How They Did It: The Phoenix

This home cinema that had actually won a CEDIA Award many years ago, but over time, technological advances had all but made the room completely obsolete. For example: the room had no subwoofers — no low-end frequencies

Additionally, the space was to be used for both surround-sound movie viewing as well as two-channel (traditional stereo) listening. The client had upgraded the projector at some point, but the aspect ratios didn’t match the original screen: The client was viewing letterboxed movies. Sound treatments weren’t up to par, either, and absorption and diffusion need to be added.

And one more thing: The client wanted the room to look exactly the same both before and after the upgrade.

Here are just a few examples of the work that Wavetrain Cinemas did to bring this cinema up to par, in the integrator’s own words:

We removed the side walls and the fabric between the side walls and the front and rear joinery. This allowed for all the acoustic treatments, speakers and subwoofers s to be installed correctly.

“We built new linings and turned the corners of the cinema into massive bass traps.

“Because we needed to match the existing color in the walls exactly we had acoustically transparent fabric custom printed to match and then used this to cover the speakers to create what was meant to be the original architectural design.”

The final result was a winning project for the Wavetrain team: Best Home Cinema, Level I (Asia Pacific).