The vast majority of home cinema installations we see at HCC use a projection system to deliver pictures on the scale needed to recreate the cinema experience convincingly. But for all their merits, a projector is not always the most appropriate solution for every room.

“First up, you need a minimum 3.5m between the projector and the screen”, says Dave Willmott, technical advisor for Zebra, who carried out this good-looking install at a recently-built house in Kent. “Then you have to house it, which either means a table or hanging it form the ceiling. If you’re in a house with high ceilings, them means the projectors has to hang down low and that can look a bit odd”

In this instance, however, none of that was a problem. The room is easily long enough to accommodate a projector and the ceilings are relatively low. But home cinema fan Matthew, a banker, had his own reason for steering clear of projection. Nothing to do with the technology, simply that Matthew likes to keep fit while he’s watching a movie or a TV programme. So at the back of the room, roughly where the projector would have been housed, is a treadmill and an ‘ab trainer’. So no projector for Matthew then. Instead, there’s a high-tech solution in the shape of a 50in Pioneer Plasma Display Panel, which forms an elegant centrepiece for the system.

SPARE ROOM
The room in which the home cinema system is housed had been standing empty, save for the exercise equipment and a l4in portable television, for almost a year when Matthew visited Zebra's Kings Road showroom on a friend's recommendation.

After a site visit, Dave put together a plan for the system, working to the client's budget of around f35,000. Prior to the event, says Dave, Matthew did not seem overly concerned about the choice of equipment. “But I think he checked us out afterwards; he adds. “Since the kit went in, he seems to have been doing his research to make sure we didn't sell him any duds!”

You would be hard pressed, in fact, to find any duds in Matthew's system. Surround sound muscle and processing is provided by Yamaha's mighty DSP-A1X Dolby Digital/DTS amp, with a multiregion Pioneer DV717 to spin the DVDs, and a Miller & Kreisel speaker setup. This comprises three MK S-125s across the front, two SW95s on the rear channels, flush-mounted in the ceiling, and an MX350 sub for low-frequency impact.

Other gear includes a Panasonic NV-HS850 Super VHS VCR and a Nakamchi MB-10 5-CD changer, though you'd be hard pressed to find any of the hardware, so well is it concealed by some great-looking beech cabinetry along the front wall. 'The cabinetry is a little more expensive than we originally envisaged; says Dave, 'but it looks great. It did cause a slight delay to the job; he adds, 'but then again, decent cabinetry always seems to take longer than you would expect, because it's such specialist work".

EASY DOES IT
As installs go, this was one of the more straightforward jobs that Zebra has tackled. “It helps that the room is at the top of the house, so it's easy to run cabling up through the loft; says Dave. 'Also, the walls are plasterboard with insulated panels, so it's a lot easier to run cables up the walls than it is in an older, stone-built house, where you can spend the first day just knocking channels in the walls.”

The only real potential hiccup came with the installation of the plasma panel. Though it's not a problem that many of us will ever have to worry about, custom installers have found over the last 18 months, as they have begun to use plasma monitors, that they can cause problems with infrared-based control systems, which use repeaters to pass the signal from the controller to the equipment, where this is housed out of line-of-sight from the controller.

When the PDP is switched on, the infrared signals generated when the pixels in the plasma panel are illuminated can block the infrared signals from the remote, so that the user has to execute the same command several times before it is completed. The solution adopted here is a simple one: a Crestron touchscreen remote which uses RF, rather than IR signals, to control the equipment, thus sidestepping the problem.

DVD BUYING SPREE
In addition to the equipment, the cabinetry around the plasma panel also houses a rapidly-growing collection of software, including around 100 pre-recorded movies on VHS, plus 50 or so DVDs, almost all Region 1. I was curious as to how aware Zebra's customers (particularly those who don't have a regular diet of HCC to keep them up to speed) are as to the merits of R1 software over R2, and whether it's an issue that tends to come up during the initial discussions.

“Some clients know more about it than others; says Dave, “but we dechip all our DVD players as a matter of policy and we talk about the benefits of buying R1 in the System Manual that we prepare for all our installs. What we also find is that sometimes we finish an install and the client has nothing to play on it, so we tend to throw in a few discs as a gesture of goodwill when we complete the job.”
That wasn't the case here, however, as Matthew had been on something of a buying binge to make sure he had plenty to enjoy, once everything was installed. His DVD collection currently numbers around 60 discs and includes a good variety of movies, from classics like The Deer Hunter and Reservoir Dogs, to system-crunchers like Saving Private Ryan and The Matrix.

The first disc used on the system once it was all installed was The Fifth Element and, as Dave reveals, it was clear from the opening scenes that Matthew was going to have some fun in his dual-purpose media room.
'Matthew had been working away and insisted that I didn't come to 'commission' the system before he arrived back so that he could be the first to enjoy it; says Dave. 'So I came along and set it all up and put The Fifth Element on. We had only got a minute or so into the demo when Matthew insisted we stop it so we could go and get his wife so she could see and hear how good it was:
And as the blackout blinds drop at the touch of a button on the Crestron screen and the system fires up, you can see why Matthew got so excited. Sure, the plasma panel may not have quite the same impact as a 7ft projector screen but, at 50in, it's large enough, and it helps Matthew get two rooms - a gym and a cinema - out of one. The only thing we're still trying to work out is why, with all this fun on tap, anyone would want to waste their time exercising.

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