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FOUR SEASONS BREEZE | NOVEMBER 2023 19 By Steve Benoff I've almost never been a good student. At Beverly Hills High School my grades were middling, but I was a track star – the fastest sprinter in the school. I proudly wore my letterman's jacket as I had woefully little else to be proud of. In college, my grades were again average while I spent most of my free time doing theater projects. (In those days, you didn't get unit credit for such activities.) My four years in post graduate resulted in a master's degree in theater arts and little else. But my first year at USC Law was the outlier. In a class of 120, I finished at 19 and was rewarded with placement on the Law Review. (The subsequent two years were a return to form.) Unfortunately, I didn't know of my success until the end of the summer of 1969, so instead of taking a job at a law firm, I responded to a posting at the USC student center to install a sound system in the Hollywood Hills home of an SC graduate. That launched what was then a part-time activity of installing whole-house audio systems on the west side of LA. I operated Steve Benoff Stereo through the rest of law school and even when I was a lawyer and corporate officer of Flying Tiger Airline and its parent Tiger International. Those five years were both successful and unsuccessful and I ended up running my audio business full time. As an aside, all the stereo installation companies at the time were adjuncts of a storefront business. I didn't see the point of paying rent when I could just operate out of my home. So, I became the first "trunk slammer" in LA and perhaps the country. That term was used in a derogatory fashion for decades until it now describes many people in the audio/video business. I operated Steve Benoff Electronics (installing not only audio, but video, cameras, phone systems, and networks) for 40 years, installing electronics in fancy homes all over Southern California (back then it wasn't the burden to drive the freeways as it is now). When I retired and we moved to Four Seasons in 2006, I felt my home should have an entertainment system much like the ones I'd been installing for decades. So that's what I did. And that system has stayed essentially as installed since then. But as I know only too well, sometimes electronic systems don't always work perfectly. Rarely is it a total system failure. Sometimes one or two elements of the system stop working. I'm not talking about a component such as a TV or A/V receiver failing. I'm talking about an otherwise working component not responding to system commands as it used to. I guess I need to explain that the A/V systems I've installed for decades usually had just one remote control for the entire system. Furthermore, the remote did not itself emit the infrared (IR) light that most components respond to. Instead, it uses radio frequencies to communicate to a central controller which sent those IR commands to components located remotely. But what happens when those components don't respond as they should? That's when troubleshooting comes into play. I'm talking about a problem I recently experienced. Sometimes the problem can be traced to the control system itself. In my case, I had two TVs which weren't responding to IR commands seemingly being emitted by the control system. I know the TVs work properly because they respond to their IR remotes. So, how do I know if the system is sending IR commands as it should? Aha! I'm finally getting to the name of this column. I need to know if the tiny IR emitters wired into my system which are attached to the front of these TVs is actually emitting an IR signal. Well, it turns out there's an app for that. I searched the app store for IR detector and found nine of them. None seemed to be designed for my particular purpose. Apparently, there is a market for those concerned about night-vision cameras. Such cameras depend on IR light invisible to the naked eye. But these are apps that use your phone's ability to detect IR light. While I'm not concerned about hidden cameras, I can use the app to see if the emitters in my A/V are sending out IR light commands. So, I pushed buttons on the remote control with one hand while holding my phone with an IR detector app active on its screen. Sure enough, the button press did not result in an IR flash from the emitter. With this information, I traced the problem to the program which controls the whole system. I made some changes and corrected the problem. If you use an app you'd like to share with others, let me know at steve.benoff@verizon.net. THERE'S AN APP FOR THAT! 90210 to 92223: The Journey of a Lifetime

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