BEST CINEMA OF 2019!

This beautiful award-winning home cinema is located in Brisbane City, Australia.  Early in 2019 we completed this home cinema and were awarded by CEDIA for our efforts, taking out the win for Best Home Cinema (Level II) in the Asia Pacific region.

From the outset, it was our goal to produce something extraordinary for our client.  Having had several meetings with other home cinema suppliers in the local area, our client was confused with what brands to choose and how to put the room together.  Once we began discussions it became apparent that brands and models were not actually the main concern.  Instead, the focus was on having a giant screen, impacting sound and an interior that was both functional and clean.  Along with this, we had to ensure the room was as soundproof as possible with the space we had to work with.

We started with locating the seats- all 10 of them.  From here, we were able to work out the maximum screen height and layout of all the speakers.  For this project, we decided to use Pro Audio Technologies digital active speakers.  These speakers provide a genuine cinema sound with incredible dynamics and hard-hitting bass.  Two large 15″ subwoofers were installed into the columns to ensure that bass was evenly distributed to all seats and had the chest-pounding impact that we were looking for.

The speaker arrangement in the room is a hybrid combination of Dolby Atmos and Auro 3D.  This set up uses 9 primary bed channels on the walls, 4 main Atmos speakers on the ceiling plus two additional centre height speakers for Auro3D mixing.  Add in two subwoofers and the system could be referred to as a 9.2.6 layout.  This layout worked exceptionally well. It allowed for full channel playback of Atmos content plus up-mixing of legacy content to all channels for an extremely immersive experience.

For the projection system, we utilised a custom-sized 186″ Severtson Screens cinemascope woven screen using their SAT4K material.  To light up the screen, a BenQ LK970 4K DLP projector was combined with a Lumagen Radiance Pro 4K video processor/scaler.  This processor handles colour processing and aspect ratio.  Not many projectors can handle HDR material well, so in this case, we utilised the power of the Lumagen to implement 4K HDR-to-SDR processing. This allowed the 4K sources (Oppo Bluray, Apple TV) to output their full 4K HDR signal and for the Lumagen to repackage it into a wide-colour SDR signal.  The projector displayed this with ease.  The overall final image was sensational and ticked all the boxes for brightness, colour accuracy and sharpness.

A lot of time was spent during calibration and testing to ensure that the system operated to a high standard.  More than three days were spent on audio calibration and video calibration and the finished result is nothing short of amazing.  We know that our client is getting a lot of use from this room and will do so for many years to come.

If you would like to get in contact with The Digital Picture, our details can be found here:  https://thedigitalpicture.com.au/contact-us/