Transcript
Scott Wilkinson (0:00)
In this episode of Home Theater Geeks, I talk about the latest AVS Forum Home Theater of the Month. This one is a replication of a Dolby Cinema. Very cool. So stick around.
Unknown (0:16)
Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is Twit.
Scott Wilkinson (0:32)
Hey there, Scott Wilkinson here, the home theater geek. In this episode, I'm going to profile another Home Theater of the Month from AVS Forum. This one is the 13th of 2024, so it's the bonus Home Theater of the Month. We like to say we make it a baker's dozen, and in this case it's really very cool. Of course, they're all really cool, but. But this one seeks to replicate a Dolby Cinema in a home theater. Now, Dolby Cinema is my favorite commercial cinema format. I like it better than imax, certainly better than a conventional commercial cinema. And so does Terrence. He finds it to be the. The most enjoyable commercial cinema experience as well. And so he wanted to replicate that in his home. The. Now, he built a house in. I think it's called Brazelton, Georgia. I think that's how you pronounce it. And he built it from scratch. He had. He built the whole home. You know, he had it built and he included in the plans a basement home theater so he could start from scratch. He didn't have to work with any existing room and try to figure out how to make do with this or that or windows or obstructions. He just built it from scratch. And that's really the best way to go. So I wanted to start by showing you a picture of the final room. And we're going to show a few pictures of the installation and how it went. But check this out. The finished room uses blue LED strip lighting, just like Dolby specifies for its commercial cinemas. Now, interestingly, most Dolby cinemas are in AMC Cineplexes and they chose to use red lighting. And I don't know why that is, because I know Dolby specifies blue. And in a couple of the Dolby cinemas I've been in that aren't in AMC Cineplexes, the lighting is blue. It's this blue LED strip lighting. And so Terence went ahead and did it the way Dolby specified, and it really just looks great. Now, as I said before, he framed the room in his basement, and we can see a picture of that framing process, or at least as it. As it was in process. Here you see the riser in the back for the second row of seats. First row of seats would be between those. Those two little platforms on either side. And you can also see in particular, I want to point out the wall in the back of the seating area. You can see the framing there. That is a false wall. It's not the end of the room, but it's there for a couple of reasons. One is to provide a bass trap. So it's going to get stuffed with insulation and covered with acoustic material. Duct board actually. And that is going to act as a bass trap, which means it's going to absorb some of the base frequencies and prevent them from reflecting back into the room. We can see that in the next picture. Some progress here. We see that all the framing is filled with insulation, which serves two purposes really. One is sound isolation, keeping the sound inside from leaking out and the sounds from the outside from leaking in. And it also serves as some damping to the internal sounds. In the next one, we can see the drywall is up. And that's, that's a, that's something that I personally wouldn't tackle. I would pay somebody to do that. And I believe he did in this case. You know, his whole house is being built. So the builder went ahead and did that, although he himself specified what, how he wanted this room to be. And notice again in the back, the false wall is still. We still see the insulation. The next picture has a closer view of it and you can see the. There's an opening, a rectangular opening at the top, which is where the projector will shoot through that opening and onto the screen. And also I want you to notice the, to the right of this picture, that wall does not extend all the way to the, to the side wall. In fact, that is the entrance into the theater from the outside, which is exactly like a Dolby Cinema does it. You walk into the outer door and you have to walk around the wall to get into the actual theater. We're going to see more pictures of that in a minute. But before we do, I wanted to show you the screen wall, which is where the screen goes. And I like showing how home theater owners have set up their front, left and right and center speakers, which you can see here, along with two subwoofers. Those left, center and right LCR speakers are Triad gold in wall speakers. Triad is a very well respected maker of speakers in particular in walls. And they basically come in three levels, gold, silver and bronze. And the Gold series is the top of the line, as you might expect. And he's got three of them there behind the screen wall. They're actually in the wall. Thus he's using in wall speakers the two subwoofers that you see down there are from a company called GSG and they're called BTS subwoofers behind the screen. And those drivers are 21 inches in diameter, which is mighty big, so it makes a beautiful low bass sound along with those LCR triad speakers. So those speakers and all the ones around the room are driven by amplifiers that sit in a very tall equipment rack outside the theater. And as you can see here, that is one tall equipment rack. And there's a lot of gear in there, including a Kaleidoscape Strato C player and a Terra prime server with eight terabytes of storage. And that's where most of his movies are stored. He also has a Panasonic DP UB9000UHD Blu Ray Player so he can actually play physical discs, although the Kaleidoscape plays digital files with the same quality as a real Blu Ray. So now the Kaleidoscape is a pretty expensive system, but it stores everything on a big server and you can search for things and it starts right up. It's. It's really quite wonderful. But in case you can't get a Kaleidoscape title that you want and you have it on an actual physical disk, Terrence can play it on the Panasonic UHD Blu ray player. His surround processor is a JBL synthesis SDP55. Very high end. He has Summit and Crown power amps and a Lumigen Radiance Pro video processor. The projector is a JVC NZ9. I believe we'll see a picture of of that a little bit later, but it's very high end equipment all the way around.