March 2006 - Reference Theater Part 1 - page 2
Building the Theater Room in the Virtual Domain
While Bobby Rees was working with the city and trying to convince my neighbor to sign off on the four-foot side yard setback issue, I started to put my team of designers and gurus together for my theater. The first firm I retained was Tim Duffy and Christopher Hansen at Simply Home Entertainment. While there are many great AV installers and integrators in the West Los Angeles area, Tim and Chris are personal friends who are currently building cutting-edge theaters that work perfectly with top interior, acoustical and video-based design seamlessly. Simply Home would do the prewire and the redesign of the home automation that would power the heating, security, lighting, audio and video, which would run throughout the entire house.
The next group of people I called on were my gurus. My audio guru has always been Bob Hodas. He is the most sought-after studio tuner who, after 10 years of tuning and EQing my various less-than-perfect rooms, has a feel for my audio likes and dislikes. He can make my beloved Wilson WATT Puppies have ever so slightly less sizzle on the high frequencies, while making my soon-to-be-two Revel Sub 30 subwoofers pound in my new room without even the most trained listener being able to locate them sonically. Hodas, Duffy and Rees worked on the calculations for the room in the virtual domain with the goal of creating the dimensions of a room that had a running chance at excellent audio. As always, when dealing with gurus, you can never make them completely happy with every decision, such as where to put media storage (Duffy wanted me to do away with all of my CDs and DVDs by using a DVD server and a music server) and what effect would it have on the audio. We additionally called in my personal friend Kevin Voecks from Revel for a second opinion for audio design, since we were going to be using some Revel speakers. He would lobby for the use of all-Revel speakers, but that is unlikely, considering the investment I have in my Wilson WATT Puppy Version Seven speakers with the WATCH center speaker. We would use Revel’s excellent in-wall speakers for side channels, as well as adding a second Revel Sub 30 reference subwoofer.
Towards the end of the design segment of the project, we all came to an agreement for a room that was going to be 19 feet long and 14 feet wide. Fabric walls would cover the front and sides of the room with built-in media storage and equipment racks on the south side of the room. There would be one step up in the back of the theater to create a stadium effect. The overall theater would seat five adults comfortably. Tim Duffy was able to use software from Middle Atlantic and Stewart Filmscreen to create drawings of the way the two seven-foot-tall pullout racks would look with all of my current and future gear installed. He was able to determine the size of the auto-masking Stewart Filmscreen video screen that I would need at nine feet diagonal, which was a dramatic increase over my trusty old Stewart 4:3 100-inch roll-down screen. Bob Hodas was able to work with Bobby Rees to get RPG treatments built into most of the locations he wanted in the room, including his new favorite Modex panels that eat ugly-sounding standing waves in the back of the room. Custom absorption panels have been designed to be placed on the ceiling for the first order reflections that cause so many audio maladies.
Things weren’t perfect, but my team was working with an environment where we could deal with many of the issues that have plagued my old reference systems. Some of those problems included ambient light and sound leakage. We solved the light problem very easily by not installing any windows in the room. There are spots pre-framed in the room for windows if someone is insane enough to want to tear out the theater, but- we made it as dark as possible. Sonically, the acoustical design of the room was going to be better than what I was used to; however, Duffy suggested to the contractor that we use a series of products called Quiet Rock, which is drywall that is specifically designed to keep the sound in. Not only is the drywall of a special fabrication, it also ends up being sealed or caulked to keep the good vibrations in. Considering that my fiancée will be sleeping
directly above the theater, this seemed like an easily justifiable investment of an extra $1,500. We considered the use of studio doors that normally have two sets of heavy, sealed doors, but there really wasn’t enough room. We were forced to compromise to one large, heavy door that would allow big gear in and out, but could be counter-sunk into the floor so that light couldn’t sneak in and wreck the contrast on my projector.
How My Video Almost Ended Up Crappy
Picking a projector can be a daunting task. Technologies change fast, but I had a short list of products that I was considering. For video, Duffy worked with Rees to create a soffet that runs across the back of the room to house the video system, as well as much of the wiring needed for the system. Unlike my hush box experiment in my old theater, this system would have its own forced air system that would be silent and allow whatever projector I invested in to run cool as a cucumber. The problem was that the plumber installed the drainage for the master bathroom toilet directly into the area where the projector would go. While he was able to reroute the path of the toilet to make more room, one of my favorite projectors, the Sony Qualia 004, was eliminated from the running because of physical depth. At 30 inches long, I no longer could fit the 004 into my soffet. So much for no compromises.
Ultimately, after walking the floor at CES like a kid in a candy store, I was able to settle on Meridian-Faroudja’s new D-ILA projector. I have used Faroudja processors for more than a decade in my system and their ability to upconvert to 1080p and their projectors’ ability to reproduce 1080p was what closed me on the projector. Until every hockey and baseball game I watch is in HDTV, I will need scaling to get the most of the content I enjoy.
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