New Demo Home Cinema Room Week 3

Equipment Deliveries

Work continues (albeit at a slightly slower pace this week) on our new home cinema demo room.

We had some exciting deliveries to start the week off.

First the Sanus A/V Rack arrived, all the way from Holland. This equipment rack is a 27 Unit rack that can hold up to 340kg of Audio Visual equipment.

The Unit size (in our example 27U) is a unit of measure defined as 1.75 inches of height. It’s the standard measurement for the height of rack mounted equipment. Typically equipment height is 1U, 2U, 3U or 4U and it’s useful in planning out how the equipment is laid out in the rack.

Next up to be delivered was the Starscape fibre optic starfield ceiling track. Starscape are the Berwick Upon Tweed, Northumberland based manufacturer of awesome starlight ceilings, walls, panels and other fibre optic lighting systems.

We are really excited about the special ceiling in the demo room, it will give a feeling of height and space within the room.

We also got hold of our trickle fan, heat and noise are considerations when we think about our audio visual equipment. Amplifiers and other equipment gives off a fair amount of heat which we need to extract from our room.

We opted for a Greenwood Unity CV2GIP fan to help extract the heat at the lowest noise level possible.

This is a dMEV (decentralised Mechanical Extract Ventilation) continuously running extractor fan.

It can trickle flow air at a rate of 75 cubic metres an hour at only 10 dBA sound levels whilst using only 1.1 watts of electricity.

When we talk in a whisper, that measures in at 30 dBA, the fan is very quiet.

We installed the fan in the equipment closet high up to extract hot air as it comes out of the top and back of the Sanus rack. The equipment rack will pull cool air through the bottom.

Sanus Equipment Rack

Starscape Ceiling Kit

Greenwood dMEV Trickle Fan

Vicoustic Treatment & Paradigm Speakers

Vicoustic Acoustic Treatment

Acoustic Treatment

Previously we’ve discussed soundproofing and isolating sound in the room, with a mixture of rockwool, bitumen, bracing and MDF/OSB materials we have a quiet, soundproofed room with a low ambient noise level and sound leakage.

It’s a great start but none of that will make it actually sound good inside. Hard surfaces reflect soundwaves which bounce back and forth resonating, ringing, echoing and generally making the sound muddled and confused within the room.

We need to acoustically treat the internal walls so that the sound energy dissipates in a more controlled manner. We do that by lining parts of the interior walls with different acoustic treatments.

By ABSORBING and DIFFUSING the soundwaves we ensure movie soundtracks actually sound awesome - tight and powerful, with a wide space so it feels like we aren’t sitting in a room but right there in the midst of all the action.

Ensuring that the acoustics are correct guarantees that the home cinema room will perform and all of our specified equipment (amplifiers and speakers) sound their absolute best. An acoustically treated room will also be considerably more comfortable to spend time in.

Installing Home Cinema Acoustic Treatment

The front grouping of ABSORPTION panels which are closest to the screen will help eliminate the FIRST reflection points. This stops echos from reflecting directly from the speaker to the wall and out to the listener. It keeps the front soundstage clean and tight for better surround sound immersion.

These aren't aesthetic panels, purely functional and will be hidden and covered with beautiful acoustic fabric.

Time and money spent here on acoustic planning and treatment early on is rewarded five fold in the end. The boost it gives to the surround sound performance and general feel of the room equals and surpasses systems costing considerably more, in rooms that haven’t had acoustic treatment. A worthwhile investment.