Photograph by Douglas Rider
Steve Ehrsam is president of Audio Arts; he recently moved his showroom
to Big Basin Way.
Audio Arts lets customers get feel of realistic theater
By Rebecca Ray
Saratogans no longer have to travel to San Jose to see Audio Arts theater systems.
On Nov. 1, Audio Arts moved from San Jose to 14419 Big Basin Way and began a three-year lease. Inside the 300-square-foot location is a home theater system with seats that move during action-packed scenes in movies.
The setup of the home theater system allows customers to see what Audio Arts, an authorized dealer for about 400 different lines of audio and video equipment, can install in homes and how technology can be used in a useful, noncomplicated manner, company president Steve Ehrsam said.
Inside the building, four theater-style seats face a 50-inch screen and are attached to a kinetic motion machine that makes the seats move. The seats move in accordance with a DVD video when a CD-ROM inside the kinetic motion machine reads the DVD. The equipment manager of the Odyssee kinetic motion machine has written software for 50 movie titles.
A person can play a DVD by touching the LCD touch screen on the wall. With the LCD touch screen, a person can bring up one of several screens, each screen performing a different function. While one screen can be used to play DVDs, another screen can be used to control an audio distribution system that allows a person to hear music throughout his or her house. People can use other screens to control lighting, preview TV channels, view what a surveillance camera is picking up and control alarm systems.
Behind the seats are "invisible" speakers, which are hidden in the sheet rock wall. Below the screen are subwoofers, speakers that allow listeners to hear and feel low-frequency bass sounds, and transducers, speakers in which the sound comes through the seats and makes them vibrate. Both subwoofers and transducers are used in movie theaters.
The interior of the shop looks like a movie theater, with movie posters hanging from a wall and lamps hanging between the posters. Behind the seats are two gold posts with a black rope suspended between them.
In addition to installing custom home electronics, the 11 graphic designers, computer programmers, project managers and specialty construction contractors at Audio Arts build physical surroundings with motifs, such as Egyptian and 1920s motifs.
Other products Audio Arts sells include popcorn machines, three-pound projectors that fit under coffee tables and inside drawers and CDme, a product developed by Ehrsam and Jeroem Sumners, a software developer in the Netherlands. CDme keeps track of where CDs and CD covers are, and allows the user to locate a CD even when it's in the wrong case.
As systems designer for the company, Ehrsam designs lighting, space and floor plans for homes. He founded the company in his Saratoga residence about 10 years ago. Ehrsam, who had earned a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Santa Clara University, taken interior design courses at West Valley College, set up audio systems and written computer and house control programs, thought it would be nice to program one system that ran many things, instead of multiple systems that ran different things. When the company Crestron manufactured a control system, Ehrsam thought it could be used as a home theater system, since a control system could create a movie-like experience by synchronizing light and sound, as opposed to just amplifying sound as would a loud TV. So Ehrsam started a company that installed control systems as home theater systems. He called the company Montalvo Interior Audio, after the street he lived on, until he changed the name to Audio Arts in 1995.
When Ehrsam moved to San Jose, he moved Audio Arts there with him. But the company outgrew its location, and Ehrsam wanted to be closer to the customer base, so he moved the company back to Saratoga, and the store opened at its new location on Dec. 7.
Saratoga, California Since 1955
