logan, Media Rooms, nano, new construction, new homes, projectors, receivers, retrofit, s3-av, snap av, Speakercraft, speakers, subwoofers, trends, TV Mounts, two-channel, wii, x-box, zobo
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