home cinema – Dellicompagni

home cinema

What is it

A dedicated home cinema is an immersive experience. We aim to reproduce audio and visuals as the director intended. A dedicated room will be dedicated to reproducing the audio and visuals entirely with little compromise.

A non-dedicated room maybe a living room, often referred to as a media room..

Waiting for a projector to ‘boot up’ or having a large amount of ambient light may not suit having just a projector. We may decide on a large format TV or a combination of both a TV and projector set up to suit the everyday to day use. TV for the kids and news, projector for watching films! We can make the projector screen and projector recess into a ceiling to completely hide them when not in use.

Which ever scenario suits you, we have ability to tailor a system to suit.

Discovery

This is where we find out what you want. It’s likely this means only the aesthetic at this point. Here we want to know how you want the room to look.

The number of seats you’d like.

The content you’ll be watching is important, this will be a contributing factor to the screen aspect ratio we’d recommend.

How we do it

We take the size of your space intended, the number of seats and what you’re wanting to watch.

With these three criteria, we can start our engineering of your room.

Design

A dedicated room is going to consist of acoustic treatment, a projector, a projector screen, surround sound speakers, audio processor and amplification.

We don’t simply have a ‘favourite’ speaker we use, we have a selection of manufacturers and the chosen speaker is based on its engineering merits.

The projector and screen are much the same as the speakers, we choose the right projector dependant on the brightness at the screen. There are many factors that affect this, distance from screen to lens being the first major factor.

Once the ‘electronics of the room’ have been located and positioned we can then lay our aesthetic finish of the room over the top.

All of this is done in house, we use SolidWorks to do all our CAD work. So, we’re able to produce renders at every stage of the design. We love involving our customers at every stage if that’s what is wanted!

Design Technical

Once we have the room dimension, distance from listening position to speakers and projector throw distance with ambient light level (expected) we can then start working on specifying equipment.

Room Acoustics – Consider walking into a freshly plastered room. It is very echoey, we call this ‘lively’. At the opposite end of that spectrum would be an anechoic chamber, a ‘dead’ room. Neither of these are desirable to good room acoustics and frankly, no matter how much investment was made on the audio equipment, would sound terrible!!

Our aim, unless requested, is not to soundproof the room from the rest of the dwelling. What we want to achieve is a very quiet room inside. We may be aiming to produce 105db, but if the room has a base spl measurement of 50db (from external noise sources), that will equate to a lift of 55db. Now if we’re able to get the room down to 25db, we would give a lift of 80db. Although the peak volume (105db) is the same, our quieter room is going to be far more dynamic. The subtle noises will be more audible giving the room much better dynamics and will result in far better detail of the audio track.

As part of our design process, we spend time predicting the RT60. According to BS ISO 3382, it is the duration required for the sound energy in a room to decrease by 60 dB after the source emission has stopped. With known material we can estimate with a high level of accuracy the RT60 at set frequencies to produce amazing results.

The base room construction will have a huge impact on how we design the acoustics. There is no ‘one solution fits all’ we literally start from scratch with every room.

Speakers/amplifiers – Let’s say we want to hit the ‘Gold standard’ of 105db (sound pressure level or SPL), with our distance from main seated position, we can calculate the power needed to drive a speaker to achieve the required spl. This allows us to then choose the right amplifier and speaker combination.

The number of speakers is very much down the dimension of the room. More isn’t always better and putting speakers in the ‘wrong location’ to suit unmovable objects, such as doors, can be more damaging than not installing them at all. If you have quite a long room we may want to use front wides, if its short but wide we probably wouldn’t.

Subwoofer location is something we pay particular attention to. We want an even spl over the audio range of our sub install (typically 20-80Hz). We often see a single sub installed into room which almost certainly will result in an uneven response. We aim to give a flat response to the seating area which may need two, three of four subwoofers to achieve.

Then we need to place the speakers into the room. Again, not as simple as it sounds. We have to consider that a speaker will give 100% of its performance when pointed directly to the listener and as we then move off its direct axis, we loose performance. We overcome this by angling the speakers to desired points in the room. What we don’t want is one speaker to be very loud at one seat and much quieter at another. By pointing the speakers, we can even out to the best of our abilities and give an equal performance over more of the room.

Projector

We want to be able to get the best from the visuals, this means seeing the detail in the darkest scenes while being able to watch the brightest scenes without wearing sunglass’! to achieve this requires us to calculate the ambient light (the ideal amount of ambient light is zero, which can be achieved with blackout blinds), the throw distance of the projector and the gain from the screen. With those primary factors we calculate the best projector to be used in your room.

If you’re after the very best visuals then we would look at adding in image processors and or anamorphic lenses. The combination will give better colour, HDR and light performance.

Come for a demo!

The best way for us to show this is for you to come to our dedicated cinema room where we have implemented all the above!