Industry News

Pro Football Player Specifies his Dream Theater

July 06, 2011 | by Lisa Montgomery

Home theaters can be big, small, modest or elaborate. The owner of this medium-sized media space (a pro football player whose name we can’t mention) wanted his theater to reflect his football career and suit the unique needs of his family. First and foremost, the audio had to come through loud and clear, but not so it would disturb his newborn child or wife. Custom sound baffles were installed to keep the home theater’s audio isolated from the rest of the home, even when the volume is cranked.

The seating had to fit exacting requirements; he’s a defensive player, a.k.a. a big guy- too big for most standard seating. Instead, he wanted seats that could combine as a couch and recline individually.

The Black Diamond screen contributes through a design that’s maximized for high light output from a projector. The materials of the screen absorb the light so well that the projector’s high contrast can be effectively used; the blacks aren’t washed out, and the whites are crisp and clear.

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Screen Scene: The Latest Projection Screen Trends and Challenges

Reflecting on what’s hot in the projection screen category for manufacturers is a little like casting their own footprints up on the wall. In opening themselves up like this, the top screen manufacturers have expressed both caution and opportunity for 3D screen technology, confirmation of the rise of multi-purpose media rooms, and a multitude of intriguing predictions for what types of changes this product class may go through.

Trending in Multiple Dimensions
The biggest trend in projection screens is a direct reflection on increase in 3D content and projector technology. Not surprisingly, there are a range of views regarding the viability for 3D screens to dominate the market long term and the views of the different types of challenges that the technology presents. read more

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SCREEN INNOVATIONS ANNOUNCES THEIR NEW BLACK DIAMOND ZERO EDGE

Black Diamond Zero Edge available in 2.7, 1.4, and .8 screen gains up to 142-inch diagonal.

Austin, TX – August 18, 2011 – Screen Innovations (SI), the leader in projection screen technology, today announced its new Black Diamond Zero Edge projection screen, the first affordable large flat-panel alternative.

The Zero Edge ultra-thin, rigid panel sets a new aesthetic standard – with a pencil-thin bezel, the projected image appears to float off the wall. Among the multiple mounting options, the Zero Edge includes recessed (unframed), flush-to, projected off the wall, or flying from cables for an incredibly sleek appearance. There’s no assembly required—just unpack and hang.

According to Ryan Gustafson, President of Screen Innovations, “Our dealers have been telling us that they love the Black Diamond Big Screen experience but the problem is their customers don’t want a projection screen in the living room.  Now with Zero Edge, you can have the same big screen experience with cutting edge aesthetic appeal.  Black Diamond Zero Edge coupled with the new Black Diamond G3 screen materials offers the most stunning screen money can buy.

Standard screen sizes are available in 80 to 142-inch diagonal. Custom screen sizes are available as well. Screen materials include Black Diamond 2.7, Black Diamond 1.4 and Black Diamond 0.8. The Black Diamond Zero Edge will be shipping in October.

For more information about the new Black Diamond Zero Edge, visit http://www.screeninnovations.com/projector-screens/fixed/black-diamond-zero-edg/

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Electronic House Home Of The Year 2011

May 05, 2011 by Steven Castle

You’re treated to an entertaining show the second you enter this theater. About 150 feet of LEDs (light emitting diodes) integrated into the coffered ceiling light up and cycle through several different colors as guests take their seats.

“It’s a neat effect, and it gives it such a Wow! factor,” says Mike Fox of systems installation firm Fox Audio Visual in Springfield, Ill. “I chose five to six colors that can be toggled through. For more advanced colors, you can call them up via the remote.”

A motion sensor at the front of the room detects visitors from the side door and triggers an LED processor that’s connected to a Control4 home control system. The LED processor turns on combinations of the red, green and blue LEDs to achieve different effects. Fox and his company programmed several preset scenes into the Control4 system, so the homeowners can show off their theater and its colorful ceiling at the touch of a button.

The ceiling isn’t the only amazing part of this room. The LED lights ramp down when it’s showtime, and that’s when the audio and video system shines.

Fox used seven of BG’s Radia “ribbon” speakers to provide the audio thump. The speakers use flat diaphragms instead of traditional cone drivers, and an electromagnetic force on aluminum conductors evenly distributes a signal over the entire surface of the diaphragms. This eliminates vibrations and results in a smooth sound, especially in the upper frequencies.

“I love the sound of the BG speakers; it doesn’t really bounce off the walls,” says Fox. “And they’re great for both home theater and listening to music.” This suits the 70-year-old couple who owns this theater, as they tend to watch older movie classics, rather than today’s bass-heavy blockbusters—although Fox did enhance the low end of the sound (or bass) by adding two 15-inch Velodyne subwoofers. Lastly, Fox applied a variety of acoustical materials to the walls and ceiling to enhance the sound.

The three front Radia CC-LCR speakers are located behind an acoustically perforated video screen. Fox made sure no reflective surface on the hidden speakers would shine through the pinholes of the screen, by removing all of the plastic on the top and bottom of the units and painting their housings black. Four additional full-size Z62 LCRs are hidden behind fabric in the pillars along the side and rear walls, and the Velodyne subs are concealed underneath a cabinet in the front of the room. Together, these pieces provide the full sonic effect of a 7.2-channel surround-sound system, which is driven by a Denon AVR-4310 surround-sound receiver and Velodyne SC1250 amps.

The smooth A/V theme continues with the combination of a JVC DLA-RS25 projector and Screen Innovations 119-inch display. “I love JVC projectors, and for the money they provide a great picture,” says Fox. JVC’s D-ILA (Direct-Drive Image Light Amplification) is a variant of LCoS (Liquid Crystal on Silicon) technology, which is considered a cross between DLP (Digital Light Projection) and LCD. Forgive the alphabet soup, but in LCoS technology a light shines on reflective panels of liquid crystals to produce a picture.

The resulting images tend to be very smooth and film-like, without some of the artifacts that can result with other display technologies. “Other [projection technologies] are brighter and have a little more color, but these are a lot smoother,” says Fox. “The skin tones are more realistic and the colors aren’t overly exaggerated.”

Fox also likes Screen Innovations’ fabric screen because he says the perforation pattern that allows the sound to come through is tighter than others.

The JVC projector is all but invisible, shining from one unobtrusive hole in a soffit at the rear of the theater. The projector was hidden there, and a rear door in the adjacent exercise room allows easy access and ventilation.

A handheld Control4 remote revs up the projector, as well as all of the necessary components. The lights, including the LEDs, are controlled through the remote, too, making this one smooth room to operate. EH

http://www.electronichouse.com/article/smooth_operator

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The Death Of The Dedicated Media Room and Why What Comes Next Is Even More Exciting

A good friend of mine who is an admitted audiophile and the former owner of Evett and Shaw loudspeakers from Utah, always talked about how “anti-social” home theater systems were. He noted that you and your wife have two other couples over for dinner and a movie; by the time that you all are in the theater – the lights are basically off, everyone is pointed towards the screen and laser-focused on the screen. You are not really interacting with each other (other than the occasional laugh out loud joke or whiz-bang effect), you are just sharing a dark moment in a room. His argument was that those same people could sit in a living room with a top-level audiophile system and enjoy music, a cocktail or two as well as meaningful, thoughtful conversation. To Craig, this was much more social and much more valuable.

Additional Resources
• Find more original content in our Feature News section.
• Read Andrew Robinson’s guide to building a room.
• Learn about another new trend in home theater: 2.1 speaker surround sound.

The idea of the dedicated media room or home theater is now a standard part of many very expensive homes. Loaded with design concepts from the old days, dedicated home theaters aren’t always tuned in to the ways that people enjoy music, movies, HDTV and other media. For example, years ago when CRT projectors were the only way to get a big image on a screen – you needed a very dark room to make even a reasonable image. Today’s new light rejecting screen materials make it such that even with an affordable projector (well below $10,000), you can have beaming video with the lights on at a pretty good clip. I saw a demonstration at this past CEDIA of a DNP Supernova screen that was just fantastic as it made a hell of an image while taking direct light from a sodium light above in the rafters. Screen Innovations, Stewart Filmscreen and others are also in the light rejecting screen game. Thus today it is possible to watch really fantastic video in a room that isn’t pitch black. Is the video better in a fully darkened room? There is no question this is the case, however people aren’t always in the mood for the full experience in a dedicated room. They have other things going on but they also want to enjoy their AV systems.

In the audiophile world, many a joke has been made about “listening with your head in a vice,” in a room with “speaker cables propped up on saw horses.” Amps on the floor, one ideal seating position, equipment everywhere with ugly room treatments make for an experience designed for performance but not for anyone other than the audiophile collector. His time (let’s face it: women just don’t listen to music like this) is spent alone. As Craig pointed out above – somewhat anti-social. While Dark Side of the Moon might sound better with the lava lamp lit along with a roach in the clip (not that HomeTheaterReview.com condones drug use outside of medical use), it’s pretty much of an anti-social experience.

The Media Room of The Future
A few weeks ago at the suggestion of a top loudspeaker manufacturer, I had a meeting with acoustic designer, Anthony Grimani. His home theater acoustical designs can only really be described as over-the-top. He builds custom solutions that can soundproof a room and/or deal with physical anomalies of a media room in ways that look acceptable to real-world (albeit wealthy) clients – but also seriously perform. Over a glass of wine (Peter Michael Belle Cote Chardonnay) and sitting in front of my living room system we discussed how people are allocating the real estate inside of their theaters differently. More and more often clients are dumping the rows of stadium seat theater seating for L-shaped sofas. They are adding game tables and movable seating that can be positioned for bigger screenings. They are using larger screens designed to work in ambient light and beyond. The result is a room that can be used more often than just for the serious, lights-out screening. Consumers are building small kitchens and bars into the rooms and using the rooms more for entertaining than for focused viewing. In a way, Anthony is overcoming Craig’s objection from nearly two decades ago, thanks to excellence in design and architecture as well as new technologies available today that simply weren’t around years ago

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Death of the Dedicated Theater?

March 29, 2011 | by Lisa Montgomery

Something felt a bit off this year. During our annual Home of the Year contest, we usually draw the biggest response from custom electronics (CE) pros who have designed dedicated home theaters. You know, those lavish spaces built for serious movie viewing. We saw some dedicated home theaters, but certainly not a surfeit. And there was no shortage of home theater systems installed in other rooms. A sign of the times? I think so.

Still reeling from the economic downturn, people aren’t building new homes like they used to. They’re making do with what they have—and in most cases, what they have doesn’t include much free space for dedicated theaters. Minus this option, families are choosing to incorporate big displays and surround-sound systems into existing rooms— most often the family room.

This isn’t a new phenomenon. People have been putting big-screens and speakers into their main living spaces for years. But what is new is the caliber of equipment they’re choosing. A flat-panel TV and a basic 5.1 speaker arrangement is simply not cutting it with today’s home theater enthusiasts.

Instead, superwide CinemaScope screens, high-resolution projectors and 7.1 surround-sound systems are becoming the accoutrements du jour for family rooms. People are finding their entertainment comforts among traditional furnishings, family portraits and Friday night slumber parties. Sure, you may sacrifice some of the high-grade performance you’d get from having an acoustically treated environment, but as the owners of our award-winning family rooms agree, there’s something so satisfying about being able to flaunt what you’ve already got.

Complete Article http://www.electronichouse.com/article/death_of_the_dedicated_theater/

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Interesting Article – Why 3D doesn’t work and never will. Case closed.

Wikipedia writes: “Murch is widely acknowledged as the person who coined the term Sound Designer, and along with colleagues developed the current standard film sound format, the 5.1 channel array, helping to elevate the art and impact of film sound to a new level. “Apocalypse Now” was the first multi-channel film to be mixed using a computerized mixing board.” He won two more Oscars for the editing and sound mixing of “The English Patient.”
“He is perhaps the only film editor in history,” the Wikipedia entry observes, “to have received Academy nominations for films edited on four different systems:

• “Julia” (1977) using upright Moviola
• ”Apocalypse Now” (1979), “Ghost” (1990), and “The Godfather, Part III” (1990) using KEM flatbed
• “The English Patient” (1996) using Avid.
•  “Cold Mountain” (2003) using Final Cut Pro on an off-the shelf PowerMac G4.

Now read what Walter Murch says about 3D:

Hello Roger,

I read your review of “Green Hornet” and though I haven’t seen the film, I agree with your comments about 3D.

The 3D image is dark, as you mentioned (about a camera stop darker) and small. Somehow the glasses “gather in” the image — even on a huge Imax screen — and make it seem half the scope of the same image when looked at without the glasses.

I edited one 3D film back in the 1980′s — “Captain Eo” — and also noticed that horizontal movement will strobe much sooner in 3D than it does in 2D. This was true then, and it is still true now. It has something to do with the amount of brain power dedicated to studying the edges of things. The more conscious we are of edges, the earlier strobing kicks in.

The biggest problem with 3D, though, is the “convergence/focus” issue. A couple of the other issues — darkness and “smallness” — are at least theoretically solvable. But the deeper problem is that the audience must focus their eyes at the plane of the screen — say it is 80 feet away. This is constant no matter what.

But their eyes must converge at perhaps 10 feet away, then 60 feet, then 120 feet, and so on, depending on what the illusion is. So 3D films require us to focus at one distance and converge at another. And 600 million years of evolution has never presented this problem before. All living things with eyes have always focussed and converged at the same point.

If we look at the salt shaker on the table, close to us, we focus at six feet and our eyeballs converge (tilt in) at six feet. Imagine the base of a triangle between your eyes and the apex of the triangle resting on the thing you are looking at. But then look out the window and you focus at sixty feet and converge also at sixty feet. That imaginary triangle has now “opened up” so that your lines of sight are almost — almost — parallel to each other.

We can do this. 3D films would not work if we couldn’t. But it is like tapping your head and rubbing your stomach at the same time, difficult. So the “CPU” of our perceptual brain has to work extra hard, which is why after 20 minutes or so many people get headaches. They are doing something that 600 million years of evolution never prepared them for. This is a deep problem, which no amount of technical tweaking can fix. Nothing will fix it short of producing true “holographic” images.

Consequently, the editing of 3D films cannot be as rapid as for 2D films, because of this shifting of convergence: it takes a number of milliseconds for the brain/eye to “get” what the space of each shot is and adjust.

And lastly, the question of immersion. 3D films remind the audience that they are in a certain “perspective” relationship to the image. It is almost a Brechtian trick. Whereas if the film story has really gripped an audience they are “in” the picture in a kind of dreamlike “spaceless” space. So a good story will give you more dimensionality than you can ever cope with.

So: dark, small, stroby, headache inducing, alienating. And expensive. The question is: how long will it take people to realize and get fed up?

All best wishes,

Walter Murch

Salt shaker and landscape Photoshops by Marie Haws.

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The State of the Art in 3D 1080p Home Theater Projectors

Evan Powell, January 10, 2011

ProjectorCentral.com

The CES trade show floor featured half a dozen demos of new 1080p home theater projectors in 3D…

All of these products are either just now shipping, or scheduled to ship this quarter. The demos showed impressive 3D imagery, but generally with varying degrees of instability. Having spent time viewing each of the six, I’ve written up some impressions in The State of the Art in 3D 1080p.

Evan Powell
Editor

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SI Appoints Tom Nugent National Accounts Sales Manager

Nugent will be implementing aggressive new sale strategies to increase two-piece projection sales in national accounts.

Austin, Texas, January 4, 2011 - Screen Innovations (www.screeninnovations.com) is proud to announce that it has appointed 10-year JVC veteran Tom Nugent as National Accounts Sales Manager, effective immediately.

“As SI continues to grow and evolve in both the domestic and international markets, we needed an individual with extensive experience and relationships in the A/V markets,” said Ryan Gustafson, SI president. “For several years JVC and SI have been working together to bring the projection experience to the masses, now with Tom onboard, we can quickly expand on our current successes.”

Prior to joining SI, Tom has been the National Product Specialist for JVC’s Procision line of front projectors. Tom was a key ingredient in the rapid growth of JVC’s front projection business over the last several years.

“In an economic environment when many manufacturers are scaling back, SI is focused on hiring the brightest talent to help move the company to the next level,” Gustafson added.

For more information, visit their web at www.screeninnovations.com or call 512-832-6939.

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Netgear 3DHD Kit Wirelessly Distributes 1080p

No new wires for 1080p high-definition video distribution? That’s what Netgear says it delivers with its new 3DHD Wireless Home Theater Networking Kit.

Netgear says the system can wirelessly send multiple streams of high-def with “carrier-grade” range capable of covering homes as large as 5,000 square feet.

“Video consumption in the home has increased at a phenomenal rate and is shifting to the Internet from conventional cable, over-the-air and satellite sources,” says Som Pal Choudhury, Netgear director of product marketing for Core Networking Products. “Our customers are routinely viewing online video content, either stored locally or streaming to their high-definition televisions, and are also moving to broadband digital TV Services.”

“We created 3DHD Wireless technology to keep home networks from becoming a bottleneck for such demanding streams, while eliminating the expense and effort of running Ethernet cables through walls, floors and ceilings. This makes 3DHD Wireless technology an ideal solution for consumers, professional home theater installers and broadband service providers.”

The 3DHD wireless technology features:

Four transmitters and four receivers built into each 3DHD Wireless adapter for Multiple Input Multiple Output transmission (4×4 MIMO), significantly increasing WiFi range and reliability.

Dynamic digital beam forming to steer and target WiFi signals toward the receiver rather than broadcasting the signals in all directions, boosting range.

Space Time Block Coding (STBC) to send multiple and redundant copies of the same data across different paths, minimizing packet loss and improving video reliability.

A feedback control loop that allows the transmitter to adjust its activity based on responses from the receiver, for reliable video streaming even in a high-interference wireless environment.

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