Home Theater Geeks 457 Transcript

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00:00 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
On this episode of Home Theater Geeks, I feature one of my very favorite home theaters of the month from AVS Forum. So stick around Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is TWIT. Hey there, scott Wilkinson. Here, the Home Theater Geek. In this episode, I'm going to feature one of my all-time favorite home theaters of the month from AVS Forum. Now, I've been doing AVS Forum Home Theater of the Month for quite a few years now, and this one is from 2018. So it's been there for a while, but it's really one of my faves. It's amazing. Now we're putting the link up to the article in our show notes, so you should go check that out. There's more detail there and also a link to the builder's thread, which has a lot more information. Now, I was living in LA when I featured this home theater, which is in LA also, and so I got to actually go hear it and see it and it's amazing. It's exactly the type of home theater that I love. It's exactly the type of home theater that I love.

01:24
It was built by a guy named Mike who is a retired electrical engineer from the aerospace industry, and after he retired from that, he got into the home flipping business and at some point he decided you know, I really want a home theater. So he had a construction crew and he actually built a room, an add-on to his house that was going to be this home theater. Now, his primary design goal, as he explained to me, was having form follow function. That is, the function was the most important part. He wanted to have no compromises, or as few as possible. He was focused on audio fidelity and video fidelity and performance and let the room follow that. He wanted to minimize compromise there's a poem for you. Compromise there's a poem for you. He was going to have 16 channels of audio in a 9.1.6 configuration, so nine channels around the listening position front, right, left and center, and then surround channels, one subwoofer channel although there's hardly one subwoofer, there's many more than that, as you'll see and six overhead speakers for Atmos and DTSX and that immersive sound format. He wanted little or no sound leakage into the rest of the house or coming from the house into the theater, and he wanted a large screen. He ended up with 130-inch, 2.35 to 1 screen. So, as I said before, the way to start he thought was to just build a room onto the side of his house, and here you can see the start of that, the foundation and the joists which would support the floor, and in the next picture we can see the frame or the shell of the room finished. And he also ended up putting a balcony off of his second floor bedroom. But this room was going to be completely dedicated. There it is in his backyard, sticking off the back of his house.

03:52
Now he used a bunch of well-known construction techniques specifically for theaters and recording studios. For that matter. The walls and ceiling are double drywall with a substance called green glue between them, and here we see a picture of some of the drywall and some of the insulation. And most important in this picture are these silver rails. Important in this picture are these silver rails. Those are called channels and they basically are used to isolate acoustically isolate the room from the rest of the house. So the drywall was going to be put on, basically hung on these channels and that would effectively isolate the room. And the floor also is isolated, consists of two layers of OSB with green glue on top of a Serenity rubber mat. So he was really going to isolate this room. The only access to the room is a double door with gasket seals all around, just like a professional recording studio. So he was serious about it.

05:15
Now I want to tell you about the subwoofer system, which is unique in my experience. It includes 12 15-inch base drivers that are mounted in six opposing pairs, and here you can see the framework that the subwoofer drivers would be mounted in. So there are six boxes there, each with a hole on either side of the box, and the drivers are mounted into those holes and the sound comes out the front rectangular hole. We'll see that in the next picture. Here's the picture of the drywall in place with those six rectangular openings, which is where the subwoofer sound comes out of. You can also see the center channel speaker right in the middle of that wall.

06:16
Mike talks about this array, this subwoofer array, and he says it overcomes many of the issues with small room base response, which is a problem. It eliminates, he says, vertical and width room modes by forming a planar base wave. So it's a plane, it's a flat wave of base coming from that wall rather than a spherical wave coming from a normal subwoofer, and that basically solves a lot of the problems of subwoofers in rooms. It's quite remarkable actually how well that works, as I found out later. Now in the next graphic we see the absorption layer at the back of the room. Now that is insulation that's three feet thick so it can handle much lower frequencies. It can absorb much lower frequencies than most acoustic treatments and that's right there at the back wall so that there isn't greatly reduces the standing wave, the front to back standing wave, that could result from the subwoofer If you go back one one.

07:44
There's one other thing I wanted to show you in that picture. Notice the little access port down near the bottom, just to the right of center. There's enough room behind this wall where you take off that access port. You can crawl in behind the subwoofer wall and, you know, handle any problems you might have or change the wiring, whatever you need to do, but that's like an access port that allows you to actually crawl into that wall. It's pretty cool.

08:19
Now, interestingly, mike is a strong believer in what are called point source speakers. Most speakers, as you might know, have a tweeter and maybe a mid-range and a woofer, and they're in different locations in the box, in the enclosure that houses the speaker. Point source speakers are otherwise known as coaxial, which means that the tweeter is mounted at the center of the woofer, the larger driver and so the speaker. All the sound appears to come from the same place and Mike used speakers. All of his speakers in this room are coaxial or point source speakers and you can see a bunch of them here in this picture. The front, right, left and center speakers which are the larger ones there are Danily, a company called Danily, and they are SM60F speakers. He decided to put the left and right speakers outside of the, just outside of the boundary of the speed of the screen uh, which improves, I think, the sound stage uh quite a bit. He also has height speakers, uh, up above the screen. You can see the six subwoofer openings there right around the screen, and then you can see a couple of the surround speakers to the right and left and some of the overhead speakers near the ceiling. Those are all from a company called Reaction Audio. The model is the CX-8.

10:02
And Mike went so far as to replace their aluminum diaphragms with beryllium, far as to replace their aluminum diaphragms with beryllium. There's a lot of argument and discussion about which materials are better for drivers. He decided he preferred beryllium. So that's what he did. And so he did. He got a 16-channel system that's all controlled by a Trinoff altitude preamp processor, which is very, very high end, but that befits this whole theater.

10:38
Now, another AVS forum member, a guy by the name of Niall Mellor from Acoustic Frontiers, designed the acoustic treatments in the room and he took into account the dispersion characteristics of the speakers, which are different than conventional multi-driver speakers. Now he built all you can see some of the acoustic treatments here as they're installed in the room, treatments here as they're installed in the room. So Mike built all of the broadband absorbers using 703 fiberglass and black burlap material and Niall specified a bunch of RLX geofusers which are quote unquote gentle diffusers that are more forgiving if you're sitting close to them. But the fact this is a pretty small room, I think that makes a good, a good case for that. Now the look of this theater, as you're starting to imagine, I think I hope is it's based on what I said before.

11:48
The maximum form follows function. The walls and ceiling are flat black, which is best for optimizing the image quality on the screen. I have believed that for a long time. Here's a picture of a sidewall of the finished theater, and notice also at the top the wires the speaker wires are exposed. He chose to do that because he liked the aesthetic.

12:15
One of the main principles he said, was to avoid putting anything on the walls in the walls, rather sorry. For example, all the wiring is on the surface of the wall. His original plan had been to build fabric panels to cover them, but the wires give the room a kind of a tech look that he ended up liking and, of course, they disappear when the lights are out. Now the baffle wall behind the acoustically transparent screen has to be black as well. I mean, the whole room is black, so that was kind of a no-brainer. But behind a screen like that an acoustically transparent screen you really need it to be black so that the light that passes through the screen because sound passes through it but also light passes through it, and the light that passes through it you don't want to be reflected back and come through the screen again because that would distort the image. So here you can see the screen wall before the screen was put up with the black absorptive material so that any light that passes through the screen doesn't get reflected back into the audience.

13:34
Now he at the time in 2018, he had a JVC DLA-RS600 projector. I suspect he probably has upgraded it by now. I haven't talked to him in a while so I don't know for sure, but any projector by JVC is okay in my book. They make the best consumer projectors in my opinion. So this one is mounted on the ceiling in a beautiful custom mount and it includes an anamorphic lens.

14:07
This is the Panamorph I'm sorry, it's an ISCO 3 anamorphic lens that slides on a motorized sled, so it slides into position in front of the lens of the projector and then slides out, depending on what you need. Now, an anamorphic lens like that is important for displaying 2.35 widescreen movies on a 2.35 screen, because most do it is with the projector by itself can do that with processing and so on. But if you do it with an anamorphic lens you get more uh resolution. You don't lose any resolution by doing that. So, uh, that's why he has it there. Now, that piece of glass, that's a big piece of glass and those lenses ain't cheap. But he wants the best that can be done and that's the way to do it.

15:17
So he decided to call his theater the event horizon, which is a term from astrophysics, which is the radius around a black hole beyond which nothing can escape, not even light. And he said, quote "'I chose that name partly because I'm a physics buff and partly because the theater is a form follows function design that incorporates a totally black environment from which light cannot escape. Well, maybe a little can escape. It's not a true black hole, but it's as close to one as you're going to get in a home theater, which is my philosophy exactly Now. This did not need to conform to any spousal acceptance factor or anything. This was his room to do as he wanted, completely closed off, and he did it exactly as he wanted, which I commend him for.

16:14
So here's a picture of the final theater, a picture that I actually took, I'm proud to say, because it's really a nice representation of what this theater looks like. And there's another one as well that shows the seating. And the important part here is he designed it so that there was no compromise in the audio or video in the center seat of each row, and then that's where I sat when I actually sat in this room, and he was kind enough to let me do that. But the other seats aren't slouches either, that's for damn sure. The whole thing just is amazing.

16:53
We listened to some Dolby Atmos soundtracks, recordings, starting with something called the Pure Audio Blu-ray of the Choir of King's College in Cambridge Say that five times fast which included choral music and Renaissance instruments called cornets and sack sack butts, which I have played for many, many years and so I know how they sound, and these sounded fantastic. We also watched a Blu-ray of Hans Zimmer live in Berlin playing some of his movie soundtracks, and boy oh boy, did that sound good in Dolby At as well. And we finished up with blade runner 2049, which has some serious subwoofer workout uh frequencies in it, and man it was. It was amazing. It almost felt like the seats were shaking, like, like tactile transducers. They weren't. The seats don't have them. I don't believe in them and neither does Mike, thankfully, but it was very impactful, really, really amazing.

18:06
So congratulations to Mike for building a theater that is truly outstanding and, as I said, one of my very favorites of all the home theaters of the month that I have profiled on AVS Forum over the years. So I hope you've enjoyed seeing it too. Now, if you have a question for me, you can send it along to htg at twittv and I will answer as many as I can right here on the show, and I will answer as many as I can right here on the show. And, as always, we thank you for your support of the Twit Network with your membership in Club Twit, which gives you access to all the Twit shows in their video form, so you can see all the great graphics that our hosts provide, and I hope you have been able to see here on this show, and that would be a great thing to consider. Until next time, geek out.