| For the home cinema
installer, every job throws up something different, perhaps in the
shape of some structural problem that no-one has come across before,
or in the form of a request which, though tricky to accommodate, must
be accommodated nonetheless. He (or she) is paying the bill after
all. For Zebra, the challenge set by
this install in a converted loft in north London was to create a
great home cinema system in a room that was already home to a pool
table. And while it would be untrue to say that the pool table was
sitting smack bang in the middle of the room, it was in a position
which meant that the Zebra team couldn't simply ignore it. It was
sitting roughly where the screen would ideally be placed. So they
had to think of a very clever way around it.
The client, an executive in the oil industry,
originally came to Zebra looking for a hi-fi system for the room,
but a little bit of research opened his eyes to the wonderful world
of home cinema, and his two-channel horizons immediately broadened.
The only problem was, the client's wife was perfectly
happy with the room as it was and had no great desire to see it
packed to the rafters with speakers, a projection system, screen
and all the other paraphernalia that comes as part of the media
room baggage. The objective wasn't to create a state-of-the-art
home theatre - rather a top-notch media room, but with virtually
none of the equipment on show.
LOFTY ASPIRATIONS
The design of the house was in the installers' favour. Above the
loft ceiling, they had around a metre of air to play with. This
left them with more than enough room to house not just the motorised
Stewart 7ft. perforated projection screen, but also the projector
itself, a Sony VPL10. This lowers down when required, using a motorised
Audipack projection lift, then disappears away into the ceiling
void again afterwards.
The housing for the screen was cut into the ceiling
so that when lowered, it drops down just a few inches in front of
the pool table. So while the lower part of the pool table is visible
with the screen lowered, it is both below and behind the screen.
This, then, solved the problem of where to house
the screen, but in doing so, it created another problem for the
installation team: where to situate the centre speaker. The front
left and right speakers, although hefty beasts, sit fairly unobtrusively
in the corners behind the pool table. But mounting the centre speaker
on the rear wall in line with the front left and rights would have
done nothing for the front soundstage. To solve the problem, the
Zebra team came up with the neat solution of suspending the centre
speaker from a bracket secured to the underside of the pool table,
a few inches behind the screen.
Even this solution threw up another problem of
its own, owing to the fact that the front left right and centre
speakers were now out of alignment, with the front stereo pair back
towards the rear wall and the centre speaker a few feet further
forwards. The installers overcame this problem by putting a delay
on the left and right pair to realign the front speakers sonically,
if not physically.
The front speakers come from the Danish company
Artcoustic, which is not particularly well-known in the UK, but
which does have an interesting range. Artcoustic describes its products
as 'a unique mix of the art of acoustics and painting' and its speakers,
which are certainly a little out of the ordinary, are widely used
in themed bars and
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restaurants. Using
a system called the Artcoustic Match system, which offers customers
a choice of eight colours of fabric for the speaker grilles and
eight different acrylic paints for the frames, the company says
it can create products which match most interiors, and for this
install, they certainly delivered the goods.
The Artcoustics used in this installation are
a pair of DFF 180-43s for front left and right, and the slimline
DF Multi centre speaker (just as well considering how is it positioned),
which measures up at 1m wide but is just 150mm high and 100mm deep.
PUMP UP THE VOLUME
With discretion in mind, the Zebra team went for two pairs of Miller
8 Kreisel in-ceiling wide dispersion surround speakers, and in order
to add the bass extension that the Artcoustic speakers lacked, they
op[ed for a couple of M&K MX3SOTHX subwoofers. These reference
standard subwoofers, each sporting two l2in long-throw drivers,
can chuck out 350W worth of tight, controlled bass, reaching down
to a rumbling 20Hz at the bottom end.
The system's low frequency output, in fact, provided
another challenge for the installers. With the M&Ks chucking
out such serious, amounts of bass, Zebra had to think about how
to isolate and insulate the room acoustically from the rest of the
house beneath it. Their solution was to create a suspended false
floor beneath the existing floor and line this with two layers of
underlay and extremely dense carpet in order to keep low frequency
leakage to a bare minimum.
The source equipment used in the system includes
a Pioneer 737 DVD player and JVC HR-58700 S-VHS VCR, with a Lexicon
DC1 processor and Cinepro two-channel and six-channel amplifiers
providing the muscle. There's also a six-zone Lutron graphic eye
lighting control system and blackout blinds for the windows. The
total cost of the finished system was a cool £45,000.
SIZE IS EVERYTHING
The owner is a fan of multichannel music, and has as many music
DVDs as he does movies. But that's not to say that he doesn't make
the most of the system. In fact, he's been so impressed with it
since it went in, that in a few weeks time, despite all the head-scratching
that went on to come up with the idea of hanging the screen in front
of the pool table, he's calling the Zebra boys back in to put in
an even bigger second screen, this one measuring eight feet on the
diagonal. This one will drop down from the ceiling in line with
the far side of the pool table from the vantage of the viewing position.
This means, of course, that the pool table will be visible beneath
and just in front of the larger screen when this is in use, but
the client is unconcerned. He wants the larger screen for enjoying
music videos on DVD, and reasons that for this type of material,
the quality of the viewing experience is less important than simply
having the biggest image possible. But the smaller 7ft screen won't
suddenly become redundant. When he wants to enjoy a movie and the
quality of the viewing experience is more critical, he'll use the
original seven footer and put up with the smaller (?!) picture.
All of which begs one blindingly obvious
question: when is anyone going to find time to play pool? Come to
think of it, with this much AV droolware on offer, who'd want to
anyway?
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