Universal Remote Controls

Across the universe by remote control

Universal Remote Controls today are sold with just about every piece of equipment. Most remotes today have a few extra buttons added so they can call it a Universal. It must sound good on specs lists to sell equipment with the inclusion of a Universal Remote. Most Universal Remotes are quite lame; in fact the only component that routinely provides quality Universal Remote controls are Home Theater or Stereo receivers. Receivers are a special case because they tend to be the control center for your system, so its a logical step for the remote to control the rest of your system as well.
These days the very scope of the Universal remote has expanded to include more than just controlling other manufacturers devices. Traditionally, the only thing universal remotes did differently than any other remote was to include a code book. Codes would be entered then mapped to a mode button letting you take charge of your Sony CD player or your Samsung VCR from your universal remote control. This is handy but still had you switching back and forth into different modes every time you wanted to do a simple function on another device.

Often if your manufacturer wasnt included in the manual, you were either out of luck or forced to take advantage of a feature called learning remote functions. Learning is what you did first: lots of learning to figure out how to get your remote control to learn the infra red code of another remote control. This meant reading the manual and getting the exact sequence of keys figured out so you could actually have it learn and retain the IR code required to control another device. Needless to say, learning functions are only for the very patient universal remote aficionado.

Many higher end Universal Remotes today have touch screens that allow you to scroll through a list of icons, often on a colorful TFT LCD display. Touch sensitive LCD screens may look attractive but theyre also battery hogs, forcing you to replace your battery as much as every month in extreme cases.

The biggest new feature in the universal remotes today is called multiple function mapping. You can map a series of changes on your system to a single button. Lets say you have a favorite setting for your surround system, such as rear speakers turned up, center turned up, fronts turned down and Dolby Pro-Logic II movie mode engaged. If this was your preferred method for watching an older film with two channel audio, you had to bother your family with a bunch of changes and sound checks before you could begin to watch the movie or worse, interrupt the movie in progress, to get the sound just the way you wanted it. This is no longer a problem with new function or activity mappings. You can now do all these functions with one button. In fact some new universal remotes will do all these functions and can even dim the lights while turning your digital cable terminal to the movie channel, all mapped to your multi-function mapping called Movie Time.