When it comes to lighting, every room has its unique needs. Yet most recessed lighting in homes isn’t tailored to the space and feels formulaic. The result is lighting that fulfills the functional role but fails to inspire on the aesthetic side. When you work with a professional recessed lighting installation company, you can benefit from both improved function and a lighting design that transforms the look and feel of your Atlanta, GA, home. Keep reading below to learn more about how recessed lighting and intelligent control can remake your home illumination. 

Note: We originally wrote this blog in 2018, long before anyone started talking about this novel coronavirus that affects so many lives now. Now more than ever, it feels relevant to discuss how we can make our outdoor spaces more enjoyable for our families. And when this pandemic passes, we will finally get to enjoy our outdoor lighting and video with extended groups of people once again.

Many people know about Coastal Source’s many outdoor audio options but don’t know that it’s also a premier home lighting design provider. In this blog, we’ll remind you of the beauty and functionality built into outdoor lighting and why you should prioritize it for your Georgia home. You’ll learn how a Coastal Source system can highlight your architecture so that passers-by can appreciate it on their nightly walks through the neighborhood. You’ll also discover why lighting control is a key safety feature. Keep reading to explore why lighting and audio are even more important today than when we originally wrote this article.

This blog has now been updated; you can view this updated post here.

Get to Know Crestron’s New TSR-310 and HR-310 Remotes

Our world is full of touchscreens. According to Statista stats portal, 2.8 billion touchscreen devices were shipped worldwide in 2016 alone. You have to work hard these days to find a human being on the planet that hasn’t been exposed to one. The reason is straightforward: Touchscreens present intuitive interfaces for people to accomplish tasks without resorting to a help manual. The smartphone in our pocket proves that they work for a host of applications.

As much as we all love touchscreens, there are some times when they are not always the best control experience. Touchscreens require us to look at the screen to make a choice or perform a gesture.

When it comes to A/V control, the majority of remotes still have real buttons. Vendors have added app control to smart devices – from sophisticated devices like A/V receivers to simpler ones like Roku Streamers – to extend the control capabilities and allow for an alternative form of control. There are people, particularly of younger generations that grew up with touchscreens, that might prefer the smartphone as a remote control, as it is virtually always with you.

For A/V control, sometimes the touchscreen is not the best option. For many people, adjusting the volume is easier by feeling for the right button on a hard-button remote. That way, you don’t have to look down at a screen or light up a darkened room during a movie. Transport functions like play, pause, and fast forward can sometimes be more intuitive with real buttons too. Lastly, your smartphone is doing other things than remote control, and switching or starting apps for a simple function can be tedious.

Crestron has been in the A/V and home automation business since it began. They understand the control of devices and systems thoroughly. In this age of the screen, they still offer hard button remotes to allow the freedom to control your environment the way you want.

Read on to learn more about managing your A/V and home automation systems in the Roswell area with the the new, advanced TSR-310 and HR-310 remotes for your Crestron control system. These are not your average complicated remotes though – they are designed to be customized for you.

In these days of virtually endless streaming options, you might be thinking: What’s a movie jukebox, and why should I care? After all, I’m not popping discs into a player anymore! Well. you may not, but you may be missing out on extracting the full potential of your home theater. 

Streaming services are superb for the sheer convenience of pressing a button or two and seeing a movie come to life, but there is a bit of a price to pay. Services like Netflix and Amazon Prime do offer 4K video and Dolby surround sound, but they tend to optimize the stream for the data rate of the network connection. In other words, there is some compression of the stream, resulting in the loss of video and audio fidelity. 

After you’ve spent a good sum on a state-of-the-art home theater installation, we think you deserve a higher-quality option in your Atlanta or Florida cinema. That’s where the Kaleidescape comes in, offering a new level of audiovisual performance with all the convenience of a veritable movie jukebox at your fingertips. Keep reading below to learn more about this exciting way to get the best possible film experience at home. 

Spring is here in the Atlanta area.  While our winters are fairly mild, we all look forward to spending time outdoors.  In the South, you can beat the humid heat on a lazy Sunday by floating or frolicking in the pool.  Or perhaps you just like relaxing on a chaise, in the shade, with a good book and a sweet iced tea. Think that sounds enjoyable? Just add music to elevate this experience to the mental retreat we all need now.

We originally wrote this popular blog article during a much more pleasant time, the summer of 2018, before anyone talked of this new coronavirus. The current COVID-19 pandemic, which has afflicted much of Northwest Georgia, casts a shadow over even this outdoor merriment. However, if we’ve learned anything these past few weeks, it’s how therapeutic our outdoor time can be after being cooped up indoors all day.

Whether you’re spending time chilling with pets and family on your patio or getting some exercise in your pool, everything feels more enjoyable when you add music. However, simply adding any speakers you find on Amazon Prime isn’t enough. You’ll need Atlanta’s premier AV installer to help you choose and install the best speakers for your patios, yards and pools.

Note: More than a year after we originally drafted this blog, voice control has taken an even more prominent role in today’s smart homes. Clients rely on voice control technology to search for information or ask their home assistants to perform certain actions. For example, maybe you’re cooking and want to brighten the lights, but your hands are busy. Just ask your virtual assistant for help, and you’ll notice the room brighten in seconds. However, in the past, you had to mind your diction and use exactly the right words for your assistant or voice control app to understand you.

But that’s not how humans speak on a regular basis. Sometimes we jumble words, ask something in a more obtuse manner, or simply speak with an accent. Your voice control should be built to accommodate that. Josh.ai revolutionized the industry by creating the first home assistant with natural language processing capabilities. Keep reading to see how that function works in real life and why we highly recommend Josh.ai voice controlled home automation for your Alpharetta or Metro Atlanta residence.

Summertime is best spent with family and friends in the fresh air with food sizzling on the grill and your favorite tunes wafting through the air. Why not make your backyard the unofficial destination of the season? Today’s weatherproof technology means you can upgrade your Sandy Springs or Metro Atlanta property with an outdoor speaker system and outdoor TVs for cookouts, pool parties, and relaxing year-round; without worry of long-term damage from exposure to sunlight, heat or rain that our area is known for.

But before adding outdoor speakers and TVs to your home, it only makes sense you’ll want to hear and see the quality first. Many direct-to-consumer products claim to be high-quality, but you don’t know how it truly sounds until you experience the technology in real life.

At Georgia Home Theater’s showroom in Marietta, you can look, touch, hear and see our outdoor speaker and TV options before purchasing. To prepare for your visit, continue reading to explore the outdoor entertainment that is on display at Georgia Home Theater’s showrooms.

Enjoy unprecedented audio quality, whether listening to your favorite recordings or watching the latest blockbuster release in your home theater. Our team recently became a Focal dealer serving Cumming, GA, and the greater Atlanta metropolitan area. We are excited to provide our clients with the patented acoustic technology the company has developed over the past 40 years. Focal home speakers all feature the company’s trademark inverted drivers known for their depth, range, and clarity.

The French company incorporates its acoustic innovations into headphones, bookshelf speakers, architectural speakers, and outdoor models. But it is still best known for its beautifully designed flagship loudspeakers. Here at GHT Group, we've focused on three of their premier models, which you can experience firsthand in our Marietta showroom: the Sopra, Kanta, and Aria.

If you were of age in the 1980s, you might remember some of the advertising of the era. It was the last decade before the Internet age; a time where the primary media was print and TV, and a time that Facebook, YouTube, and online banner ads that tracked your every online move didn’t exist. Who could forget the famous Orwellian TV spot in the 1984 Super Bowl that introduced the Apple Macintosh?

There was another memorable ad that captured the imagination then. It was an ad for Maxell cassette tapes. Maxell made some of the highest quality tape at the time, and it was prized by audio enthusiasts as a quality way to make the vinyl music of the day portable. The ad captured the excitement of music listening, with a period-hip fellow getting “blown away” by the high-fidelity sound of Maxell tape.

If you’ve read this far, you may be wondering why we are talking about cassette tape; something replaced long ago by everything digital. You see, the speaker pictured in that ad was the JBL L100. A hugely popular speaker in the 1970s and 1980s, to this day it remains the best-selling speaker in JBL’s long history. Its unique foam square design grill made it instantly recognizable, and it was known as a great speaker for rocking out. Maybe one of your friends had a pair, and if that was the case, it likely evokes fond musical memories of your youth.

But you don’t have to live on memories, and if you are too young to remember the original L100, you’re still in luck.

JBL has decided to bring the L100 back, aptly naming it the L100 Classic. The new model hews true to the original iconic design both in form and function, but it has been resurrected as a product of JBL Synthesis, which is the high end of JBL and part of parent company’s Harman Luxury Audio group. That means it’s not just the great party and rock and roll speaker which may have blown you away in the 1980s – it is a serious speaker worthy of the HiFi stereo system in your favorite Alpharetta or Metro Atlanta listening room.

Best of all, Georgia Home Theater’s Marietta experience center is currently the only showroom in the Atlanta area where you can see and hear the new JBL L100 Classic. Do you need any more reasons to visit us? Learn more about the JBL L100 Classic below.

Are you considering diving or gently tiptoeing into the world of home automation and high-performance audio? Maybe you’ve been scrolling through Instagram, looking at different home theater designs, or reading up on whole-home audio systems that fill your home with incredible, immersive sound. And let’s not forget the outdoor entertainment area. 

Technology has left some remarkable choices on our plates. Where do you start? That’s where we come in. GHT Group has been providing custom technology solutions in Atlanta and Marietta, GA, since 1989. We know a thing or two or three about home theater design, whole-home audio, outdoor entertainment systems, and home automation.

Which brings us to the topic at hand—focal home speakers.

With legendary McIntosh audio components, the introduction of a successor to a groundbreaking model is a noteworthy event. As such, the C2800 vacuum tube preamplifier marks a significant milestone for audio enthusiasts. As the replacement to the highly acclaimed C2700, the McIntosh C2800 is not merely an update; it's another major step in the continuous pursuit of perfect sound. McIntosh has once again raised the bar, combining its legacy of sonic excellence with cutting-edge technology to craft a preamplifier that promises to redefine the listening experience. In this blog, we'll cover how the new McIntosh C2800 stands out in the world of high-fidelity audio and how it caters to the most discerning ears in Atlanta and beyond.

Home theaters are the best way to enjoy movies, TV shows, documentaries, sports games, and even video games from the comfort of your own home. There’s no more need to drive to the theaters to watch something on a large screen with crisp detail and immersive surround sound — that can now be achieved right at home.

One of the best things about owning a home theater is customizing the design, layout, and technology. With the help of a professional and experienced home theater company, you can build an excellent home theater. Here are four benefits of having a custom home theater in your Sandy Springs, GA, home.

At this point, you may have heard of tunable lighting. We've written a bit about it on these very pages. And if you have looked at LED lighting fixtures and bulbs lately, you might notice that many are incorporating color-changing capabilities that enable the "tuning" of white light.

To review (don't worry, there's no test at the end), tunable lighting is the ability of artificial light to change its intensity and hue to mimic how sunlight varies throughout the day. Why is this important? Light affects us in subtle ways, and our bodies respond to the rhythms of natural light. The ability to change the color temperature of white light is a recent feature of LED lighting technology.

Quite a few competitors have emerged in tunable lighting. But you should know that not all tunable lighting is the same. Let’s explore one of the most highly touted features of tunable lighting – warm dimming, and how Ketra, a pioneer in this space, does it better. Read on to learn about how Ketra lighting is different and what it can do in your Buckhead, GA home.

Tunable lighting is one of the newest and best features of lighting control. By varying color and intensity at your will, tunable lighting helps set a mood, energize us, and relax us in subtle yet significant ways. Lutron's Ketra lighting is the best tunable lighting system on the market, in large part due to relentless innovation and refinement. 

We last wrote about the Ketra difference in warm dimming, a key feature of tunable lighting that creates the kind of lighting ambiance in your home that you tend to see in the best photography. But there’s more to Ketra. Just like a great photographer, Ketra lighting unlocks the vibrancy of colors in your Brookhaven, GA home. Read on to understand more of why Ketra’s tunable lighting is a cut above the rest.

For a long time, Crestron has been the choice for sophisticated home automation in the largest and most complex properties. As a pioneer in both residential and commercial automation, Crestron has built a powerful and advanced software platform that allows you to automate things in the home that other systems couldn't. It accomplished that with ultimate customizability.

But technology moves forward, and other competitors caught up with many of Crestron’s innovations, creating sophisticated systems that didn't require as much programming to achieve the same goals – even if they weren't quite as customizable. In the past few years, Crestron has embarked on an effort to make their systems far easier to configure and offers users a simpler, sleeker, more intuitive automation experience, while still retaining the customizability and flexibility that are hallmarks of the system.

Georgia Home Theater is a long-time Crestron integrator, and we are excited about the new Crestron Home system powered by their latest OS 3 software. OS 3 lets us configure a sophisticated Crestron automation system in your Dunwoody home faster than ever before, and at lower cost as the configuration is much more simplified. We’re so excited about it that we are setting up a new Crestron Experience in our Marietta showroom, where you can see it in action.

Ready to learn more? Read on to see more about what Crestron Home is all about.