A Professional Recording studio in a Standard Home Theater
A room-within-a-room
To achieve this, Ernie Blumenthal turned to Jochen Veith of JV Acoustics from Germany. Jochen is an architect that has designed premier recording facilities around the world, including participation in the design of Studio C at Capital Records in Hollywood, California that is equipped with Dolby Atmos.
Jochen brought his expertise to this home theater. The room, approximately 27 feet wide by 35 feet, was designed to have acoustic features just like a professional studio. To acoustically isolate the home theater from the rest of the house, a room-within-a-room construction was used, complete with two acoustic access doors. The floor has a 5-inch slab of concrete sitting atop acoustical isolation pads, which in turn sits atop the 4-inch slab of the main house. Walls are separated by a gap with acoustical treatments in between.
The aesthetic design inside the theater was just as important as the performance; with its 16-foot ceiling and tiered ceiling, the space allows for a grand theater with all the impact of a commercial cinema. Uniquely, the designers of the room chose light-colored wood for the flooring, rather than traditional carpeting. Blumenthal notes that the acoustic treatment is so well designed that the wooden flooring would not be a problem for sound quality in this theater.
High-performing equipment
A custom-made 50,000 watt-isolation transformer with voltage regulation is used to provide clean power to all the theater equipment. A StormAudio ISP 3D.32 preamp processor is used in conjunction with PMC loudspeakers in this room. PMC flagship active loudspeakers are used for the front mains and twenty-two surround speakers to make a Dolby Atmos configuration. The 22 feet wide screen is from Seymour-Screen with a motorized masking system. The projection is powered by a 4K laser from Digital Projection with 30,000 lumens. A Lumagen video processor is also used in this system to ensure scaling and aspect ratio is accurate for playback of multiple sources.
Appealing to the audiophile in the homeowner, a top-of-the-line VPI turntable and a McIntosh phono preamp are installed in the back of the theater. As the room has recording studio standard acoustic construction and with the high-performing equipment chosen, the room can playback any type of content with professional sound quality.
Seamless and powerful experience
The entire theater took over 2 years to complete and cost over one million dollars; after the installation of the room, testing and measurements show that the room surpassed all design specifications. At 110 dB full bandwidth pink noise, there was an almost 80dB drop at all frequencies outside the room. Together with an A/C system designed to be totally silent, any content can be enjoyed fully with no unwanted noise disruptions.
Since the completion of this home theater, an upgrade for the StormAudio has been released, an MK1.5 hardware module that can add many of the latest MK2 features to all existing MK1 devices. Once this has been installed in this state-of-the-art room, allowing this cinema to have increased decoding options, including DTS:X Pro. Also updated is the new eARC HDMI card developed exclusively by StormAudio & Cypress Technology, making the entire experience for this cinema even more seamless and powerful.
With a combination of top professional acoustic design and high caliber equipment, this home theater delivers the pure audio and visual impact of movies and music in an environment that allows an audience to experience the content as close as possible to its original moment of creation.
Products used: ISP 3D 32 Elite MK1
Installation by: Sound Lab Designs
Distributor: Immersive Audio Technologies Inc.
To know more about this great home theatre, read here the Widescreen special article.
