A home theater can be a significant investment. A large screen, the audio system, lighting, control, and seating can all add up. Granted, your home theater doesn’t have to be just for movie watching. It can be the place for Netflix binges, sports, gathering together to watch presidential candidates debate, and more.

However, sometimes all this content doesn’t take full advantage of everything your Marietta home theater installation can do. If you've invested in multichannel Dolby Atmos sound and the latest projector or 4K TV with HDR, you want to take advantage of it! Yet many streaming and cable TV offerings don’t use these features. Some movie and show soundtracks don’t use the surround audio channels much, and many are not mastered for the high-contrast imagery that HDR can display. 

You might be surprised at what we’ll suggest. Try video games!  Even if you’re not a gamer, you might be blown away by the storylines, cinematic presentation, and incredible use of sound that comes with the best of today’s titles. 

SEE ALSO: Do You Enjoy Netflix in Your Home Theater?

If our clever title has you lamenting the end of summer in Georgia, we did not skip the season by Springing into Fall. Indeed, please read all about enjoying summer fun with outdoor entertainment technology. But as you read this, you are quite likely wondering what might be happening with school schedules this fall, given the ongoing pandemic.  

As your local smart home company in the Atlanta area, we can offer you some innovative ways to have smart technology make the new home routines for work, play, and fun a little more manageable, and, dare we say…fun! Not only that, but we can also show you this tech in action at our 20,000 square foot showroom in Marietta. Keep reading for some ideas that may spark your imagination. 

SEE ALSO: The Three Things to Look for in a Smart Home Company

We love a home theater, whether it's indoors in a dedicated space, or outside. Like an indoor home theater, your outdoor home theater can be anything you want it to be. For some, a proper home theater indoors is a dedicated space with a giant screen, a great sound system, and comfortable seating. Or it can be a media room with the audio and video chops that also pull duty as a game room or living area.

An outdoor home theater for your Alpharetta, GA home can be much the same. GHT Group has dedicated solutions that are more theater-focused and outdoor entertainment systems that you can use as your own outdoor drive-in, minus the cars. Let’s explore some options below - it’s easier than you think!

We’ve dedicated a lot of virtual ink on these pages to the wonders of home automation. From audio and video systems that almost run themselves, to lighting, motorized shading, climate control, and security, home automation systems like Control4 make everything in your Johns Creek, GA home run like a finely tuned machine. We may also have referred to it as an orchestra, but we think you understand the idea.

Having done many smart home projects over the years, we're always amazed at our clients' imagination when it comes to automation for their homes. If it is technically possible, we'll strive to make our clients’ automation dreams a reality.

With that in mind, we'd like to tell you about a few more things you can automate with a Control4 smart home system. Keep reading!

We live in a world of almost limitless content. In cable TV, an old joke was, "we have 300 channels, and there's nothing to watch." You'd be hard-pressed to make that joke today with the wonderful world of streaming content so readily available to us. With Netflix, Amazon Prime, HBO, Apple TV+, Disney+, and so many more, it's difficult to think about not finding something you want to watch.

But this blog is about audio, not video! And the amount and range of music we can call up with a few flicks on a touchscreen are equally amazing. Today’s streaming music services boast 40 million-plus tracks of recorded music available in an instant, whether it’s from 60 years ago or today’s top hits. It’s equally difficult to imagine not being able to find some music you like to listen to on a streaming service. 

You might be wondering, what's the difference in streaming services? Isn't the music library much the same? The short answer is yes. But the way you find that music, and how you interact with it is different. Some folks feel very strongly about their preference for Spotify over Apple Music or vice-versa.

So which service should you use on your whole-home audio system in Atlanta? GHT Group isn't here to tell you which one is best – that's up to you. The good news is that all the ones we'll discuss here work with whole-home audio systems we recommend like Control4. 

Read on for a brief overview of five of the most popular streaming services to see which ones are for you.

SEE ALSO: Upgrade to the Luxury of Whole Home Audio with Control4

New technologies sometimes transform entire industries - or bury some and create new ones. LED technology has transformed many industries. It replaced bulky CRT based monitors for computers, led to brilliant, efficient, and lighter laptops, is steadily replacing analog instruments and all types of lights in automobiles, and has revolutionized TV screens. 

In home lighting, LED technology may not create a total revolution, as your house will still look like a house. But LED light fixtures in homes lend new flexibility in lighting design, last much longer than other lights, and of course, are far more efficient for your Atlanta home.  

Let's take a look at a few ways you can use LED lighting to rethink the light in your home.

SEE ALSO: Learn About Georgia Home Theater’s New Brand Partner: DMF Lighting

Monitor Audio is a great British speaker company, much like KEF and Bowers & Wilkins. Unlike those companies, Monitor sometimes flies a little under the radar but is nonetheless quite familiar to most audio enthusiasts.

Last year we were excited to bring in Monitor Audio to our growing stable of high-fidelity speaker brands at GHT Group, in addition to MartinLogan, Klipsch Heritage, and McIntosh. This year, we are very excited to introduce the new Monitor Audio Bronze 6G, which might bring a new benchmark in audio price/performance to your Buckhead, GA living room. 

Read on to learn more about the new Monitor Audio Bronze 6G line.

SEE ALSO: Introducing Monitor Audio at GHT Group

GHT Group is a big fan of Lutron, a company whose mission is built on the management and control of light. The company is renowned for its lighting control solutions, from commercial applications like controlling lighting in the New York Times building in Manhattan to several lines for the home that span control of one room to an entire compound.

Lutron is well-known for solutions for managing natural light, too, with several motorized shading systems for the home. One of our favorites is Lutron Palladiom, which sports a modern aesthetic that is a triumph of both form and function.

Read on to learn more about Lutron Palladiom shades and the new options they’ve recently introduced for the ultimate in contemporary style for your Johns Creek, GA home.

So, you have decided that this is the year you are splurging on a custom home theater. Not just a space with a big screen and big sound, but a home theater. A dedicated place to enjoy cinematic masterpieces, but also not above bingeing on a Netflix series, watching a big football game, or even hosting an epic video game. 

It takes some effort to plan, design, and build a home theater. If you need a sink in the garage where there is no water or drain, chances are you will hire a plumber, a professional that knows what they’re doing and will ensure the garage sink will not result in a house flood. Likewise, if you’re looking to build an elaborate home theater that will delight you and not leave your eyes seared and your ears ringing, chances are you will also hire a professional home theater company in Johns Creek, GA, to get it right. 

So how do you choose the right home theater company? That’s what we’re here to tell you!

SEE ALSO: A Movie Server: The Ultimate Home Theater Upgrade

While the current generation of kids may not know the Jetsons, it left a lasting impression on those that watched the cartoon in the 1960s and in many years of syndication after that. It promised a world of flying cars, robots, holograms, drones, and video calls. Guess what? We have all of those today, sans the flying cars. If we can get the coming generation of self-driving cars to run on real streets without crashing into each other, perhaps they can take flight next.

If the imagination behind the Jetsons was a portent of things to come, then what do the next 50 years hold for the future of home automation in Atlanta and around the world? Braced with the knowledge we have today, and given some of what we’ve seen in technology the past few years, we’re going to make some fearless prognostications about the next few years.  Perhaps in a couple of years, we'll circle back and see what we got right and wrong!

SEE ALSO: A Quick Look at the Top 3 Features of Crestron Home Automation

As a recovering home theater company, we love to talk about home theaters. And when the weather is warm, we love talking about moving the home theater outside. After all, now that drive-ins are practically extinct, how else can we enjoy summer movie nights under the stars?

We are only joking about the recovering part – we are still very much into home theaters! GHT Group is always excited to bring you new options for outdoor technology, and you can even see and experience many of them at our Marietta showroom. Recently, Samsung announced its first foray into outdoor TV, with the new Terrace line. What makes it perfect for an outdoor home theater setup at your Brookhaven, GA home? We’re going to cover that below!

If you follow our blog pages at all, you know that we love great audio, and we write about it often. We also think hi-fidelity sound is not exclusively an indoor thing; it can extend outside too. No, we're not talking about putting your beloved B&W tower speakers out on your covered patio – they wouldn't last long out there (but you know that). Outdoor sound has its challenges, not the least is that you need outdoor speakers that can take on the seasons of Georgia weather. 

The good news is that an outdoor sound system for your Alpharetta outside space need not be a complicated affair. It can be an extension of your current audio system, even if that setup is in just one room, like your family room. It can also be a very elaborate system with multiple zones and even tie in outdoor TVs. In this blog, we're going to take a look at some of these options, from the simple to the "wow all your friends" variety. Ready to learn more? Keep reading below. 

To paraphrase a common refrain on airline flights, "we know you have many choices in home automation systems, and we're glad you chose us." True, there are many choices in smart home automation. There is an almost bewildering array of options in consumer automation devices and platforms, tied together by software and devices from Google, Amazon, Apple, and Samsung.

But when it comes to managing larger, more sophisticated homes, the choices narrow down further and quickly. Sure, you can use parts of excellent consumer products like Google's Nest ecosystem to manage some functions of your home. You can run your own email server at home, too. But few people operate their own email servers because they have to be quite technically savvy to keep them running correctly. And while consumer home automation is far more accessible, the more you do with it, the more complicated it gets. And there are some things that these systems won't do without a great deal of advanced hacking.

There is a more straightforward way. You can call GHT Group to design and build a customized home automation solution that works exactly the way you want in your Johns Creek, GA home, with no tech support required from you. And if your property is quite large and there are many things to manage – we would likely recommend a Crestron solution, as there are few limits as to what it can do. Read on to learn more about three ways Crestron systems are a different breed of automation solution.

Intuitively we know that a well-lit place is safer than a dark one. However, we don’t want the outside of our homes to look like Fremont Street in Las Vegas. It might be safer overall, but no one really wants their house to be like a beacon in the dark. In some communities, dark sky ordinances will also limit how brightly you can light your outdoor areas.

Landscape lighting design may have several objectives. You want certain outdoor areas to be usable with attractive lighting. You may have entries, paths, and driveways that you want to be illuminated for safety. And you may want lighting that adds aesthetic appeal to the exterior of your home and property. 

These objectives don’t have to be at odds with each other. In this blog, we’ll focus on safety and some ways to think about it. Keep reading for ideas on using landscape and outdoor lighting for a safer property in Brookhaven, GA.

Several months ago, we introduced the concept of “human-centric lighting.” Considering lighting was invented by humans for humans, you might think the term is a bit of a misnomer.  But if you’ve worked in a large office with cold, bright, fluorescent lights, you would know that those lights were designed to get work done, but not necessarily to please humans. To be fair, fluorescent lighting is highly energy-efficient and inexpensive, which is why it is widely used in commercial environments.

At home, however, we get to control our environment. And thanks to LED lighting technology, we don’t have to use fluorescent lighting for efficiency at home. LED lighting has tremendous advantages over older incandescent and fluorescent technology, being far more energy-efficient and longer-lasting than both.

The latest LED lighting has another feature that no other lighting technology can touch – the ability to change color temperature. Ketra lighting, now part of Lutron, one of the leading companies in lighting, was a pioneer in tunable LED lighting. Read on to see how you could transform the feel of your Atlanta, GA home with Ketra tunable lighting solutions.