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Fully digital home theatre for the most accurate sound

2022, February 23

A StormAudio integrator in Switzerland brings his own home theatre up to date.

The challenge of using a room working for day time too

My business partner Michel Hafner and I have been into home theatre for a very long time, since the mid 1990s. We used to import HDTV tapes all the way from the USA when HDTV was not available in Europe yet. This was back when global purchases were not common like they are today. When I moved into our current house I had the opportunity to convert an existing room into a home theatre. The best room for this was more like a living room with window doors opening towards the garden. So we faced a challenge to make a room, which works both for day time use and as theatre when watching movies.

We didn’t want a totally dark room when it was not being used for watching movies. Nor did we want to compromise on picture and sound quality whilst we were. We came up with a clever solution using curtains to make the room black when used as a theatre. To make the room more inviting as a living room during the day, we have kept the walls bright as much as possible. Only the ceiling and carpet are dark. We hid the curtains behind purple wood panels, so they are not visible when opened. It’s a wonderful surprise to our visitors when we draw the curtains to transform the room into a theatre.

Going fully digital for the most accurate sound

The whole project started in 2009 and we totally upgraded the sound system to the latest technologies for Dolby Atmos, Auro and DTS:X only last year. I always had a preference for very accurate sound. So we have used digital speakers and room corrections since the beginning. The room is acoustically treated with bass traps and an acoustic ceiling to reduce reflections. When we decided to upgrade the audio system, we tried to add as many extra channels as possible without completely changing the existing room. We could add 5 ceiling speakers for Atmos/Auro. The rest of the speakers were all custom designed to fit into room, so they can blend in nicely with the existing design.

To get the most accurate sound we wanted to keep a fully digital system. After carefully evaluating various digital speakers and processors we have chosen fully active digital speakers from Ascendo Immersive Audio. Since it does not makes sense to have unnecessary A/D and D/A conversion, going fully digital with the StormAudio ISP was obvious. The ISP connects to the speakers directly via AVB, which directly delivers the sound digitally. This also makes the cabling relatively easy. On top of that the StormAudio ISP just sounds amazing. Its ability to distribute the available channels to the installed speakers (using both the Upmixers and the StormXT function) is really great.

The importance of proper calibration

In any home theatre setup, proper calibration is really essential. The Dirac Live calibration together with the StormAudio ISP really works well. The calibration was done together with the Swiss distributor of Ascendo speakers, TecTrade Brun; Since all the Ascendo speakers have their own DSPs, the bass correction and some basic calibration was done first using the Ascendo Software. This minimises some room modes and phase align all bass speakers.

We ran the Dirac calibration as a second step. All speakers are really matched perfectly and the sound transition in any direction is very realistic without any sound gaps. One great feature about the StormAudio ISP is that you can have different presets with different Dirac corrections. Calibrations can be added for theatre mode, as well as some extra ones for listening to music. We also have a preset for music where the back surround channels become fronts and vice versa. This means that we can listen to music properly when sitting at the bar or when the room is used for a party.