Press Release: ITC One from SE2 Labs: Audio, Video, Xbox, AMX, Tuners, Power Protection, More

(Edited: Original story said dual Xbox 360s. In fact, it includes one Xbox 360 and one Xbox 360 HD DVD Player)

The ITC One from SE2 Labs combines name-brand A/V components, Xbox 360s, iPod dock, AMX automation, TV tuners and more into one compact box that puts most home theater equipment racks to shame.

It's like a six-foot-tall A/V rack boiled down to a single box measuring 18 x 21 x 19 inches, or 11 rack units high (although it's not rack-mountable CORRECTION: Rack ears are available).

Weighing 100 to 125 pounds, the ITC is packed with everything needed to operate an elaborate home theater, including motorized drapes and lights.

Inside the snazzy console are all of the electronics that typically comprise an A/V rack, but without the extraneous cases, buttons and connectors. You get a surround-sound receiver, preamp, amplifier, video processor, video iPod dock, power conditioning, cable and satellite TV tuners, a PVR, A/V cables, an Xbox 360 + Xbox 360 HD DVD, and a control system to manage it all.

And these aren't run-of-the-mill components. The pieces come from name-brand, high-end manufacturers like Vidikron, Bryston, Transparent Audio and AMX.

The ITC is configured and programmed to order at the SE2 Labs. Just take it out of the box, connect the speakers, a display, and maybe a couple of contacts, plug in the power cord, and go.

All of this for the low price of about $20,000 (for starters). Not bad, if you consider that all of the gear separately, plus a rack, plus the cabling could cost three or four times that much. And that doesn't include the extra time for installation and programming, and the repeat service calls (always during holidays and in the middle of the night) that a traditional system entails.

The Little Things That Make ITC Cool

Before getting to the nitty gritty -- like how SE2 can cram so much stuff into one box without it blowing up -- let's get right to the good stuff.

In his previous life as an integrator, SE2 founder Mike Pyle spent months in various home theaters researching things that drive consumers batty. "We had a list of about 300 problems concerning usability, serviceability, installation, etc.," he says. Many of those problems are solved with the ITC.

Here are some of the little things that make the product especially lovable:

• A system-wide on/off button is located at the front of the unit so all of the gear can easily be turned off. "One issue we found is when people have a problem with something like a satellite receiver, they [tech support] tell you to unplug the receiver," Pyle says. "If it's mounted in a rack, how do you get back there?"



• A power outlet is located on the front of the ITC. If you want to plug in a camcorder that is probably dead because you used up the batteries on your vacation, you don't have to hunt for a power outlet and extension cord. Duh. If the video inputs are there, why shouldn't the power be, too?



• A plaque on the front of the unit shows the serial number and contact information. You don't have to pull out any components to find it.



• There are four status lights on the front of the chassis monitoring connections to the Internet, telephone service, television service and the local network. If the system goes awry, you know where to look. "If Comcast loses a signal, you get real-time feedback that it [the problem] is external," Pyle says. Not that that ever happens.



• Press a button on the front of the ITC if you lose the remote and follow the beeps.

How Does it All Fit into One Small Box?

First, a little history: Pyle has been in the home systems industry for about 14 years. He owned a home systems installation business in Salt Lake City, which eventually became Aurant, a leading integration firm in the area.

Naturally, during that time, he became cozy with many of the leading manufacturers in the home theater and automation business.

He was able to get them to supply the boards for the ITC -- no cases, no individual remote controls, no fans, no nothing, just the boards.



"We went to manufacturers like Vidikron and said, 'You have a great video processor, but I'm not going to pay six grand for it,'" Pyle says.

He thinks it's a little silly to have piles of boxes stacked on top of each other taking up so much real estate when so much of the stuff is redundant. And it's sillier still to have to pay for it all.

"Every component is a universal box," he says. "Each box has to have its own user interface, buttons, inputs and outputs and remote controls. In a home theater there might be 400 possible buttons and 300 inputs and outputs. Why pay for all of these if you're not using them?"

It isn't the DVD player, for example, that costs so much. It's the trappings -- the case, the buttons, the connectors, the remote control.

SE2 eliminated all of that by using only the PCB boards from Vidikron, Bryston and AMX, among others. Transparent Audio built a customized wiring harness for the innards, and provides power management for the ITC. As for Xbox, Pyle just buys those and strips off the plastic and other extraneous parts. It's amazing how small a machine you can build with a little bit of consolidation.

With ITC, Pyle says, "You're only buying one box that has one user interface and one set of inputs and outputs."

He likens his solution to a PC, where everything you need is in a single box. If computers were built like home theater systems, you'd have one box for storage, one for audio processing, one for video, one for the operating system, etc. People would have to mix and match and assemble the parts and buy a costly rack to put them in.

"We [the home systems industry] are asking people to buy a bunch of pieces that don't go together, and we end up with a clunky mess."

Why Doesn't it Overheat?

The very first and most complicated problem in developing the ITC was overheating. Back when Pyle was researching all those home theaters, he sought the causes of system failures.

"It turns out that heat is a major reason for product failure," he says.

And one major reason for overheating -- regardless of how many fans you stick in your A/V rack -- is the horizontal orientation of the components. With components stacked on top of each other, heat cannot escape, even when the individual units have built-in fans.

"DirecTV has a fan, but that fan blows hot air from the back into the chassis," says Pyle. "That can short-circuit it. …The air flow is fighting natural convection."

The problem is exponentially more difficult for the ITC since it packs so much technology within a single box. You might have 1800 watts in there. Normally all of that energy is spread out a across an entire rack with multiple gaps for breathing room.

To mitigate this problem, SE2 built its products with the "components" -- the boards -- aligned vertically. "Cool air comes in the bottom and goes out the top and it can't go back into the box," Pyle says.

Problem #1 solved. Problem #2: This architecture can be noisy.

There's nothing worse than a home theater experience being interrupted by the whirring of fans in the components.

SE2 devised a chassis where a two-inch gap at the bottom of the ITC lets air into the vents. The air goes through a series of acoustical baffles that muffle the internal fans. At the exhaust end (the top) is another set of baffles and a generous space for warm air to escape.

"It can move a ton of air and do it quietly," Pyle says.

The fans are computer-controlled so they are infinitely variable. A temperature sensor tells the fans when to ramp up and down. "There's just a slow, consistent change in speed so you won't hear it kick in like other fans," says Pyle. On the exhaust vent, a glowing light changes colors to reflect the temperature of the box.

Audio & Video

The video processor comes from Vidikron's highly regarded VDP-80, and manages all of the various video sources including iPods, Xbox 360s, and TV service.

You can bring your own display device, but if you choose a Vidikron projector, "they customize them for us," Pyle says. "We have all of these video inputs like iPods and the Xbox 360, and the scaler optimizes them for whatever the output needs to be."

Pyle says that even iPod video looks pretty impressive after Vidikron is through with it.

SE2 preconfigures the ITC at the factory for whatever TV service the customer has. "We can even set up the sources with customer information so they don't need to call DirecTV," Pyle says.

When a system is upgraded or a cable/satellite card is changed, the system reconfigures itself, Pyle says. Newly released cards will need drivers from the Internet, or SE2 can send a Compact Flash card with the new drivers loaded. "The end user or installer does not have to configure anything," Pyle says.

For PVR capabilities, the ITC currently supports DirecTV HD PVR, Dish Network HD PVR, and Comcast HD PVR. More are on the way.

Alternatively, you could tap into a Media Center PC on the network and access it through the onboard Xbox 360, giving you full access to the Media Center's PVR (and pictures, and music…).

As for audio, the surround sound processor is the SP-2 from Bryston. SE2 uses ICEPower digital amps, the likes of which are used by Rotel and other leading brands.

Naturally you can bring your own speakers, but SE2 has worked with Triad to create a system that is optimized for the ITC. "We have all the configurations like EQ set up to match the speakers," Pyle says.

The Controls

The ITC is as close to plug-and-play as you can get. The customer specifies the configuration and SE2 does the rest -- activating the drivers and loading in the scenes.

"There's no need for macros," Pyle says. "Everything just works the way it should. We have taken thousands of hours of research and experience to program the system to work the right way. If you have a motorized screen and you choose a video source, then the screen comes down."

A trigger for controlling screens and screen-masking are already incorporated into the box.

A "Room Light" button on the handheld remote can send a trigger to a third-party lighting control system to activate a scene. Pyle says ZigBee light switches are on the way.

Most of the communications to third-party systems happens through triggers, but SE2 does accommodate RS-232 when serial communications is required.

The two questions every one will ask: Do you have to be an AMX dealer? No. Can you incorporate it into your whole-house AMX system? Sort of.

The ITC really is meant to be a one-room home theater system and SE2 wants to keep it simple and reliable. For that reason, the company will not let dealers program the onboard AMX processor. Integrators can control the system, with "limited functionality," through an external RS-232 port using any serial communicating control system.

SE2 just wants to keep it as simple as possible -- so simple that there are only two ways to control the system: through a ZigBee-enabled RF remote and the touchscreen on the face of the ITC.

The remote does not control any components directly. It issues commands to the ZigBee-enabled AMX NetLinx, which gets all of the other pieces to do their thing.

Pyle is very proud of the handheld remote (it's "way cool") so let's give the product its own section.

The Handheld Remote

The remote has no LCD screen, just hard buttons. Every single one of the buttons lights up in the dark, which Pyle says is a unique feature. "I couldn't find one remote [on the market] where all the buttons light up," he says.

Lighting up, unfortunately, consumes precious battery life, but SE2 mitigates the power consumption problem. The remote has both a motion sensor and a light sensor. If the remote is handled, the buttons light up according to the ambient light conditions. If it's bright, the buttons stay dark. If it's pitch black, they light up 100 percent. If it's somewhere in between, the buttons dim and brighten accordingly.

The back lighting on the volume toggle is color-coded so you know where you are on the volume scale. If it's green, the volume is low; red is really loud. There are gradations throughout the volume spectrum. "People sometimes have a setting they like," says Pyle. Sort of like the Sleep Number bed.

Pyle shuns rechargeable batteries, opting for AAs instead. Not to worry, there is a battery indicator on the back of the remote -- just push a button to see how much battery life is left. Pyle says the unit is built to accommodate rechargeable batteries so that may be an option down the line. He says the AAs will last for about six months, "which is longer than an Xbox 360 wireless remote."

Pyle says the remote is "very, very strong" and water resistant.

And don't forget, if you lose it, just press the button on the ITC console and follow the beeps.

SE2: The Business

Pyle sold his stake in Aurant in 2005 to found SE2, although he and his former colleagues had been working on an all-purpose box for years.

A prototype ITC was shown to a few dealers in January 2006, where feedback was "phenomenal," according to Pyle.

Some local Salt Lake City integrators have installed the product already, but SE2 will make its official debut at the CEDIA Expo, where the company will begin accepting dealer applications. "We don't see a problem with market demand," Pyle says. "It's about how fast we want to grow."

He anticipates selling about 500 units in 2008.

Four people including Pyle work full time at SE2, but the company also works with about 30 contractors. Pyle expects to have about 15 full-time employees by CEDIA. The company has 11 patents.

The next product in the line will be a cheaper box in a plastic case -- ideal for classrooms and boardrooms, Pyle thinks. He does not anticipate coming down much in the home theater market; in fact, a higher-end solution, maybe in the neighborhood of $30,000, would be the next extension in the ITC line.

SE2 has gone through a couple rounds of funding and now has a larger VC on board.

The Good & Bad of a Theater-in-a-Box

The SE2 -- and the effort that went into it -- is a remarkable achievement; however, this product isn't for everybody. The purists will want to pick their own components and customize their own remote controls, probably one with a touchscreen or at least an LCD display. (No, the touchscreen on the ITC chassis is not removable for use, just for servicing.)

Many dealers will want to incorporate the ITC into a whole-house system, but you really can't. If the doorbell rings, you can't get a picture of the visitor in a PIP on the screen.

There really is very little tweaking that integrators can do on their own.

Then again, that's the beauty of the system, which can solve so many problems for integrators: dealing with dozens of different vendors, even getting access to certain vendors, storing piles of components, building racks, dealing with discrete codes, crimping cables, and generally getting everything to work. The ITC just works. SE2 burns in every system for 36 hours before shipping it.

Many integrators will see the complete integration as a margin-killer. Cables, racks, fans, remotes, and programming can be a nice boost to the bottom line. But what dealers lose in accessory sales, they gain in higher-volume installations. What's more, if the home theater electronics are only $20,000 total, the client can put more money into higher-end screens, furniture and acoustical panels -- things that don't tend to break.

In addition, dealers will save plenty in the service department. They won't get calls because a cable disconnects from a component. They won't get blamed when the Internet goes down. They won't have to fret about a system overheating.

And here's a good one: How hard is it to find good A/V installers? With the ITC, you won't need so many of them to install and troubleshoot a system.

If there is a problem with a system, SE2 can tap in remotely, diagnose the problem and fix it. If they can't fix it, now that's a problem. The company voids a lot of warranties with the ITC. Pyle says SE2 itself warranties the system for five years.

So what if SE2 goes out of business? That's a whole lot worse than if the manufacturer of your broken A/V receiver goes away. Just buy a new receiver. Putting so much faith into a non self-serviceable system could frighten more than a few integrators.

Bottom line: If I were an integrator, I'd sleep a whole lot better the night before the Superbowl if my customers had integrated home theaters where little can go wrong.