AlicePulse-Eight recently won a Smart Building Award in the category of Matrix/Signal Distribution Product Of The Year for its neo:4 Professional W/ HDCP 2.2.
“The entire factory is proud to have been awarded the Best Matrix award for 2017 and it reaffirms our commitment to the UK installer,” said Pulse-Eight’s Martin Eliis. “Our product is built with the installer in mind and we continue to innovate on new and exciting features that help with the installation and maintenance of our products.”
The flagship 4×4 HDBaseT matrix features four HDBaseT outputs, two mirrored HDMI (outputs) and the full kit includes four HDBaseT 70m Class B PoH receivers.
With the neo Alexa skill enabled on Amazon Echo or Amazon Dot, users can use voice commands to control devices connected to a neo:4 Professional matrix. Fully certified by Amazon, this integration is native to Alexa and requires no complicated set up and no third party integration.
At the core of neo is MatrixOS the beating heart of the manufacturer’s 340Mhz video processing unit, providing users with instant access to their connected source devices in Ultra HD 4K, 1080p or 3D.
“Four in, four out; that’s 16 possible combinations of your video,” said Martin. “Historically matrixes have offered remotes with eight or 16 buttons, requiring multiple presses to get video to the TV you’re watching. We thought this was an odd solution, given you already know which room you are in, so should the matrix! Our designers did away with this old concept and instead created Contextual IR, this reduces the number of buttons to just four, one for each possible input. Whatever room you’re in, select one, two, three, four and watch that source instantly.
“But then we asked, why use IR at all? Most TVs now support CEC, we are world experts in CEC technology with our libCEC and USB-CEC Adapters, so we’ve baked that technology into neo. Now you can just use your normal TV remote and press the ‘Source’ key, each of your input devices will be listed and just select the one you want and the matrix will route the video automatically, even if the source does not support CEC itself. If however, the source device does not support CEC, then you can continue to control it via your remote control as neo will automatically relay the necessary messages to your source device.”
Martin continues: “By designing and building our products ourselves means our support structure is second to none: If a customer calls with a question, they are going to be able to be put through to someone who either physically made the product or one of those who designed it. By speaking to someone involved in the process, there is no waiting 24 hours for a response to an email, we are on hand ready to help.
“It’s important that you get video all the time, to help us do that every neo professional matrix keeps in contact with our cloud management service. You can tell if this is working with the Monitored LED on the front of the matrix. If you get stuck, your installer or yourself can log into our cloud portal and see helpful diagnosis information (if you let them), fix problems remotely or tell you where you may have gone wrong in the installation and best of all this is free of charge and included with every matrix.”