Hi, I'm Scott Newnan, the CEO of Audio Advice today, I'm going to share with you
how we converted an upstairs bonus room into a unique theater space.
What made this project so much fun is how many challenges we face
since this was a total retrofit in an existing space in home.
I bet many people who watch this video will relate to wanting a great theater
in your own home, but every time you think about where
to put it, you just run into too many issues.
So we're going to show you the entire process from start to finish,
including a full time lapse of the transformation of the room.
and how we address each challenge.
For those of you who already subscribe to our channel,
you know, I like to show something new in every video.
In this video, you'll see how we addressed acoustic
challenges of the room, installed a star ceiling,
and we'll end with our final microphone demo to see how it came out.
Now let's get started.
OK, so
let's go take a look at the room before any work has started.
If you come on in here where you'll see us, what this room looked like
when the homeowner literally just purchased the home.
So these plates were already here and some wiring that's already here.
But what we need to do is turn this into a real great theater.
So we're going to rewire it to have the wiring within wall
speakers at your level here, playing straight to the main listening position,
and we're going to suspend a screen in front of it so we can do the JBL in walls.
And then we're going to have the all the components in a cabinet below here.
Now let's take a look over here.
one of the challenge you've got room,
and many of you may have this in your own rooms.
We've got windows all on the side, and there's two challenges with windows.
one is acoustic
because you can hear from the road outside and the other is light control.
So we're actually going to do drapes
that completely cover up each of these three windows.
And then if you look here, we actually have a couch that's sitting in
approximately the position that the main seats will be in.
Once this is installed, this is a great thing to do.
If you're doing a theater on your own,
you'll see if you use our free home theater tool where we designed this
and we mapped out all the speakers
that this is now sitting exactly where the couches sit in.
The tool actually tells you where it will be.
So we know this is what it's going to look like.
So when the designer and the homeowners come through
and look at the room, they'll know this is where the seats are going to be
. Now, if we look back,
the theater tour will also show you exactly where the front speakers will go,
as well as the rears from here instead of doing sides
because of where these windows are and those doors.
We're going to use all SCL7's, which is a diagonal speaker
that will aim a little bit inward across all of the seats in the back here.
And then we're going to do Atmos up here.
The fan will come out a star ceiling in the middle.
And this thing will be pretty cool.
You'll see the vision of the transformation
in our 3D render of the final room.
These three dimensional renders are most helpful for our DIY customers
who are using our online design team and installing the system themselves
or with their local contractor, but they can also be helpful
for visualizing what the final room will look like.
Now let's shift gears and see the time lapse of the installation.
OK, so let's check out the
final room after it's been totally transformed.
What we're going to do is start with the screen and the projector.
So this is 138 inch diagonal cinema scope screen.
It's acoustically transparent by Stewart Film Screen.
one of the goals the homeowner had for this room
is they really wanted a bright, strong picture that you would typically
find on a television more than in most theaters.
So this is a one to three gain screen, which brings back a lot of light
back to the key seats.
And it's paired up with an Epson 4050 projector.
Now, Epson is known for having really high lumen capability for the money,
so it has 20 400 lumens when you match set up with a 1.3 gain screen.
The room really pops in.
The picture looks terrific.
OK, let's shift gears and talk about the audio side effects.
The front three speakers are JBL Synthesis SCL 6.
The SL6's have four, five and a quarter inch woofers,
but what really makes them saying is chaebols, patented one inch compression
drivers mated with a high definition imaging horn.
These are two major advantages over traditional speakers.
The first is that these speakers have tremendous dynamics
because compression drivers have force behind them.
They're incredibly efficient and can go from the tiny
sound of a pin drop to the powerful blast of an explosion in an instant.
The second advantage is that the compression drivers are behind waveguides
the control, the dispersion into the room, so the SCL sixes are on axis speaker.
So the waveguide sends the sound straight forward, enabling consistent,
smooth frequency response across all four of the seats in this theater.
So with the French doors you see sitting over on this side.
Plus, if you come over here,
you'll remember we've got the windows back over here.
The JBL SCL six is with the control dispersion really helped us
control the sound in this room
and provide good even distribution even before we started calibration.
OK, so now let's take a look at the rear here.
You'll see that we've got the JBL Synthesis SL seven back here.
The SCL7's have the same woofers.
There's two, five and a quarter inch lovers, plus the one edge compression
driver playing forward.
Now, what makes these different from the six is primarily is that these are off
axis, meaning they focus in at a 15 degree angle.
They have a 90 degree spread here.
What makes that really cool is in situations like this
where you don't have sides and so you want to move your rears
quite wide to create dispersion in the room in here,
but it minimizes bouncing off the wall and fully covers the seats.
So for those of you who subscribe to the channel,
you know, I like to cover something new in each video.
I'm going to pause here
for a second and talk a little bit about how you might think about situations
where you don't have space for sides or maybe don't have space for rears.
And then what do you do?
So I'm going to just walk you conceptually through it.
Ideally, what you want to do
is try and create as much 360 degree dispersion as you can in a room.
So when you're sitting in a seat,
the speakers are as much around you as possible.
So if you go to the Adobe spec, what you'll see is that when you look at RIRs,
rears can be between a 60 degree angle back or 90 degree angle.
But how do you know which one should you be at 60 degrees or 90?
And the answer is you want to think about surround yourself with speakers.
So in this particular case, if we've got no sides, we want the rears
to be wide to get more dispersion around us where the speakers,
if it were the reverse, for instance,
and you had no rear because there's no back to the room,
you might want to bring your sides back further.
Now the good news in this case is we actually have created all of this
in the free home theater design tool on Audio Advice.com.
So if you're new to this, are you trying to design your theater
and you don't want to make a mistake or do some math wrong?
The easiest way to do it is just go there.
Put in all your dimensions, put in the speakers you've got,
and then you will see we'll actually modify it
and put them where
they should be based upon what the capabilities are in your room.
OK, so now let's switch over and look at the outmost speakers.
We actually hear the Atmos speakers here in this star ceiling,
so you can't see them right now.
But there JBL SCL8's They have the same five and a quarter inch woofer
and one inch compression driver as the other speakers in the room.
They play at a 45 degree angle, so we've got them in front of the seats
and they've got a 60 degree spread hitting it.
So it completely covers all four of these seats,
as well as the director seats here in the back.
All of these speakers are powered by an Integra
five that for surround sound receiver.
The Integra has 120 watts per channel of really good power.
When you combine this power with the high efficiency of the JBL synthesis speakers.
You get incredible dynamics from this system.
OK, so now that we've got smooth, consistent response
across everything in the room, we need to focus on the bass side of things.
Given the dimensions of this room, it was best to do two subwoofers.
So we've got two SVS SB 3000 subwoofers
that matched up perfectly, putting them in the front left and front right.
These subwoofers have 800 watts of armées power
20 500 peak with a high excursion 13 inch woofer now in a future.
video, I'm going to talk about the difference
between arms and peak power
and really walk through how you should think about that.
But suffice it to say,
these two subwoofers provide plenty of slam and bass in this room.
Now let's talk about another challenge in this room, which is that
the room dimensions are not naturally good for audio.
In addition to having the big windows on the side,
if you look at the dimensions which is 18 feet deep, 16 feet wide
and nine feet high, the depth is exactly double
the ceiling height and the width is almost equal to the depth.
If you were designing a perfect room, you would avoid dimensions
that are multiples of each other or that have the same length and width.
Because of the way that sounds, bounce around the room
and certain frequencies are canceled or multiplied.
If you're designing a room from scratch and you want to learn more about this,
check out the video I did on home theater design
best practices, which is linked in the description that video covers
room dimensions and all the major topics for designing a theater.
Many of you will find yourself
in a situation like this where the room is not optimal.
Yes, we could have created a fake wall and shorten the room, but
then it would have tightened the space and made the length and width even closer.
So we had to employ a host of techniques that collectively led to a great outcome.
The first thing we did was to use the JBL synthesis
SCL speakers that give us great dispersion control.
OK, so the second thing we did
was to employ using two subwoofers versus one in general.
If you want to get good bass distribution across multiple seats,
you'd rather have more subwoofer.
So in this particular case, it worked out well to have one in the front left
and one in the front right.
We then phase in time aligned the subwoofers with everything else
in the room and actually ended up with a pretty good bass curve.
Even despite having challenging dimensions of the room.
Now, if you want to learn more about how many subs you should do
or how to set them up or where to place them,
check out the link in the description.
We actually have a video where I talk about going through all of that.
OK, so the next thing we did was try to use good acoustic treatment principles.
So starting with really heavy, thick carpet on the floor,
big thick drapes covering up all the windows here.
Then if you shift back here, you'll see
we've got the Revolution Home Theater seating,
which is by far our number one selling home theater seats in the nation.
But they're great at absorbing energy as well.
And here, if you look at the star ceiling, this is one big acoustic panel
that's hitting at the first reflections, again coming off of the ceiling.
And then finally, even on the front right here, we have acoustics
cinema around absorptive panels
that catch the first reflection coming off the side speakers here.
So we've basically done everything we can to set this room up for success.
OK, so the final piece of the puzzle
was to use Dirac base calibration, which comes with the Integra five Dot.
For what that does is it analyzes the response of all the speakers in the room,
including the impact of the room and then evens everything out.
Does a terrific job doing it.
So I like to end all of our videos with a demo of the room
before I tell you how I think this room performs.
Let's watch the famous lobby scene from The Matrix, which has been remastered
in Dolby Atmos and is actually in our video on the top ten.
At most movies in particular.
What I want you to notice is in a scene like this where you've got so much
electronic music and a bunch of shooting going on at the same time,
it can overwhelm a system
and really kill the imaging if the system's not designed well.
So let's go ahead and watch, and let's see what you say.
I personally
love this scene, the music, the graphics and all that is going on.
Hopefully, you got a sense listening to the binaural mike set up how clearly
you can hear every single shot, even as fast as those shots were coming out
and every shot and movement was imaged perfectly in the room.
So one of the big takeaways from this home theater installation should be
that you can take a less than ideal environment
and with good design, installation and calibration,
you can turn it into a great home theater room.
I'd like to thank the terrific home owners for allowing us to work with them
on this project and for letting us document it in this video.
As you can probably tell,
we live and breathe audio
and home theaters and just love bringing happiness to our customers,
whether we're installing it ourselves or helping a customer halfway
across the country, design and install their dream system in their home.
If you're considering building a home theater or updating your own.
Check out our home theater page and audio advice dot com where
we have our full free home theater design tool.
How to videos and inspiration gallery and everything home, theater related.
Or if you have any questions at all, give us a call or chat with us
and audioadvice.com or stop by one of our award winning showrooms.
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