We continue to prove that we truly are the best home cinema installation company in Bath
We were given the brief to transform a disused music rehearsal room in a clients house into a cinema room. Every element of the design and build was handled in house by Hidden Home Technology, from air conditioning and heating to lighting design and furnishing.
After the tour of our experience centre it became apparent that the client had an equal love of music and film so this was incorporated into the design. Décor and lighting had to lend itself to both listening to music and to watching films. Also audio performance had to be designed in such a way that enough of the budget and performance was dedicated to the stereo channels. Often with cinema systems the budget per channel (speaker) is diluted by having many additional surround speakers. We had to tread this compromise lightly. Trying hard to maintain the immersion of surround sound whilst leaving enough budget for a truly high end music experience. We used Wisdom L75 speakers for the front three channels and the mighty Wisdom STS subwoofer to achieve this.
The video gives you insight into this transformation and build. Sit back and enjoy.
Project at a glance
Location: Bath, Somerset. Room: a disused music rehearsal room inside the client’s house. Brief: a dedicated cinema that would also work as a serious two-channel listening room. Front three channels: Wisdom Audio L75 in-wall line sources. Low frequency: Wisdom subwoofer. Scope: complete design and build in house — structure, acoustics, air conditioning and heating, lighting design, décor and furnishing. Recognition: Silver, Best International Installation, URC Unsurpassed Awards.
The problem we actually had to solve
A cinema and a high-end listening room want different things, and most rooms that try to be both end up being neither. A surround system spreads the budget across seven, nine or eleven channels; a two-channel system concentrates it into two. Split the money evenly and you get a cinema with mediocre stereo and a hi-fi with mediocre surround.
Our answer was to weight the front three channels heavily and accept a more restrained surround array behind them. Wisdom Audio in-wall line sources made that possible. A planar line source behaves differently in a room from a conventional cone in a box: it interacts less with the floor and ceiling, so early reflections are reduced and dialogue and voices stay clear without the room having to be smothered in absorption. And because they mount inside the wall, the budget went into the drive units rather than into a cabinet nobody would ever see behind the acoustic fabric.
Why this room had to be built, not decorated
The walls in this room are not the walls the client started with. Building out the front wall created the depth the in-walls needed, the space for acoustic treatment behind the acoustically transparent fabric, and a clean route for cabling and lighting. That is the part of a build like this that never appears in the photographs and determines almost everything about how it sounds. Retro-fitting any of it afterwards would have meant taking the room apart again.
Heating and air conditioning were designed in from the start for the same reason. A sealed, well-treated room with a projector in it warms up quickly, and gets noisy if the ventilation is an afterthought. A cinema you cannot comfortably sit in for two hours is not finished.
What we would tell a client considering the same thing
Decide early whether the room is film-first or music-first, because the honest answer changes the speaker layout, the acoustic treatment and where the seats go. Then bring us in before the studwork rather than after the decorating. Almost every compromise in a room like this traces back to a decision taken before anybody thought to ask an installer.
See more of our projects, read about room acoustics and home cinema design and installation, or browse the full Wisdom Audio range. Our full awards record is on the awards and press page.
