My Caavo Control Center was dying and my decade-old Harmony was not in the best shape either, so I decided it was time to replace the remotes in both of my systems. With both Harmony and Caavo gone, the only game left in town without going down the pro-installer rabbit hole is Sofabaton.
The x1s is their third generation product and I must say that I'm impressed. This thing is easily on-par with any Harmony I ever used and I actually prefer their mobile app and overall setup experience. As with the Harmony, the hub is an IR blaster with two emitter outputs. It come with two emitters, but they are individual component style rather than blasters. For now, I opted to just keep the emitters I had in place. They were compatible and there was no drama.
Tonight, I set up the family room system. That is the one with the custom cabinet I designed and the custom speaker system Franklin built for it. The speakers are WiSA and operate via a wireless transmitter designed to run off HDMI Arch. The Caavo Control Center had an integrated HDMI switch, which I obviously no longer have. I picked up a pretty nice one from Amazon with discrete on/off and direct input selectors, making it ideal for this application. Manually adding the IR codes from the switch's remote to the Sofabaton was very easy and a lot less of a hassle than what I had to deal with on the Harmony.
The sources plug into the switch. The switch plugs into the TV. The TV's HDMI ARC output plugs into the WiSA transmitter. Volume and mute are controlled via the TV. It is the only way to set things up using this transmitter, but it works well and takes up very little space. I've had zero issues with the remote operating this mess. Everything just works.
If you need a new remote, I highly recommend giving the Sofabaton x1s a try.
