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Lord of The Rings meets home theater in this real-life fantasy come true

2022, December 19

DO YOU BELIEVE IN MAGIC?

New York-based AcousticSmart designs and fabricates private high-end cinemas around the country. While the subject of this project is themed, the majority of their work is not. They are known for building acoustically treated luxury home theaters featuring high-end technology.

The Lord of The Rings Theater is in a home just outside of Nashville. AcousticSmart had previously created a CEDIA award-winning Egyptian-themed theater for a client in Maryland. This time around AcousticSmart partnered with Nashville-based Visual Concepts, to create a one-of-a-kind themed Lord of The Rings room.

Magic delivered by StormAudio processors

Being the theater designer, Richard Charschan of AcousticSmart says that they can recommend products but they don’t make the final decision on what to use. AcousticSmart had recently put a StormAudio processor in their showroom and were so impressed with the unit that Richard strongly suggested that the Lord of The Rings room include one. The client loved everything that AcousticSmart had come up with and listened to their suggestion.

Charschan wanted to use the StormAudio processor he said, because sometimes you don’t know how the room is going to come out sonically. If you do your homework and you do everything you’re supposed to do, you do the acoustics right and balance everything out, you hope it comes out the way you hear it in your head. Sometimes it’s magic and sometimes it’s not. This was magic. He said he heard things off his shoulder, he heard things around him that felt like he was totally immersed in the experience. The goal of a good private cinema designer is to always try and create the suspension of disbelief and if this is not delivered properly in one of their theaters, then they didn’t do their job. He says StormAudio delivered that for them in spades.

Special efforts to preserve the acoustic

To make the room look like a real castle, AcousticSmart did custom-stamped concrete work with the family insignia in the concrete itself. To balance it out, they had to have a certain amount of absorption in the room to counteract it all, so they did an analysis and figured it out with an in-house acoustic program to achieve the optimal reverb time. They put various types of diffusion in locations where it was needed, and the room ended up balancing out quite nicely.

There’s a concession area on the left-hand side that has a Lord of The Rings image that the client supplied, which was not a high-res image. The team was able to take that image, put it into a program in the computer, and upgrade the resolution. And then it was illuminated from the back, so when you come into the concession area it glows and it lights up and looks super cool.

Every detail matters

The wood, even on the door, was done to look like an old castle with old hardware. Everything was done to such a crazy degree. And some of the stuff was from Romania, from out of the country, some really old sconces and chandeliers. In the bar cabinet there are old gargoyles holding up the actual bar counter. And the owner has a Lord of The Rings sword collection from the actual movie on display. AcousticSmart found some cool holders that look like claws. The swords are being held by the claws.

There are also two windows on the left-hand side where you’re looking towards the screen, and they look like windows from the movie that are arched. There’s a TV inside each one of the windows that’s in portrait mode linked to a Kaleidescape system that shows a script, and when the lights dim and the movie’s about to start, the dragons come through the windows. It’s like the dragons are outside attacking the castle.

No words needed

The theater features six seats, which AcousticSmart made themselves. They drew a picture first and then they rendered them so the client could see what they would look like. The client was concerned because the chairs were being made from scratch, and he didn’t have a chance to sit in the seats beforehand. His family insignia is on the chairs, which look like thrones, and the actual headrest is articulating. It has a special metal back AcousticSmart created so the headrest can move forward when the client is reclined back.

When the theater was finished and calibrated, the client was blown away. He noticed the difference the acoustic treatment made and when calibrated correctly, the immersion, the whole immersiveness of the experience goes tenfold. The smile on his face was just ridiculous, he loved it.