Monster Demos Ambitious New Automation System

I was on my way to the Monster Home of the Future demo during EHX, escorted by Monster's Eric Bodley. We were nearly at the room, and the door opened, with the Monster crew ready to greet us.

They knew we were on the way because Eric's Bluetooth-enabled cellphone registered on the new Monster Central Advanced Control System, alerting the group to our arrival.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

In the Beginning: Z-Wave Remotes

Monster Cable made the first public debut of its Advanced Control Systems line during CES, where it introduced a Z-Wave enabled remote control and some Z-Wave compatible light switches. (Z-Wave is a low-rate two-way RF protocol primarily for home automation.)

The way Head Monster Noel Lee tells it, the devices represent a natural extension to the Monster product line. "We sell more power [management/conditioning] products than a lot of retailers sell A/V receivers," he says. "The attach rate is very high."

But Monster's best-selling product at retail is ScreenClean ($21.95), a kit for cleaning TV screens. Lee says, "It's actually a high-tech product," but it doesn't hurt that Monster is a sales and marketing machine and trained thousands of salespeople how to sell this high-margin stuff.

"It spawned an industry," says Lee, adding that other manufacturers have followed suit.

"We're successful at creating new markets," says Lee. "Controls is next." He says that the retail attachment rate for standalone universal remotes is less than 1 percent of TV sales, versus 8 percent for cables.

Then again, Monster knows a lot about cables. "What does Monster know about remotes? Not much," concedes Lee.

So Monster teamed up with a couple of leaders -- Logitech for the remotes and Leviton for lighting control.

Monster employed its own human factors engineer to design the remote, which looks decidedly different from others on the market. Buttons are a variety of shapes and sizes, with strategically placed peaks and valleys -- most notably for channel and volume controls -- to enable users to access the most common buttons without having to look down. "Stevie Wonder validated this for me," says Lee.

SURROUND MODE has its own button front-and-center. "The surround functions are usually two levels deep," says Lee. "We wanted them right on top. We're audio guys."

An A/B switch, called ZONE lets users toggle between two completely different control scenarios in case they want to use the same remote for two different rooms. The option could also be used to create two separate profiles for two different users. The adults might be taken directly to CNN, and the tykes to Nickelodeon.

A big LIGHTING CONTROL button at the top of the remote takes users to the automation menus -- and serves as a constant reminder to non-automated households that the unit can in fact control lights.

Monster's MCC AVL300 remote issues both IR and RF (Z-Wave) commands. The companion OmniLink is a Z-Wave/IR bridge and blaster with four addressable IR ports. The device itself stores the commands, so users need only press a single button to trigger a macro. A kit with the remote, one OmniLink and four IR blasters is being sold through a variety of mass-market retailers and custom installers for $600.

Z-Wave Lights

Monster isn't rolling out just any old Z-Wave dimmers. The company's Illuminessence lighting devices feature built-in intelligence that eliminates the need for a central controller. The switches themselves store the scenes and light-switch IDs, so a Z-Wave remote control (namely, Monster's MCC AVL300) simply needs to broadcast the single trigger command, and each switch knows how to respond.

Most systems require the control to broadcast separate commands to each device required in a scene.

The Monster approach reduces traffic on the network and eliminates latency since all devices can respond simultaneously.

This is a big deal, and certainly justifies Monster's premium over lower-cost Z-Wave dimmers. Monster's products retail from $100 for dimmers and plug-in modules, to $149 for five-button in-wall controllers.

I thought the dimmers were the piece de resistance of the Monster presentation. As I told them, "You had me at the Z-Wave light switches."

But there was much, much more.