Best Home Cinema ◆ Level I

Wavetrain Cinemas

Wavetrain Cinemas were called to this home to see how the existing cinema room could be upgraded to current technologies. But “as soon as the client turned the system on, it was obvious there were many issues in the room that needed to be first corrected” — speakers rear-ported into a large joinery void, no acoustic wall treatment, and general room reverb “way too high for even stereo, let alone surround sound”.

Wavetrain set to work, removing the side walls and the fabric between side walls and front/rear joinery to allow acoustic treatments to be installed, along with correct installation of the speakers and subwoofers. Plumbing pipes were lagged; additional deadening insulation was used, with new linings and the corners of the cinema turned into massive bass traps. Panels and speaker door sizes were amended, and black speaker grilles replaced with new acousticallytransparent fabric grilles printed to match the original architectural brief.

The screen was switched to a more appropriate brightness for the projector recently fitted, and was given a ratio of 2.2:1 (as wide as possible without changing the current screen height), with a Lumagen video processor to customise without using projector memory.

“We did not have masking,” explains Wavetrain. “The projector was instead zoomed out to the width of the screen and the Lumagen does the format changes, including NLS [Lumagen’s clever non-linear stretch] for 16:9 content, which is the client’s preference. We have provided two NLS settings stored in presets — for sport and movies.”

With full-room acoustic treatment and the rest of the changes, this cinema is now more suited to what is part of an architecturallyrenowned award-winning home, yet the cinema is still almost hidden when not in use, with an artwork replacing the screen (image below).