New Demo Home Cinema Room Week 5

Rockwool (again)

It’s week 5 of our home cinema demo room build. To start the week we used an electric carving knife to cut and tidy the rockwool in the demo room. It will dull the knife quite quickly but does allow us to get precise cuts. Rockwool is fibres of rock, literally a wool made out of rock.

Rockwool is very dense and has a high mass which makes it really useful in both soundproofing and in actually taming Bass.

It achieves this because it absorbs soundwaves into its dense matrix of fibres. These fibres slow the movement of soundwaves and turn the energy into heat which then dissipates.

Ideally we want the soundwaves to pass back and forth through the Rockwool sheets, this way the the soundwaves are reduced on the way through and also on the way back from the reflection. When this occurs we call it a BASS TRAP, by stopping the bass from bouncing back and forth at full force, we tightening up and control bass.

Trimming Out Rockwool

Cinema Entrance

Painted Black

Next we finished painting the demo room out with matt black paint. Our acoustic treatment isn’t aesthetic, it’s purely there to make the room sound better. This will be covered with acoustic fabric that will let sound pass through (and back) without any effect but look more uniform.

Once the cinema screen arrives it will fit to the front of the room. The screen is acoustically transparent, meaning sound can pass through the screen material. It’s a woven screen rather than perforated. A little more expensive but means that visually there aren’t any artefacts caused by perforations, although woven screens also have considerations that need to be taken into account.

The woven cinema screen will fit over the Paradigm Pro front left, centre and right speakers, what we refer to as the front soundstage.

These are the most important speakers and where most of the concentration of sound will originate from throughout the movie. With the speakers behind the screen the sound fires right through the screen, directly out to the audience. The sound really feels like it's emanating from the action occurring on screen and helps pull you into the movie and experience total immersion in the story and experience.

Isotek Polaris Evo 3

As part of our rack build we will have power conditioning from Isotek. This protects and conditions power for up to 2,300 watts of audio visual equipment and is effective against 13,500 Amps overload.

Peoples thought on power conditioners vary, for some they are an essential component and others think it’s snake oil.

Do we think it will make your equipment sing or do some special magic to improve the sound, No not really. BUT what it does do, is ensure that we are receiving the cleanest power output to our equipment.

By reducing buzzes, hums, noise and interference we guarantee our equipment can perform to it's very best ability. A system is only as good as it's weakest link

Additionally when you have expensive equipment, you want to make sure it is protected.

The Isotek equipment is professionally designed, manufactured and carefully hand-built in the UK and every component extensively tested for quality, reliability and purpose.

For peace of mind and for the level of performance we will be requiring out of our home cinema demo room I think it’s worthwhile.

Subwoofer Unboxed

We unboxed one of the Paradigm Defiance X12 Subwoofers, This thing is a BEAST!!!

It’s only a 12” Subwoofer but features a massive 650 watts RMS power,High Excursion Drivers, Plays all the way down to 20Hz and has advanced ARC room correction. It’s made in Canada.

We've got two of these going in the new demo room. That’s 1.3 kilowatts of Bass, I’ve been in small nightclubs with less, I’m very excited to get these up and running.

Paradigm was the first ever Subwoofer I bought when I first got into home cinema 25 years ago, It’s funny how things come full circle.

Paradigm Defiance X12 Subwoofer

X12 Paradigm Sub

Koldlok Grommet

Not terribly exciting...But then again, the small details don't tend to be.

This Koldlok Grommet is often used in Data Centres in the floor. It seals around cables so that dust, air, heat and sound don't affect the performance of equipment.

We will be using it behind our Sanus equipment rack to feed the speaker and data cables into our cinema room equipment enclosure.

The end result will be less sound leakage out or in, better airflow pressure and a tidier install.

Koldlok Grommet