Lighting Makes the Difference: GREEN T Home Solutions

Good lighting can do so many things for the average home. This month’s newsletter focuses on the three major benefits of good lighting: security, appeal, and convenience.

Lighting is one of the most important elements of every home and certainly one of the most overlooked. That is, unless you are looking for the easiest home to break in to. Burglary statistics are scary even in the best years and—other than locks—the easiest way to protect your home from intrusion is to adequately light the exterior. When criminals see an externally lit home they see a target not worth the risk. So long as there is the chance neighbors will see them or passing police officers will spot a suspicious person at a window, logic dictates that criminals will avoid the home and seek something easier. Lighting is the supreme difference maker when defending family and property.

Lighting is also a difference maker inside the home. It can be the difference between a memorably dim but inviting dinner party and your guests feeling like they just walked into the doctor’s bright and sterile waiting room (and that’s never good!). The aesthetic quality of light is just as important as furniture, flooring or framed art on textured walls. A good lighting system with customized settings can make a media room feel like the movies, a dining room look like a fine restaurant, and an outside patio reminiscent of a European sidewalk café.

Convenience also makes the initial costs seem minor. Through a centralized control panel or wireless remote, homeowners can now change the settings for every fixture, interior and exterior. Timing mechanisms in newer models can be set so that “smart” lights turn on and off at specific times. Many users choose “on” at dusk and “off” at dawn for their exterior lights; some even go the extra step and keep automated interior lights on until later at night, thus making the house look “alive.” Business trips and family vacations leave our homes vulnerable—as discussed earlier—but only if our homes are easy targets. With convenient controls, you can select the time settings that make your house look lived in, whether you’re wrapping up a business deal in Shanghai, or treating the family to a week in the Outer Banks.

Interested in optimizing your light fixtures and making your home safer and more convenient? Please contact GREEN T Home Solutions by phone at (201) 327-2729, or by e-mail: vin@greenthome.com. Call now to discuss how GREEN T Home Solutions can bring the best technology to your home or office. We’re conveniently located at 342 Route 17 North, Upper Saddle River, NJ 07458. Visit our website at www.GREENThome.com.

Customer note: One of the post popular “smart” light packages today is the Lutron RadioRA system, which provides wireless radio frequency (RF) lighting control in and around the home. You can create localized room settings or you can create lighting themes for your whole home. All it requires is installation and the touch of a button.

The Blu-Ray Revolution: Green T Home Solutions

Home video lovers can remember a time when movies were on tape, wound up in plastic cartridges and vulnerable to all kinds of damaging elements like humidity and age. Many were relieved when DVDs (or digital video discs) replaced VHS tapes, but again the format was not flawless, and even though the image was an upgrade, it was not perfect. Home movie fans dealt with these issues, however, and turned DVD into the standard format of the 1990s and the early years of the following century. The image was crisper, the sound was stronger, and the price was often cheaper. What more could the consumer need? The answer was hi-def image and sound quality.

In 2003, Sony began selling the newest variant of DVD, one that would address DVD’s shortcomings and enhance the viewing experience in a way previously unthinkable. The next evolutionary step in home video was named Blu-ray.

Blu-ray Disc (or BD) is an optical disc storage format which is mainly used for demanding next-generation video game systems, high-definition videos, and large data storage projects that require anywhere from 25 to 50 gigabytes of storage. Sound impressive? It is, but the disc should look familiar: it has the same dimensions of a regular standard definition DVD. What makes it different is the storage capability and the laser reading the disc.

Blu-ray Discs are named so for the blue laser that reads their contents at a higher speed than regular DVDs (which are read by a weaker red laser). This “blue ray” of focused light gives BD the potential for up to six times the data found on traditional DVDs. This new laser allowed blu-ray disc players to process so much more information that videos could now be programmed in high-definition with sophisticated sound and real-time special features that allow users to fully customize their viewing experience—all while the movie is playing.

All Blu-ray Disc players are “backwards compatible,” meaning that the user can watch their standard definition DVDs on their high-definition machine. Unlike the difficult and expensive transition from VHS to DVD, the owner does not have purchase their entire video library again, but can instead buy new films or high-definition releases of their favorite classics.*

Interested in high definition television and what Blu-ray can do for your favorite movies? Please contact Green T Home Solutions by phone at (201) 327-2729, or by e-mail: vin@greenthome.com. Call now to discuss how Green T Home Solutions can bring the best technology to your home or office. We’re conveniently located at 342 Route 17 North, Upper Saddle River, NJ 07458. Visit our website at http://www.greenthome.com.

*How are older films released in high-definition? High-definition cameras are relatively new; meaning older movies aren’t as sharp, right? The answer is “No, older movies can be just as sharp as new releases.” The reason for this is that when studios release older films in Blu-ray format, they scan each individual frame of the master reel [i.e. the flawless vault copy] of a movie. This perfect source material is then remastered in high-definition. Check out The Shining, Casablanca, and Disney classics like Sleeping Beauty.)

The Home Theater: GREEN T Convenience and Entertainment Solutions

There was a time when the radio was the primary source for news and entertainment in the home. Limitations were obvious, as radios only produced sound and could not convey anything beyond expressive words, music, or live news reporting. Americans first moved beyond this limited medium in significant numbers only in the 1950s, as television broadcasting grew more sophisticated and images, paired with sound, became the home standard. And now as the twenty-first century gains momentum, so too does the technology we use to entertain ourselves at home. Nowhere are these advances more impressive than in home theaters.

The goal of modern home theaters is quite ambitious: owners seek to reproduce the movie theater experience at home, where it is most convenient and customizable. Forget standing in the box office line on Friday night or paying too much for movie theatre goodies like popcorn and candy. Home theater owners and prospective customers demand the highest possible quality in the best environment—the family living space or a dedicated media room.

But what does “home theater” mean? What does a complete setup include? This of course depends on the desires of the user and what experience they wish to customize for themselves, but we can certainly strip down the home theater to its basic components. Not surprisingly, these are the same elements one finds in a larger community cinema or theater complex.

The first component is the actual screen. Users must ask themselves how they wish to view their movies, television programs and sporting events at home. Do they want the newest LCD or plasma television? Or are they entertaining a large enough group that a high-definition projector might be best? GREEN T home solutions works with clients individually to qualify their home theatre needs and provide the best service and suggestions.

Beyond the screen is the sound. Sound is one of the most important elements of the home theater because it can transport the viewing audience from the couch to car chase, from the recliner directly into the action. Surround sound systems offer the best experience because they make the impact of the image that much more impressive. If “seeing is believing,” than enjoying true surround sound allows the viewer to experience the action as if they were there.

The final—and often overlooked—home theater component is furniture. Many home theatre users are ready to sit down with their friends and family and enjoy a great movie but only so many consider what they’re sitting on. GREEN T offers home entertainment solutions that include home theater seating arrangements that are fully customizable in regards to shape, size, cost, and color.

Interested in creating your own customized home theater setting? Please contact GREEN T Home Solutions by phone at (201) 327-2729, or by e-mail: vin@greenthome.com. Live your dreams...call now to discuss how GREEN T Home Solutions can bring the best technology to your home or office. We’re conveniently located at 342 Route 17 North, Upper Saddle River, NJ 07458. Visit our website at http://www.greenthome.com.

The Evolution of Home Sound

Along with the meteoric rise of high-definition format film and television in the past decade (as well as the continuous expansion of cable networks and hi-def programming), home entertainment fans have seen similarly spectacular achievements in sound presentation. To truly appreciate these new achievements in audio, it is best we start at the beginning—when televisions were black and white, and when broadcasts were limited by unsophisticated visuals and audio. Consider first where television and “home entertainment” humbly started.

Monaural (or “mono”) sound was for a time the television and film standard. Mono, in the history of home entertainment, might best be compared to a turn-of-the-century phonograph, in that it maintained one “signal path,” or if one were to use a television with two speakers, still only one track of sound would be produced. This one track included everything seen on screen, as opposed to later surround sound units that reproduced multiple sounds at different origin points around the room for a more engrossing experience (i.e., a more theatrical experience).

Next came home stereo units, which at least provided the user with two independent “paths” of sound. Though still a modest achievement when compared to today’s high-tech variants, stereo was the initial step toward complete home entertainment. First experimented with early in the twentieth century—and demonstrated for mass audiences in such prestigious establishments as Carnegie Hall in 1940—stereo sound was not the industry standard until a technological generation later, in the late 1950s and 1960s.

The final quarter century of the 1900s saw the most impressive and important audio advances; indeed, true surround sound came into its own in the past twenty-five years.

Phase one included the popularization of 3.0 and 4.0 formats, which included a triangular surround sound setup for 3.0 configurations (with two speakers at the front, and one behind the viewer), while 4.0—or quadraphonic sound—positioned four speakers at each corner of a room in most cases. While effective, these formats were still limited to only so many independent tracks. The 5.1 break-through followed with three speakers positioned at the front of a particular room (along with the television) and two at each corner behind the viewer. Unlike 4.0, 5.1 included a new audio point of origin that was directly in front of the viewer and thus was seemingly produced by the image itself—the other four speakers thus supplemented this primary sound output.

The newest surround sound development is even more spectacular. If mono sound was a glorified phonograph, 7.1-surround sound is the equivalent of being in the front row of a live concert. Most 7.1 systems are arranged in a “horse-shoe format,” with the viewer positioned at the very center of the action supported by seven independent speakers all producing layered audio. Better than even some of the best new digital theaters, 7.1 is the newest evolutionary step of home sound.

Interested in home entertainment and audio solutions? Feel free to contact Green T Home Solutions by phone at (201) 327-2729, or by visiting our website: www.GreenTHome.com. Call now to discuss how Green T Home Solutions can bring the best technology to your home or office.

Green T is currently located at 342 Route 17 North, Upper Saddle River, NJ 07458.