Dedicated Home Theater

Every (home) theater design is unique and needs to be treated as a custom project to achieve a truly superb movie experience.

Softrim Consultants customize systems for each theater to ensure that critical components are matched to the room layout, desired cinema experience and of course, the budget.

The salient criteria in designing and optimizing the movie experience relate to:

The Room

• Acoustics, the room must be balanced between the amount of hard, reflective surfaces vs. the amount of soft, absorptive surfaces. Totally hard floor, ceiling, and walls will produce too much echo and reverb time. A room with totally absorptive surfaces will produce a "dead" sounding room.
• Lighting is critical and the design is highly dependant on the type of TV or projector to be used. For optimal viewing complete darkness is best, but most people prefer to have a little light in the room.
• The size of the screen. Simply put, the larger the better providing that the room can accommodate the correct seating and distance from the screen. People view an image's size based on height, not width; the taller an image, the larger it appears to the human eye.
• Optimizing the distance from the screen to the seating is critical. Too far away will result in loss of image detail. Too close to the screen produces too much detail resulting in jaggy, over-pixilated images.
• Speaker Placement: The best loudspeaker placement is one that completely surrounds the listener and therefore the ideal would indeed be a circle with the listener at the centerpoint. Since this is not practical, Softrim starts with the placement of the most important loudspeaker: the center channel speaker which carries a film’s dialogue. This speaker is generally placed behind the screen (when using projection) or over or under a TV, and as close to ear height as possible. The center speaker: The center speaker handles most movie dialogue, and should be placed directly in front of you (generally near your television) and at about ear level. The front speakers are placed at at a 22- to 30-degree angle such that they are toed in to face the central listening location, and the tweeters are at ear height. The side channel speakers are placed 90 to 110 degrees from the viewing area, high on side walls, to the left and right of the listening position, equidistant from the front speakers and the rear speakers These speakers handle directional audio such as effects that should seem like they're coming from a specific place in the movie.. Rear channel speakers are placed high on side walls, slightly behind the listening position. Subwoofer: There's no set position for a subwoofer, except that it should be placed on the floor. Positioning isn't so important with a subwoofer, because its bass audio is non-directional.

The Video

Simply put, the larger the screen size the better the viewing experience. Softrim offers a choice of:

• Large screen RPTV (rear projection TV’s)
• Flat screens (Plasma, and LCD’s)
• FPTV (front projection TV’s)

The optimum choice is a front projection DLP projector/screen system.

The Video Format

Softrim defines the format as the combination of aspect ratio (height-to-width ratio of the viewable area on the screen) and the resolution of the picture.

• High Definition TV has an aspect ratio of 16:9 or 1.78.
• Movies on DVD’s have an aspect ratio of 1.85 and therefore need to fill the unused portions of a television screen with black bands.
• Cinematic films are shot at an aspect ratio of 2.35
• The HDTV standard increases the resolution and quality of the picture (over basic broadcast TV) to 1080 interlaced lines (1080i) or 1080 progressive scan lines (1080P). 1080P is referred to as true HD. "Progressive" scan means that the lines of the image are all produced in one sweep from the top of the screen to the bottom, all in 1/60th of a second. This is twice as fast as interlaced images and it produces a greatly improved picture with less flicker.

Video Feed

The home Theater must be designed to accept any combination of signals:

• Broadcast (off air)
• Cable TV
• Satellite TV
• DVD (standard, HD or Blu-Ray)
• D-VHS (Digital VHS)

Softrim Technicians calibrate the incoming signal from each component to insure that the output is optimized for each of the above inputs to the viewer’s personal taste based on individual subjectivity.

The Audio

Home theater implies both video and audio intertwined into a single, multimedia experience. Softrim consultants maximize sound quality to handle movies as well as music. The audio components perform a multitude of functions, such as source switching, multi-channel digital to analog conversion, surround processing, DSP, Video switching, etc. Surround processing produces the signals that conform to the number of speakers used and the methodology by which the total sound experience is generated in each speaker.

5.1 is currently the standard in major motion pictures, music, and digital television. The format consists of three speakers across the front and two speakers in the rear. The .1 is a sixth channel called an LFE that is sent to a subwoofer. LFE stands for Low Frequency Effects and the subwoofer is used to enhance the low frequencies so as to get the extra boom out of dramatic scenes requiring lots of low frequencies. The LFE channel has a frequency response from about 20Hz to 120Hz and generally has an additional 10dB of extra power to reproduce low frequency content without distortion.

Typical surround formats implemented by Softrim are:

• Dolby Digital EX: this is a 6.1 system with 5 discrete, full-bandwidth channels (front left & right, center, surround left & right), 1 matrixed, full-bandwidth channel (back surround) and 1 discrete LFE channel (subwoofer)
• THX Surround EX™: this is 6.1 system with 5 discrete, full-bandwidth channels (front left & right, center, surround left & right), 1 matrixed, full-bandwidth channel (back surround) and 1 discrete LFE channel (subwoofer)
• DTS-HD™: this is 6.1 system with 7 discrete, full-bandwidth channels (front left & right, center, surround left & right, & back left & right surround) and 1 discrete LFE channel (subwoofer)

Softrim also employs 7.1 and 9.1 systems, but these are essentially based on the 6.1 format (7.1 and 6.1 are similar except the 7.1 has 2 rear speakers with each reproducing slightly different left and right sounds so as not to jam each other.)