Bold Engineering 2013: 30 Most Innovative Products

Dec 26, 2013 10:54 AM

Two Decembers ago, the editors of Sound & Video Contractor started doing an annual recap of 30 innovative products that we had noticed in their travels through the course of the year. Innovation could mean a lot of things—from years of R&D to a stroke of inspiration, and we acknowledged both mechanical innovations and electronic ones.

This year, we opened our process up to readers for the first time. You responded in the thousands, voting to choose the most innovative from among more than 60 submitted products. Thank you to everyone who participated in honoring the work of designers, engineers, and manufacturing technicians through this program.

To be eligible for this award, products must have been designed for the professional AV market and have shipped between Oct. 15, 2012, and Oct. 15, 2013.

The top 30 products are the ones that received the most votes irrespective of category. Therefore voters chose multiple products in some categories. This allowed for the possibility that a given category may have been particularly strong this year—as we saw with signal processing products.

As always, we thank the engineers and technicians who designed and built these products. It would be impossible to advance the AV industry without their creativity and dedication.

THIS YEAR’S WINNERS:

Prysm TD2 Laser Phosphor Display Tile

Crestron AV3 3-Series Control System

Symetrix Radius AEC DSP

Mackie DLM Powered Loudspeaker Series

QSC PLD/CXD Series Amplifiers

Stewart Filmscreen FireHawk G4

Crestron 128X128 DigitalMedia Switcher

RGB Spectrum OmniWall 16/32 Display Processor

Panasonic PT-DZ870U DLP Projector

ClearOne Beamforming Microphone Array

Revolabs Executive HD MaxSecure Wireless Microphone System