You love home cinema. But is it the luxury of having a huge screen at home or the lack of sticky floors and overpriced concessions? Most likely both of these are highly desirable. Is there a better pleasure than settling into your own custom theater for a movie at home in Snowmass after a hard day of skiing?  We think not, although a soak in the hot tub is up there too.

If you already have that home theater, you may be lacking the latest technology.  Perhaps your mountain chalet came with an existing home theater.  Maybe you put the theater in yourself some years ago, before the latest 4K HDR and immersive sound formats were available. Your setup is great, but you'd really like to upgrade to 4K to take advantage of the new high resolution streaming shows on Netflix and Ultra HD Blu-ray movies, with their much higher contrast and detail. While you have a full surround sound setup, you may have been looking into Dolby Atmos and how that can provide an even more immersive cinema experience.

If you’ve been waiting to pull the trigger on a 4K projector to upgrade your theater – and perhaps take the next step to an even more engrossing sound experience -   we have good news.  Both 4K HDR and Dolby Atmos are widely available in a variety of equipment. What’s more, the amount of 4K content has increased exponentially since the early days of the formats, with streaming movies and shows from iTunes, Vudu, Netflix, and Amazon, as well as many movie releases on Ultra HD Blu-ray discs.

Read on to learn about some custom home theater upgrade ideas for your Snowmass home. 

Music consumption has always been a function of the available technology. Before recorded music became possible with Edison’s invention of the phonograph in 1877 (yes, over a century ago), there was no music business as we know it today. The phonograph begat vinyl records and the modern recording industry. Vinyl records, using the same underlying technology as the first phonograph, are still with us, and are, in fact, enjoying a nostalgic resurgence in the past few years. After several decades, vinyl gave way to the convenience and resilience of digital CDs, and they are still with us too. Today, the most convenient way of accessing a vast library of music and listening to it anywhere – in our cars, our portable devices, and our homes – is music streaming over the Internet.

The old Apple iPod slogan of 30,000 songs in your pocket has given way to 40 million songs in the cloud that you can hear anytime, anywhere - as long as you have an Internet connection. As we know, several popular music services that offer the capability of hearing your favorite tunes on demand. But are they all just different peas in the same pod?

The short answer is that there are many similarities but also sharp differences between the popular streaming services. If you are looking to invest in a whole-house audio system in Aspen, you might want to know a little more about how they differ. The streaming technology built into most smartphones and tablets give you different options for directing music to different parts of your house, and whole house systems like those from our partner Savant make it especially easy to have the endless variety of streamed music in high-fidelity throughout your home.

Without further ado, let’s do a brief overview of five of the most popular services and some of their distinguishing traits and wrinkles.

The famous tagline "There's an App for That!" has never been more accurate. For better or worse, every year there are more devices you can manage from an app. Until now, did you even know you needed one for your air freshener? Like with most technology, it can be hard to figure out which are novelties, and which have an actual impact on your life.

As home technology experts, we’re here to help! Not only do we help you figure out which smart devices are best for your Snowmass, CO home, but we'll also help you group them together for streamlined control. Deciding which to buy will be easier once you have the right information.

Lighting is at the center of the smart home revolution and can sometimes be the most difficult to maneuver. There are a variety of bulbs and even smart plugs that let you manage individual lights from an app. In this blog, however, we're going to discuss integrated lighting controls from Lutron that give you access to ALL your lights from one device.

For a long time, the high-end audio world resisted the move toward digital formats.  When the CD ushered in the first wave of digital music, purists initially waved it off as not as warm and nuanced as analog sources, like vinyl records. Over time, high-end audio vendors created precisely engineered and crafted CD transports that matched the nature of the preamplifiers, amplifiers, and speakers in enthusiasts’ hi-fi setups. 

Streaming music is now mainstream, and even die-hard audiophiles can’t deny the convenience of calling up almost any music track on a smartphone or other digital device.  Initially, the hi-fi world also dismissed streaming and downloaded audio as inferior quality sound.  But with the advent of high-resolution music tracks also available for download and streaming, it is now easy to get the highest quality of playback ever available. 

The high-end audio market has responded to this shift.  New gear from the best names in high-end audio now combines the best in digital technology with the best in audio electronics engineering to deliver incredible hi-fi sound from all types of digital sources.  And while some audiophiles insist on all separate components for their system – preamplifiers, amplifiers, and even DACs (digital audio converters) – there are high-end systems that conveniently combine all those into one unit that still provides audiophile-class performance.

In this blog, we want to cover our partner Mark Levinson’s latest line of integrated amplifiers – uncompromising components that combine the best of digital audio convenience with top-tier performance.  Read on to see how to upgrade your high-end audio setup in Aspen with the latest in digital audio technology.