Home Cinema - the reference standard.

We have just got back from the CEDIA expo at Excel in London. We (Angela and I) spent most of the week on an advanced cinema design course. It was a great course but very demanding -m brain melt at the end of each day (and I have already done the HAA and ISF stuff!). Met some great people for the first time and renewed acquaintances with people we had met before. In particular it was great to meet Floyd Toole, who has done some brilliant work on sound reproduction in small rooms. If any of you out there are interested then get a copy of his book off the Internet -Just type in "Sound Reproduction: The Acoustics and Psychoacoustics of Loudspeakers and Rooms" and his name and you will find it. It has to be the definitive work on how and what we hear when listening to music or movies in room the size we generally have at home.

Anyway, learnt loads and we now have a great opportunity to put it into practice as we have decided that the Midlands region needs a Reference Home Cinema where people can come and see and hear what the latest technologies can offer. So our summer project at the shop is going to be working with our suppliers to build, within our shop on Maid Marian Way, a cinema which meets the reference specifications.

I will try and blog as much of the build details as I can (time permitting) and the reasons for why we are doing certain things as we go so that those of you who are interested can comment / come and have a look, and use some of the stuff in your own projects.

Preliminary spec(which may be subject to change)is as follows.
- 3 chip DLP projector with sufficient light output to give us 16 ft lamberts across the screen.
- curved, acoustically transparent screen with constant projection height and side tabs for 2.4, 2.35, 1.78, and 1.33:1 aspect ratios.
- motorised anamorphic lens for aspect ratios 2.35:1 and above.
- scaler / deinterlacer to allow for multi format input sources
- blue ray DVD player
- DVD media server
- PS3
- X-Box
-Wii
and that is just the vision side - still to come the audio, the acoustic design and treatments and the decor! Loads to do.

We are all very excited about the project. Obviously both audio and video will be calibrated to HAA and ISF standards so it should sound as good as it looks. Whats more we will be able to show movies as the director intended them to be seen when they were edited in post production, as both the video and audio will be properly calibrated to the standards used in the studio.

There was a lot of stuff we learned recently about acoustics which I think will help us to get better sound from 2 channel stereo systems as well as cinema, but I have to put some thinking time into the implications on room resonant nodes of having 2 sub woofers in the room (effectively the situation if there are two full range front speakers). I will try and keep writing as we find out things that are useful.

The good news is that great sound is available from traditional stereo in a room (as all us audio nuts know). Unfortunately this has traditionally been in a single solitary prime listening position. What we are now trying to do is see how this prime listening position can be expanded to include more than one hot seat, while still maintaining the great stereo image of the prime position. It may not be possible but any improvement will be welcome!

Enough for now, got to go and design a cinema and a lighting plan for home so the electricians have something to work with on Thursday.

Jeff