CEDIA Best Global Home Cinema 2023: Inside the Remarkable ‘Cloister Cinema’ Project
The Cloister Cinema harmoniously merges contemporary and classical design elements, resulting in a space that is both distinctive and refined. Drawing its inspiration from gothic architecture and the original home’s layout, it showcases diverse metal textures, encompassing a decorative pressed metal ceiling, coffers embellished with aged gold leaf, and aged brass mesh on the walls. The juxtaposition of these textures, combined with the use of sumptuous and opulent materials and high quality lighting, establishes a rich and atmospheric setting that is exceptionally well-suited for a home cinema.
Despite granting the Wavetrain team full creative control over the cinema’s design, the customer had a precise demand regarding sound quality: the audio system in the room should be capable of reproducing concerts at lifelike volumes. Consequently, Wavetrain adjusted the sound pressure level (SPL) specifications to 100 dB continuously, with peaks reaching 110 dB at the front row, and still with 3dB of headroom to spare.
In order to attain the necessary dynamics and audio quality, the team looked to Elementi Audio’s high-output active speaker system designs, which were created by David Moseley from Wavetrain, who is also the founder of Elementi Audio. A key feature of this cinema is the AOIP, with a single D/A conversion in the wall mounted amplifiers, located close to speakers, ensuring the cleanest possible audio signal. In total, this home cinema boasts almost 15,000 watts of amplifier power. As for the layout, it does not include front wide channels because the broad dispersion of the LCRs (Left, Center, Right speakers) and side surrounds make front wide channels unnecessary to fill the typical gap, and these channels are often underused in most soundtracks.
“StormAudio with its AoIP, was the perfect match for Elementi Audio and allowed us to maintain a pure audio signal through to the speaker amplifiers. We have found StormAudio to have the lowest jitter levels in the industry, which in the digital domain translates directly to sound quality.”
The four subwoofers of this 9.4.6 system are placed on the quarter points in the width of the front and rear wall, and unusually at the half point of the height as well, all to cancel the various potential standing waves. The team also implemented bass traps in all the ceiling bulkheads, front corners and the seating platform. They were very limited with what they could do by the architectural design but the results were good. David Moseley says that “the StormAudio ISP Elite MK3 used in this project provides very flexible bass management, and here we run all subs as a group for LFE, but then the front and rear subs as two separate groups for front-to-rear bass steering, supported by steering from the relative speakers.This proved better than isolating all the subs individually, as that provided too much variation across the seats.”
Wavetrain has planned to return soon to implement Dirac Live Active Room Treatment – “a revelation, never experienced anything like it before,” says Moseley. “And Dirac ART uses the subwoofers individually, so we’ll break them apart again”.
The client is absolutely delighted with the final outcome and has expressed that the audio and video quality have surpassed all of their expectations, establishing it as their favorite room in the house.
