Home Entertainment & Automation Services in Matthews, NC.
Home Entertainment & Automation Services in Matthews, NC.
Home audio and Video Services in Matthews, NC.  TV installation, Surround Sound, Home Entertainment Systems
Inside BB King’s $1.4 Million Tour Bus

                                                                                                     

bb_king_tour_bus_teaserFor 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.

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Universal Remote Control Updates CCP Software

urc_complete_control_progra11.20.2009 — Universal Remote Control (URC) has released the latest Live Update for its Complete Control Program (CCP), which it also formally introduced.

The CCP software allows authorized dealers to program all URC remotes with just this one program.

Here are the features added via the Live Update:
Web browsing for the MX-6000 two-way color touch screen
Eleven models have been added to the IP-controllable Audio/Video devices for Volume Pop-Up.

CCP’s IR database has been updated to include new Marantz and Onkyo receivers.

More than 300 models have been added to CCP’s RS-232 serial database
User Guides have been added to the CCP Help section for the AVR two-way modules and the Web browser.

The update also adds two-way modules for the MX-5000 and the MX-6000 that support IP-controlled A/V receivers from Denon, Integra, Onkyo, B&K and Yamaha. Some of these include AM/FM/HD tuner modules that display frequencies, station names, HD metadata, presets and favorite stations, and XM and Sirius modules that display all song, artist and title metadata.

The CCP software is written to be intuitive for users and employs concepts in which remotes are programmed room by room with the ability to “undo,” “redo,” “mirror” and “copy” various functions across remote product platforms.

Older programs can also be opened in CCP and other features are automatically loaded with URC’s Live Update feature.

By Robert Archer

http://www.cepro.com/article/universal_remote_control_update_ccp_software/K356

Custom Installation Services, LLC – Home Entertainment Audio and Video services in North Carolina.

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Custom Installation Services, LLC | P.O. Box 132 Matthews, NC 28106 | 704-400-8701 | dmiller@cis-nc.com
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