I'm considering the Escient SE-D1 or the Control 4 for controlling the Sony 775ES multi-disc player. I have a Sound Advice (Tweeter) store nearby and they carry both systems. Which one is the most reliable???? The SE-D1 goes for $1000 bucks and the Contol 4 for $700.00

Thanks

prspark

i am also having a similar debate-
which route did you go?

i think the control4 give you more for the money..

you use the sony changer and for the same $$$ or less you get light control with control4.

have you seen any drawbacks to control4?

I have not used the Escient SE-D1 but I do have a Control4 System (HTC based) and it has worked excellent thus far.

It gives you a great deal more options if you ever want to do lighting control and/or whole home automation.

The advantage of the SE-D1 is it will work out of the box. With C4, your dealer will have to set it up for you and your experience may vary depending on the competency of your installer/programmer. You can manage your own Media, after the components have been setup in composer. Also there is recent software ComposerHE that allows the end user a great deal of system control.

In the last demo I saw, you needed to manually add DVD'd to the control 4 database. Has that changed?

With the Escient, you just drop the DVD's in the changer and it figures it all out for you.

I've been watching Control 4 since CES 04, they've got some neat products but there is an apple to oranges difference when looking at media servers. At least from the demo's I've seen.

jberger,

Yes, Control4 scans the discs automatically, uses network connection to retrieve cover art and details about all the movies in the changer. If it does not find a DVD automatically, then you search for it within ComposerMedia or ComposerHE. When the cover art is found, you drag and drop it on the UNKNOWN slot.

One other point in favor of the Escient, and I've confirmed it with their tech support folks. The SE-D1 can also act as a music manager/server.

There is one signifigant caveat, but I suspect it wont be an issue for many, myself included: You need to have a pc/mac/fileserver running fireball-pc to actually host the files.

With the D1 and a PC, you have a full featured audio and video server with the great Escient user interface. And it only costs $999 retail.

Please take this with a grain of salt, I havent tried it yet. I will be starting a new thread in a minute asking for experience with my particular planned config. but thought I'd add this here.

Don

p.s. for me, having the music on another device was a plus. I currently have 600 gb of raid 5 disc that is on its own UPS (despite a whole house surge protector being in place) and automatically backed up every couple of nights. So I'd rather add any new data to this pile of disks.