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NHI DREAM HOME | HOME THEATRE



BY PAUL COOK/PHOTOS BY RAY STRAWBRIDGE
WINTER 2005 ISSUE

What’s the use of owning a dream home if Saturday night rolls around and you have to pack the family in the SUV and head to the local multiplex theater?

Those days are over if down the hall, you happen to have a state-of-the-art home theater installed by Audio Advice.

Audio Advice president Leon Shaw says it was an honor to be a part of the project. “There’s no doubt that the NHI Dream Home theater room is a winner,” says Shaw. “The 100-inch diagonal screen is from Stewart and they are the only audio/video company to have actually won an Academy Award for a product. Their screens have won two Oscars and are used in movie theaters all over the world.”

Along with the state-of-the-art screen, the theater’s projector, sound processor, amplifier, disc player and speakers are also high performance components. You might think all this sophisticated equipment would entail spending hours looking through a stack of manuals and puzzling over a pile of remotes to get the latest blockbuster up and running. Not so says Shaw. “If I put every remote out there from this system, you would have a table full of remote controls,” says Shaw.

“We have developed a way to program these touch screen remotes so it’s graphically very easy to understand. The first screen lets you choose to watch a DVD, watch TV or play a CD. You just push a button and it sets everything up properly. There’s also a lights button which takes you to a lighting page that lets you dim or raise the theater’s lights. The TV page has icons for the channels so you see the logo for CBS or NBC. It’s incredibly simple to use and one remote controls the whole show.”

And don’t worry if the kids have commandeered the home theater to watch “Finding Nemo” for the 36th time because Audio Advice made sure you would never be too far from an entertainment source. There is a 44-inch, rear projection TV in the family room and three 42-inch plasma monitors are scattered about the house. The master bath sports a Sharp LCDTV, and in case the chief wants to catch the Cooking Channel, there is an LCD with a built-in DVD player in the kitchen.

If you can’t find anything you want to watch, you can always tune into the whole-house audio system. Shaw says the LCD key pads make it a snap to operate. “If you were to push FM, it would start the radio playing on whatever previous radio preset you were on,” says Shaw. “But you can jump to a page that will give you a choice of different station numbers.” Shaw says it is also versatile enough so that if someone in the family room wants to listen to a CD they can while a person upstairs is listening to the radio.

In business since 1978, Shaw says he started Audio Advice with the goal of figuring out what’s best for the customer and suiting their needs. He adds that over the years the company has gotten into whatever excites him.

“About 10 years ago I got really excited about lighting controls and we dove into that and have been very successful,” says Shaw. “If you look on my desk right now I have three different remote controls taken apart that I’m playing around with—I just love the toys. We love to figure out how to take the complexity of this gear and make it easy to use and at the same time make it perform better than it probably would if you took it home and set it up yourself. It’s kind of like taking a stock car and turning it into a hot rod and figuring out how to make it drive itself.”

There’s no doubt that the movie industry is booming and that people love DVDs. Shaw says that home theater is on a definite growth curve as well as whole house audio and lighting control.

“I’ve got three kids and it’s appealing to me to know that my teenage daughter and her friends are hanging out at our house to watch movies,” says Shaw. “And our home theater brings us together to watch movies. When you have a really good sound system along with that great picture, you just get so much more enveloped in the film.” ▪

PAUL COOK IS A FREELANCE WRITER FROM CARY.

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