Imagine being able to listen to your music collection wherever you are in your home without having to hunt for the CD.

Imagine having lighting systems with pre-set scenes to suit different moods and occasions, and imagine linking this into your own home-cinema setup.

Imagine being able to monitor and control your heating, lighting and security even when you're away. Just text or mail your house a simple command to set your home environment to exactly how you’d like it.

Imagine a system where any alarm whether smoke, water or intruder will trigger a text to your mobile or send you an email.

And imagine being able to do this through familiar tools like your mobile phone, PDA or web browser.

Whether you're interested in

Smart Homes can be all of this and more but we believe there are two important things to bear in mind. You want your smart home to work in the way you do, and you want it to look like an integrated piece of design rather than afterthought.

Whole House ControlWhole house control systems tie together the different technologies we work with. Touch screen panels can be used to access audio, video, lighting control systems and much and deliver control up through a simple, unified, integrated control layer for the user. For many people this is what they mean when they talk about Smart Homes.

With customisable interfaces and powerful programming tools, we can design systems that are incredibly easy to use and yet extremely powerful. Touch Media use Crestron touch panels and remotes for their robustness, build quality and technical excellence.

Multi–Room AudioOverview
Multiroom audio systems enable you to listen to your favourite audio everywhere around your house and garden. So whether that's the radio in the kitchen, a selection of your favourite tunes in the garden room or some mellow music as you soak in the bath in the evening, a multiroom system can deliver that from one central source and do so without the clutter of additional equipment everywhere.

And because everyone in then house is going to have their own tastes and preferences, a multiroom system has to be able to deliver different sources simultaneously to different rooms. Conversely, when you're entertaining or just as you're moving through your house, you might want your system to be playing the same synchronised source to every zone in the house.

We often tend to talk about multi-zone systems rather than multiroom. A typical example of this is a bedroom and an ensuite bathroom. Different rooms, but most of our clients don't want competing music or radio between two rooms that are so closely linked. We'll go through your requirements with you to establish exactly how you want to be able be control, separate and synchronise your music through your home. We will design a system with the appropriate number of zones for you and your lifestyle.

Benefits of a multi-zone system
Obviously you can get different music or radio in different rooms by using multiple systems. Portable radio in the bathroom, separate mini-systems in the family's bedrooms and maybe one or more "serious" AV setups in the living room, conservatory etc. Or, looked at another way, you can have all your favourite music with you all the time with a digital music player - there's a lot of people around these days with small personal players with distinctive white earphones....we'll come back to them later.

Multiroom or multi-zone systems use a different approach.

We'd summarise the benefits as being:

Design - A well designed system should give you music and radio where you want without you noticing how it is delivered there

Convenience - A music server can have the whole house's music stored on it and made available to anyone who wants it.

If you - or a group of you - want to pull different music to different zones - say the same cool ambient music to your living room, dining room and terrace as you entertain while the kids listen to Linkin Park in the playroom. That sounds like a noisy house! but because a well designed system makes it easier to access your music and enjoy more of it, you'll find yourself listening to a wider range of things more often.

Put simply, multi-zone systems make it easier to enjoy your music.

Quality - Convenience isn't worth much if you're forced into making compromises on quality. Audio quality and different people's perception of what quality audio is is a subject too huge for here. We try to simplify things by establishing what you're trying to achieve in each zone, what your expectations are, what your budget is and designing the best possible solution to meet your needs.

Home CinemaWhen people describe “Smart Homes” they often talk about a Home Cinema setup.

Well designed Theatre systems are great showcases for Smart Home technology – they bring together superb audio and video, these are supplemented with great lighting and control and often feature ingenious installations that hide away the technology so you can enjoy the experience.

Video in the integrated home is about more than Home Cinema though and here we discuss some of the options open to someone considering a project.

Home Cinema sometimes called Home Theatre is all about making the most of your film and DVD viewing experience. More than just a collection of high quality components, we believe it’s about creating a great environment, with discreet, flexible control systems allowing you to enjoy your video to the full.

More choice, more channels, more rooms…multi-room video means having access to the video source you want wherever you are in the house or garden.

With video distribution systems you can have multiple screens all playing the same central source – imagine watching a DVD downstairs on your home cinema setup, pausing it and resuming watching your film from the same point on an LCD in the bedroom. You can also have multiple screens all with access to different central sources with the ability to switch between them.

This is an area of change. We help you to understand what the next developments might bring and how you can best plan to get the maximum out of your investment. High Definition TV and IP based video distribution systems offer a great deal but need to be planned for now.

Lighting ControlLighting controls systems can really enhance good lighting making the subtleties and impact of the design easy to access.

Lighting schemes frequently use a number of individual lighting circuits which together create an overall effect. The intensity of the different circuits, the speed of dimming, even the colour of the light can combine to give magical lighting effects. Lighting control systems take away the complexity of the elements involved allowing users to access different pre-programmed lighting"scenes".

Home CinemaOne obvious application of lighting controls in the home is in the growing area of Home Cinema. It has become a bit of a Smart Home cliche to describe the pressing of one button to see the screen descend from the ceiling, the projector turn on, the curtains close and the lights dim, but Home Cinema really has opened people's eyes to the possibilities of lighting control systems in the house.

Other ApplicationsThere are many other applications. Lighting controls can replace large arrays of manual dimmer switches and provide one button access to pre-programmed scenes for eating, reading, entertaining.

"Avenues" of light can be created for the night time "

Multiple rooms or even whole house lighting schemes can be integrated. With systems allowing the user to turn off the whole house with one button and the convenience of remote controls, it is possible to lie in bed and switch off all lights in the house with a simple remote control."Avenues" of light can be created for the night time, so a scene can be created that just lights the route from a bedroom to the kitchen for example. Integration with other home control systems mean that this "avenue" can be intelligently triggered by motion rather than requiring a switch and for this motion sensitivity only to be triggered at certain times of the day.

SecurityLighting can be integrated into security schemes with lighting mimicing an occupied house. Again this can be programmed to be more convincing than a simle timer operated system. With some systems it is possible to "record" normal occupancy and play that back when required.

We'd summarise the benefits of lighting controls systems as offering:

1. Ease of use
2. Quality feel
3. Convenience

Degree of ReluctanceOne thing we admit here is that it's difficult for many people to see the application of lighting control systems in the home. People are worried by the thought of major rewiring exercises and the cost. It's also difficult to visualise the effects for a lighting scheme that doesn't yet exist. Yet those of our clients who have followed down this route are now fierce advocates of these systems. Our favourite quote?

"Why didn't you convince me to do this before?"

Home NetworkingWhen our clients talk to us about a network in the home, fast web access, email and sharing it are the most common requests. A home network is great for this and can do so much more. The home network is becoming commonplace and the possibilities it opens up are huge.

Home WorkingPeople work from home or want to have the flexibility to work from home sometimes. They want to have access to the web and email wherever they are in their house - or garden, yet they don't want the house to look like an office. A well planned home network can give you all the functionality, but no clutter and no wires and it can be simple to use. And with a reliable fast and secure internet connection it's possible to access the data on your machines even when you're away from home. No more issues with forgetting that file.

Web and Email Access for the Whole FamilyMaybe you've got more than one computer - one in the study, one or more in the Kids' rooms, a laptop. A network means everyone can share broadband and web access and it means you don't have your phone tied up for hours on end. While Broadband growth may have been slow at first in the UAE, we are now one of the best provisioned countries in the Middle East and connection speeds are rising. Broadband changes the way you use and view the internet and a network makes it simple to share.

EntertainmentThe explosive growth of personal digital music players like Apple's Ipod and the popularity of digital cameras for photos and video mean many people now have growing libraries of digital media. Too often this library is locked away on a PC away from the rest of the house.

A home network means this need no longer be tied to that PC in the office but accessed where you want in the home and watched or listened to away from the PC on your main TV or using your living room HiFi.

Digital music can be streamed to any room in the house. Photos can be enjoyed in the living room on a large screen. Games consoles like Microsoft's XBox 360 are tapping into the power of networking to deliver entertainment content from Media Centre PCs. The network now sits at the heart of the integrated home.

We help take the mystery out of networking. We listen to what you want, explain what you can do and design a network capable of meeting your requirements now - and expanding to meet your requirements in the future.

iPortWe're really pleased with the new iPort solution that simplifies integrating iPods into a multiroom audio system and does so in a very elegant and clean way.

Integrating an iPod or two...or three or four has become a fairly standard request of our clients.

While we've had a variety of solutions that would allow iPods to be used in either standalone situations or in multiroom systems this is probably the tidiest solution to integrating iPods that we've seen to date.

At its heart the iPort is a docking station, either in-wall or the new free standing unit. What makes the iPort special is that the different models in the range offer increasingly smart ways for our clients to control their iPods from any room in the house.

The simplest iPort offers charging and the ability to output to a local audio system. However, the options carry on from there so you can have Infra Red remote control or you can even have all your iPod music - including your playliststs - available at a separate touch screen panel in any room in the house. The combination of NetStreams DigiLinX or Crestron and iPort means your iPod effectively becomes a Music Server for any room in your house. There is even an iPort video option to let you access video and photo content from your iPod.

About UsTouch Media was established to provide a complete solution for people looking to integrate the latest Smart Home technologies into their lifestyle and home design. Independent of any manufacturers we are not tied to a specific set of products but can deliver tailor-made solutions to our clients' needs every time. We believe smart homes become truly smart when the project is approached as a design as well as technology challenge We have forged strong relationships with a number of technology providers who we believe offer solutions that are best of breed in their area and have worked with them to produce smart integrated solutions encompassing video, audio, security, lighting and AC/Heating solutions.

If you would like to enquire about installing Smart Home Technology into your home, please contact:

Touch Media Systems Ltd
Tel:   971 50 694 2647
Email: touchmedia@mailme.ae

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