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Simplifying Life Through Technology
SoundVision LLC is a lifestyle technology company located in Mooresville, North Carolina. We interview vendors, clients and staff with the purpose of demystifying the capabilties of new technologies for your home or business and sometimes highlighting local content that is important to our community.
Simplifying Life Through Technology
Control4: X4
On this episode of “SoundVision Tech Talks,” Mark and Andrew sit down to discuss Control4's new Operating System X4.
Forget juggling a dozen smart-home apps just to lock a door, dim a light, or check a camera. We dive into Control4’s X4 and show how it turns scattered devices into a single, intuitive control center, complete with a customizable home screen, live camera tiles, and active “sessions” you can manage at a glance. The result is less tapping and more living—whether you’re a power user who wants granular control or a casual user who wants everything important on one screen.
We go deep into routines, the standout feature that lets you automate everyday moments without a service call. Want your home to wake with you at dawn—shades rising, lights easing up, HVAC leaving sleep mode? Prefer a “goodnight” triggered by turning off the bedroom TV that locks doors, tunes climate, lowers shades, and shuts down the basement? We share practical setups for lighting scenes, ramp rates, color temperature, motion-based night paths, thermostat setbacks, and geofencing so your house adjusts as you arrive or leave. It’s real-world automation that feels natural.
You’ll also hear how X4 plays well with Apple AirPlay for effortless audio and HomeKit integration for those who love native controls. We also discuss Control4's older OS timelines. OS2 sunsets in 2026, OS3 will continue working, but OS2 will not. X4 is the leap that makes daily use faster and smarter. If you’re wondering whether to upgrade, we outline the benefits and mention current promotions on controllers and hardware so you can plan your upgrade with confidence.
If you’re ready to simplify your smart home controls, consider upgrading your Control4 OS system to X4 today!
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All right, let's talk some X4. Control 4, X4. Yeah, so today we'll be discussing Control 4's newest operating system, X4.
SPEAKER_00:So, you know, I I realize that we've been doing a lot of interview stuff. I I feel kind of like uh we're an interview show.
SPEAKER_01:I know, right? Yes, some awesome guests, but there have been a lot.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and so we uh we really want to kind of get back to the ethos of technology and providing some some uh input on some of the new tech that's out there in our world and the world of automation. Control 4 being our primary uh control platform uh that we utilize here at Soundvision, and they have had their new launch of their new um uh skin and app uh that uh interfaces with all the goodies in your home or place of business, and that is called X4.
SPEAKER_01:It is kind of similar to how on your iPhone you update your operating system.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it it doesn't happen quite as often uh in the world. Excuse me, I have had something in my throat here for the last hour, but I think I'm good now. Uh we'll see as we go along. Uh maybe we should back up just a little bit. So uh I would think that the majority of our listeners would be comfortable uh recognizing that you use apps on your phone for all kinds of things. Uh it could be a door lock, it could be a thermostat, it could be an alarm system, uh, it could be an audio video system. You know, everybody has an app. Uh heck, I just found out last actually, I was just at our house, my house, uh, which I go to fairly regularly, but I didn't realize that there was literally an app for our LG refrigerator. Is there really? There is an LGIQ is an app. Now it's just not not just for the refrigerator, it's for all LG stuff.
SPEAKER_01:Okay.
SPEAKER_00:Uh and I had we have an LG TV, and so I was I was looking at that just to see how it works. And I recognized that you could add a device, and the refrigerator was a device you could add. And I said, wow, this is kind of crazy. And sure enough, there's a QR code right inside the refrigerator, and you scan the QR code and it adds it, and it tells you things like you're like, well, why would you? Yeah, I was gonna say, what is it telling you? Well, it tells you things like what temperature the refrigerator's at, which you can change. Same with the freezer, uh, same with uh re uh restocking, refilling, and time for the water filters. Most, most, if not all, modern refrigerators have potentially two filters in them. They've got a water filter and they've got an air purifier filter for for you know uh for smells. And it it can tell you, remind you, just like an air filter in your house. So I was like, wow, that's kind of cool. So, anyways, back to the premise. So you have all these different apps and they all work fine, you know, and so you can it's called app jumping. You can go from one to the other, to the other, to the other. The control platforms that we use offer two major benefits. I mean, it all they offer a ton of benefits, but there's two major ones. Number one is you can consolidate all of these or the majority, if if not all of these apps into one app. So you don't have to app jump. And that's what the control for X4 platform does. It allows you to bring in your security system, your door lock system, your thermostat, your uh television, all that stuff is under one app. So you can go in and you control all that together. That's one major benefit. Now, some people like don't mind the app jumping, they're fine with that. Some people like it all in one place. That's just a personal preference, right? But the second huge benefit is that now they are all kind of tied together. So imagine you can do things, and this is where automation and smart home comes in. You can do things inside the control four app, both manually and automatically, that can then trigger these other apps individually. So let me be specific. Here's a real easy one. The real easy one is time. So let's say dawn and dust, just to, but it could be any time, doesn't matter. Dawn and dusk. So at dawn, which by the way changes every day, right? Someday, you know, the the as the sun moves, right? It's it comes, dawn is earlier and later. Uh at dawn, certain things can happen. Uh, your thermostat can go from the sleep mode to the day mode. Uh your uh, you know, your your lighting can change as you wake up, your shades can go up or down, or the veins open, like I have in our room, which is really cool. Um, all these things happen just based on the fact that it was dawn, but that is inside the control four app. The control four is kind of the brain, it's also kind of the translator. Imagine each one of these things talks like a different language, and the control four piece is the translator for all the different languages. So it can say, oh, when dawn happens, I need to tell the shades to go up and I need to tell the alarm to turn off, or whatever you want it to be. And then at dusk, it's uh it could be the exact opposite, it could be a whole new set of stuff, and so you can do that based on time, but that's the that's like the tip of the iceberg because you could do it based on any event. So anytime you touch something, voice control something, something changes, anything, it can trigger anything else. So imagine you turn off your TV, and that's in but only in your bedroom, but only at night, it will trigger an entire night event. Uh shades going down, thermostat changing, doors locking, lights turning off in the basement, but not upstairs. All that stuff happens through the magic of the automation platform. And in this case, we're talking about control four, X4. Not the only one out there, but that is the uh that's the one that we use primarily. So now we get what X4 is. X4 is the actual app that's on the phone. So imagine you open up your control four app, and that's the skin that's on there. And what control four has done in this iteration uh is really incredible. It's taken a lot of the uh technology, a lot of the automation, and it's given it to the customer in a very easy, logical, laid-out fashion. So, for example, you have a home screen. When you and actually you would think, well, gosh, shouldn't every app like have a home screen, right? Like you would think. You would think, and and I guess they have, but they've been very rudimentary, they've been slow to kind of catch up. Well, X4 takes a seismic leap here, and on your home screen, you can have everything that is the most that are the most common things that you use, and you can decide what's there. So you can have camera uh uh uh live camera feeds that you can literally see in real time as soon as you open the app. You don't have to go to the camera portion, you don't have to like drill down into camera. Here's the four that I want, here's the one that I want. You can just put that one right on the home screen. You can have your door locks, you can have your temp your uh thermostat, you can have all your thermostats. Uh, you know, you can do anything on the home screen that you want. And what's cool is that from that home screen, as you're using it, when you open it, if you have a session going, what's a session? Uh, let's say you start music in the living room or you start your TV in your bedroom. That's a session. So I've started that. So whatever sessions are on, they like show at the bottom. So you don't have to drill into that particular room if you don't want to. You can, but if you don't want to, it's right there. So you can change the volume, you can turn it off, whatever, without leaving the home screen. That's really cool. So yeah, it's it's really, really cool. The with the uh it supports widgets, so you have, you know, they can be different sizes. Um, so it's just it's very user-friendly and um it it works well with the users. Yeah, it allows a lot of personal customization, and that's a great segue because personal customization is the next thing that I would bring up. So in X4, they call them routines. Uh there's you know different words for them, but but that's but routines is essentially something that you want to happen in a sequence over and over and over. So one of the biggest uh complaints that we've had over the years is we have a lot of customers that love this stuff, but they get it in their home or their place of business and they want to make a change. And they the the the classic complaint is well, we got to call you to come out and do programming. Or in the recent years, it's been remote programming, but they still have to pay us to do programming. And in some cases, it's just really minor changes, and they're like, man, you know, the the return on the investment. Uh we gotta call them and they gotta do it, and then we gotta pay them. And it's well inconvenient. It's it's inconvenient, yes. So through the the magic of the new app X4, you have the ability to do a lot of routines uh that are very commonly asked for by customers. Most common ones, lighting changes. Lighting changes comes up all the time. You know, when when uh uh the lion's share of our customers, especially with new construction, not only, but a lot of the new construction. We're doing what's called automated or panelized or whole home lighting. And there's a lot of benefits to that. Uh, you know, uh lighting at what we call wall acne. Um just you imagine you go into a kitchen and you have like six light switches there and they do all kinds of different things, but you never remember. You're there like 10, 15 minutes.
SPEAKER_01:No, you feel like half of them don't even work. You just you just throw them all on. Yeah, all on and off. See what works.
SPEAKER_00:But that that huge bank of switches happens at the front door a lot of times too. Where we come in and we put in one elegant keypad, it's backlit, it's engraved, it's it's scene driven. So there's a cooking scene instead of you know, you gotta turn on these six lights. There's an entertainment scene, there's a nighttime scene, there's a pathway, like all kinds of things can happen. People love it. I mean, love it. Once they've experienced it or once they've seen it in our experience center, they're like, wow, I need that. Crazy. Yeah. So now we move in and we do this thing where we've got uh we call it the 8020, you know, or or uh excuse me, not the 8020, scratch that. Uh the the uh 30-day live-in program. And that 30-day live-in program allows people to you know experience it and kind of live with it, and then they go, Well, man, I wish this was brighter, I wish this came on earlier, I wish all the different things. And they they make us a list and then we make those changes. But people don't just live there for 30 days, so now it's you know six months later or it's a year later, and things just change in life. Yeah. And so you want to make these changes. Well, in the past, you've had to call us and we've had to do the programming. Now with routines, and I that was a long little monologue part, but now with routines, they can just do this on the fly. They can just pick the light or lights or scenes any way they want, and they can trigger it based on time, based on a door opening if you have a security system, based on temperature, based on anything they want, and they can put that in. So lighting is a big, big uh uh uh um uh not problem area, but big question that has been answered through this app. Little things too, like how fast a light ramps to a certain uh intensity. Oh, you can even change that now. Yeah, so a lot of times people don't think about this, but you know, we we talk about there's really kind of three things in the lighting. There's how bright it is from zero to a hundred, let's just say, what color it is, from let's call it 1500 Kelvin to 6,000 Kelvin, and I know it can range a little farther than that, but that's that's a pretty wide range. From that amber color to that really white blue kind of task-like color. But then there's also the speed at which it gets to that. So there's that elegance of, you know, when you turn on a light, does it immediately come on at full intensity, at full brightness, like instantly? That's spam in your face. That's what a light switch does. With a dimmer, you dim it up and down, and how long you press that or how long you program that, it could be heck, it could be one second, it could be a minute. Yeah. And and somewhere between a second and 10 seconds is is kind of the real common area where it's very elegant. It just gradually goes up, you know, or gradually dims out. So it's not just so um, it it gives a feeling and emotion to it.
SPEAKER_01:It does, and especially in times like the middle of the night, early in the morning.
SPEAKER_00:Exactly. That's perfect. In fact, we do a we do a thing with our most of our automation platforms where uh I call it the the night bathroom thing where you you go you walk in the bathroom and we use this little motion detector, a little lipstick motion detector, really small, and you walk in the bathroom and just in the middle of the night the light will come on to like 10% just so you can go to the bathroom. You don't touch the switch, you just walk in, go to the bathroom, and you don't touch the switch and you walk out either. It's timed. So we usually do about three minutes, and you just go back to bed and it just goes out.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, you don't have to worry, you don't think anything.
SPEAKER_00:You don't have to let that brain start working, so you can go right back to sleep. Right back to sleep. So that's a really cool automation trick. But but back to routines. Um the the routines of lights, yes, you can change even the ramp rate because you like it to be slower or you like it to be faster. Yeah. Whatever, it's fine, it's up to you. Uh the other thing is temperatures. So if you have thermostats that are controlled, everybody's got thermostats, but if if they're actually controlled on the system, that's another great one. Um, most of our customers like different temperatures while they sleep. Very common to kind of turn it down to sleep. Very common. Uh, and they and they want it uh like a vacation mode, or if they aren't at home uh during the day while they're at work, then they you know want it to ramp up or ramp down, depending on time of the year. And so you can do this. Sure, you can go into the thermostat and you can do a schedule and you can do it from their app. They all have it. Uh there's very few people I know that actually do that. And when you do it, you forget how to do it, and then you want to change it, and it's like, oh, how do I go? What did I do? Yeah, why did I do that? Who did that? So, in the in the X4 version, you can just grab a thermostat and change it right on the fly. And you can that it's that simple, or you can put it inside a routine that says, call it a when I go to work routine, and in that, you know, five minutes after I go to work, after I leave, after I arm the alarm, after the garage door closes, whatever the trigger is, then you can have it do. Oh, geofencing also works. Yes. Uh, you and I'll get to that in a sec, you can have the lights go off, the doors lock, it can check for the garage to make sure the door went down, and it can set back the thermostat. And you can do all this in routines. You don't have to have us. So uh another little quick pro tip is geofencing. Been around for quite a while now, uh, doesn't get a ton of love, but imagine an imaginary uh bubble around your home or place of business, as big or as small as you want it to be. Let's call it like two miles. And you put this bubble, imaginary bubble. And when you go outside the two miles, that can also be a trigger. And when you come inside the two miles or the bubble, that can be a trigger. So it can do all kinds of things like when you go outside, hey, did I turn off all the lights? It can turn off all the lights. You know, clearly you got to be smart about it because if somebody's still there. Right. Turn off all the lights, lock on the door, set the alarm. And it's based on your phone, uh, you know, your your device as it as it leaves that that uh there has to be something that you're basing it on. So, but it is possible. It is possible. So uh that's routines uh inside of uh inside of X4. Which let's see, what else do we want to go over?
SPEAKER_01:We'll definitely need to end it with that next year. Oh yeah, yeah, OS2. Yeah, yeah, we'll be going.
SPEAKER_00:I'll do I'll touch on the Apple thing real quick and then I'll do OS2. Okay. So I did want to touch very briefly on integration uh because this gets a little this gets a little out there and not everybody's interested in it, but um X4 is integratable with uh Apple uh home kit uh and it also uh works very well with airplay, so you can you can airplay very uh any kind of music from uh from your device or whatever uh into it. That's very easy. Uh but if you are an Apple Home Kit person, there are uh some benefits to the new control for and integrating it uh with Apple Home Kit. I would, if you're interested in that, I would reach out to us and we can give you a little bit more detail on it. But it suffice it to say, you can do it. Now, this is an upgrade, and anybody that has electronics of any kind, phone of any kind, you're gonna know that you get operating systems upgrades from time to time. Uh, we are recording this in the middle of October of 2025. Apple just came out with iOS 26, the liquid glass thing, which is getting mixed reviews. Um, but you just the point is the the operating systems change. X4 is a monumental change from what the previous operating system was with control four, which was OS3, operating system version three. Why did they go to X? Have no idea. Why is it not OS4? I don't know, but it is. The world may never know. Um prior to OS3, shockingly, it was one? No, OS2, Andrew, OS2.
SPEAKER_01:All right, 321.
SPEAKER_00:That's right. Uh OS2 is sunsetting in 2026. What month is it? Do you know when it is? I want to say March, but don't hold me too much. Okay. OS2 is sunsetting or going away and not being supported starting in 2026, let's say March or later. Why does this matter? If you already have a control four system and you are operating on one of the old operating systems, they still work. I mean, you don't have to upgrade to this. Yeah, you can just roll with it. And if you're on OS3 and you like it, you can just stay with it. There's it's gonna keep on working. OS2, however, though, is not. So if you're on OS2, or if you don't know, which is probably more accurate. Yeah. Yeah, I paid all this money, I bought this system five years ago, ten years ago, like I don't know what it's on. Right. That would be a call to us. We can help you. Um, you want to at least consider uh looking into doing this upgrade. You're if you use your system at all, you're gonna love it. Yeah. Uh and there's again, we've kind of talked about the all the upgrades, uh things that you can do that you can't do with OS2, but we just want to make it very clear that that will be sunsetting next year and one day it'll just not work. And we don't want you to be in that just not work state. Um, last but not least, right now, control four with this is doing an upgrade uh promotion. Uh there is, there are, not there is, there are discounts on tons of options, upgrades, including controllers. If you need a controller, because you just happen to be older. Uh there uh for for a limited time. I'm not trying to sound salesy, I'm just telling you what they tell us for a limited time. You you can upgrade and get a uh sizable discount. Um, so if you are interested in that, please reach out to us. Again, not trying to do a sales pitch, just letting you know that it exists.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:So uh I think we're pretty good. I think that's a did I miss anything, Andrew?
SPEAKER_01:No, but you actually have uh updated to X4. Just real quick, what are your thoughts on it? Love it, things you maybe what do you love about it?
SPEAKER_00:You know, I I would say that anybody that's upgraded to iOS 26 and actually likes it, I shouldn't say it that way. I mean if you've upgraded and you like it, I think X4 is similar in that I do like it a lot, but things have changed. So if you were a power user on OS3, like if you were a power user on the previous, I think it was iOS 17 or something, yeah, or 18 or whatever. I don't know why they jumped to 26 either. That's a whole nother thing. 19's cards, just like X, but um it there are things in different places. Yeah, uh the way the rooms interact are slightly different. The home page takes a little getting used to. If you if you're not a power user, you're gonna go, this is incredible. If you're a power user, you're kind of used to going certain places to do things, so you got to kind of relearn it. Uh so I would say when I first got it, it was I was like, okay, what do I do here?
SPEAKER_01:What?
SPEAKER_00:Where do I go and why is this here? But now that I've been using it for a month or so, I'm I'm like, oh yeah, this actually is easier. I'm finding myself just naturally going to that. So um so I would say that if again, a power user will take a little bit of getting used to um someone that's a casual user that will find it easier to navigate and easier to actually use. Last thing I'll say, and I'll shut up. Uh I we find a lot of times that we have customers that are power users and they're just sort of over here, right? But the lion share that people don't use it that often. So it's kind of like the thermostat thing where you learn how to do it, you get all excited, you're in this sort of you know honeymoon phase, and you use it for a while, and then you then it sits, and then you pick it up like a month later and you go, Oh god, how do I do that again? So, what X4 has done is has compiled everything onto that home screen. So if you're the casual user, if you go through that honeymoon phase and you actually set up your home screen, you probably will never leave the home screen. Like you'll just go into it opening you need. Everything you need is right there. So that's another reason they did that because they were catering and tailoring to the casual user. So uh I think those folks will really enjoy it. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:And again, if any of our listeners out there are curious on what system they're using or are looking to upgrade, give us a call, reach out, and we'd be happy to upgrade you.
SPEAKER_00:Thanks, Andrew.
SPEAKER_01:This has been awesome. Yeah, thanks.
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