Immersive Audio Design Excellence

Being part of the working group was a real eye opener: not just some of the best minds in our residential industry but also great contributions from the studio and professional audio worlds. I’ve learned an incredible amount from attending these calls. The end result is a thoroughly comprehensive design document all integrators can refer to and use to deliver a more emotionally impactful end result, and so better serve the clients, at almost every price level.

The RP22 recommended practices are a big leap forward for the immersive audio and home entertainment industry. At Paradise Theater, we place a high value on performance standards. Standards provide a clear benchmark of the quality of work expected from a design firm, while also encouraging continuous improvement and innovation. With that said, it was an honor to be a part of the panel that developed the standards for immersive audio design. Collaborating and sharing ideas with other industry leaders and experts who share the same end goal of creating amazing listening spaces was a great experience. Innovation doesn't live in a vacuum. It thrives in places where great passionate minds come together. Determining the recommended criteria and practices was truly a team effort.

Having these clearly laid out performance levels and metrics is essential for consistently designing high-performing immersive audio spaces. It not only pushes us designers and engineers to come up with solutions to achieve these standards but also educates the end users on what is achievable in a home theater. We've already started putting RP22 into practice and have clients who are curious about the different performance levels.

RP22 is a valuable document for any manufacturer or integrator involved in immersive audio.  RP22 brings cohesion to design guidelines and performance objectives when adopting todays modern day audio formats to entertainment spaces.  As a manufacturer knowing the parameters outlined for each of the performance levels in RP22 will help in providing products to our dealers and integrators that can better serve these purposes.  The RP22 working group consisted of a diverse group of integrators, manufacturers, and domain experts.  Having been a part of the RP22 working group over the last 3 years I can attest to the many hours and attention to detail that went into it’s creation to provide out industry with the best possible document.

What you have before you is the result of more than three years of work and collaboration by a diverse group of industry professionals, each dedicated to the art and science of delivering great home theatre experiences to a wide range of clients. Our collective industries stand to benefit immensely from the knowledge and guidelines within this document. It has the power to elevate hardware performance, improve system designs and most importantly, elevate knowledge, and professionalism within our industry from the integrator to the marketer. It can be your assist by providing reference guidelines beginning with elemental home entertainment systems ---the majority of our business---up to and including the most demanding studio listening environments.

As the Founder, former CEO and now the Chief Vision Officer of Paradise Theater it thrills me to see our industry mature and establish objective, scientifically based, best practices for the engineering and design of private cinemas and immersive audio spaces. At Paradise Theater we have steadfastly looked to such objective criteria to assure our clientele we have delivered excellence, always! It has been a privilege for our team to participate and contribute in the process of developing RP-22 and we look forward to continuing to participate in continued efforts to fine tune these best practices and develop the best practices for measurement and verification of them as they are put applied.

As the Founder and Publisher of The Cinema Connoisseur it pleases me to be able to report to our burgeoning community of private cinema enthusiasts the maturing of our industry that this initiative represents. That private cinema connoisseurs who are navigating their way to their own dream cinema can rest assured the meeting and exceeding of their expectations are not a matter of opinion but a matter of scientific fact! Bravo CEDIA!

RP22 is a truly unique document. It has been 8 years of continuous and collective efforts sharing best practices between the most talented experts of our industry about the implementation of state of the art technologies in high performance home entertainment spaces. It was truly exciting to reconcile perspectives from scientists, manufacturers and integrators and discuss every topic to the smallest details.

In the end, it is not only the first time that so many key concepts are assembled in a coherent and practical way, but also, it introduces breakthrough concepts such as performance grades or unified speaker layouts for immersive sound. It is THE audio design reference document for our industry.

I feel a great sense of achievement after being involved with this project. Rubbing shoulders with my knowledgeable and experienced peers during the meetings has taught me more about audio design. The openness of the group has allowed me to share my opinions and experiences. Together, we have produced a reference document that will advise, teach, and support the AV installation industry for years to come.

The recommended practice gives consensus on home cinema design from some of the industry's most knowledgeable individuals. It's a design document and tool that will help guide those designing home cinemas, small and large, old and new to the industry. Having these recommendations allows designers to aim for levels of performance with verifiable benchmarks. The group working on this was led by some of the top minds and those with high levels of expertise within sometimes more niche parts of the industry. It was eye opening to be involved in discussions of the level of detail that was witnessed.

One of the most amazing aspects of the RP22 workgroup is the diversity of technical expertise of the volunteers who contributed. Supporting the joint work of CEDIA and CTA are actual A-list movie content creators, representatives for the various surround sound formats, individuals with significant experience in writing other similar documents in the music and movie industries, award winning CEDIA members, theater designers, manufacturers and subject matter experts across many disciplines related to the topic. Such a varied group certainly led to some passionate discussions, but to have so many individuals come to a consensus on very difficult topics is immensely satisfying, and gives me complete confidence in our final document.  

The RP22 document is the most comprehensive resource for immersive audio system design that I have seen anywhere! I was proud to be a contributor among so many other talented and knowledgeable audio experts, design engineers, and manufacturers. RP22 will cause systems to be designed better at every level, and those exploring the upper echelons of performance will be more thoughtful and engineering centric than they otherwise might have been in a world without such a comprehensive sound design resource.

It has been an incredibly rich experience these past three years spending time with so many talented and experienced individuals, scientists, integrators and manufacturers working together to define what makes the sound reproduction in listening spaces optimal. Identifying the key parameters and assembling them into the RP22 recommended practice is an achievement that will change the quality of any room design. It gives integrators the tools to predict and present different levels of performance to their customers, bringing into light in tangible ways all that is involved to design a listening space. As a manufacturer, StormAudio assures that our products comply with the requirements, thus guaranteeing integrators can meet the top performance expectations and offer satisfaction to the end customer. I am personally grateful to have participated in this adventure and look forward to the next step with the performance facts and measurement practice documents.

The Recommended Practice for Immersive Audio Design is a game changer: the most complete guide ever written for high performance audio design in entertainment systems. For the first time, integrators have a clear framework to present objective engineering metrics through four easily comprehensible levels. This clarity is revolutionary for our industry. Now, clients, architects, and specifiers can effortlessly discuss performance objectives and compare proposals on a like for like basis.

The culmination of over 3000 volunteer hours, this Recommended Practice was crafted by some of the most knowledgable subject matter experts in the field, including movie makers, audio format creators, researchers, manufacturers, distributors, and integrators. Created under ANSI accreditation and thoroughly peer-reviewed, rather than the perspective of any individual, studio, format, or manufacturer, this RP represents a collective industry consensus, beyond reproach.

RP22 sets new and clear guidelines for everyone to understand and set the levels of experience a consumer should expect in their next home theater project and how the Integrator will help them achieve those goals. As a manufacturer helping develop these standards it was enlightening to better understand the Integrators problems, how our products can help, or be designed better to solve those problems. The broad experience of the exceptional team of experts involved in the development of the RP22 standard ensures a benefit to manufactures, integrators and consumers alike in the final results.