The Escient FP-1 iPod docking station provides all the functionality and management features that you should expect from a Fireball. Multiple custom install features allow for a seamless integration of an iPod into any home automation project. An iPod can now become a music server that distributes all audio content throughout the home, and makes it suitable for the most demanding multi room audio installations.

Escient’s FP-1 can stream music from any Fireball music server and even a PC, without a docked iPod. Other Escient music servers that are part of the same network can access and play music stored on the iPod, including songs purchased from the iTunes store.

An IP and RS232 port offer wired control capabilities for other third party home automation control systems like AMX and Philips. The graphic user interface provided displays the artist, album, song title, and even the album’s cover. The Escient FP-1 supports and streams multiple audio formats, ensuring the highest quality possible from any audio system. 

It has already been discussed that in home cinema installations the measure of reverberation time is actually the time it takes the sound to fall by 60 dB. This is not particularly relevant psychoacoustically, and it is also very difficult to measure in situ. This is due to the presence of background noise in the home cinema room, either unwanted or the music being played, which often results in less than 60 dB of energy decay before the decay sound becomes less than the residual noise in the environment.

Even in the quieter environment of a Victorian town in the days before road traffic, Sabine had to do measurements, using his ears, at night to avoid the results being affected by the level of background noise. Because we rarely hear a full reverberant decay, our ears and brains have adapted, quite logically, to focus on what can be heard. Thus we are more sensitive to the effects of the first 20 to 30 dB of the reverberant decay curve, the 60 dB reverberation is directly proportional to the earlier curves and so this should not cause any problems when measuring in custom dedicated home cinema installations.

However, if the curve of a home cinema room is of the double-slope form, then this simple relationship is broken. The net result is that, although the T60 reverberation time of the home cinema may be an appropriate value, because of the faster early decay to below 30 dB we perceive the cinema’s reverberation as being shorter than it really is. The psychoacoustic effect of this is that the dedicated home cinema sounds ‘drier’ than one would expect from a simple measurement of T60.

Modern home cinema designers therefore worry much more about the early decay time (EDT) than they used to when designing dedicated home cinema systems.