If radio is the “theater of the mind” as its millions of proponents suggest, then picture this: building a custom-made home entertainment center with HD video and audio as its focal points and no wires to be found anywhere — and doing it all on the radio.
The “In the House” radio show, a decade-old program aired on WFLA-AM in Orlando, Fla., first got some potential listeners’ attention by demolishing an existing two bedroom cottage and vowing to build a replacement house in its place. And a big part of the project was a “mandate” that the new main entertainment center was to be located in the living room, hard-wired for 5.1 surround sound, with an eye-level, wall-mounted, large flat-panel HD panel — using no visible wiring or cabling for power, audio and video.
Also, the garage was to be hard-wired for a wall-mounted TV to allow dual-viewing of HD in both the living room and garage, according to Gefen, which makes HD cables and splitters and made these and others its HD-centric products available to the show.
Following installation of a new audio/video system during the radio coverage, a main goal was to avoid post-installation drilling or cutting into the finished drywall to run cables. So the radio co-hosts synchronized the garage’s A/V system to the living room in order to keep costs down — thus allowing the option of viewing the same HD content in the garage and living room without using two cable boxes. This shared viewing was enabled (not surprisingly) by a Gefen 1:2 Splitter for HDMI v1.3. (Two long Gefen HDMI cables were hard-wired into the walls for HD connectivity.)
After the in-wall wiring was complete, the drywall was mounted and the audio/video installation was completed. And listeners got to “see” it all on the radio.
