Design your own silver screen

Play the moments, pause the memories, stop the pain, rewind the happiness and fast-forward the fury. If the controls of the music systems had emotions, perhaps this would have been an apt description. All those movie buffs who are building their dream house, if you have plans of creating your own customised home theater system, here are few exclusive ultra modern options that can captivate you in perfect synchrony of auditory and visual amalgamation.   

While other companies are looking into providing the perfection audio experience for the entire room, Wisdom Audio offers to provide the best seat to seat consistency through its STS subwoofers, that are carefully placed using the acoustic model software that is used to determine the perfect position to ensure maximum sound performance. “The emotional experience of some movies would not be entirely real without the physical impact of low frequencies that you can feel (vibrations going through your body) but cannot hear. In scenes involving earthquakes, or a plane taking off, frequencies below 20Hz are the most challenging to reproduce cleanly from an engineer’s perspective,” says Luc Guillaume, managing director, Wisdom Audio. The Wisdom private theater fine tunes all these through its 13 ft-tall speakers. This system is effective in multi-level rooms, large homes, ballrooms, and – to quote the website – ‘palaces’. While the LS3i speakers by Wisdom audio are placed in equal distances across the room to surround with perfect sounds, the Sc-1 controller focuses on active crossover and room equalisation. Along with this, overhead speakers are added into the ceiling to reproduce the newer 3D audio format. To make it a perfect setting to watch the movies, Wisdom Audio also offers the best movie reproduction system which has consistent sound power and displays visuals with extreme clarity, which can set you back by ₹6 crore.

The 39-year-old Swiss company Goldmund audio systems has stuck to its strategic plan, which was made in 1982, by its owner, Micheal Reverchon — ‘to only manufacture products that are above anything else on the existing market’. Goldmund offers customised home theater designs based on the space, acoustics, decor and the structural detail of the room. While excellent craftsmanship defines the quality of the product at Goldmund, their equipment showcases a simplistic european styling. A typical setting includes U-Logos speakers, U-Logos subwoofers, Logos 3A infra-subwoofer used uniquely for low frequency effects, and U-telos amplifiers. However, the components vary in each setting depending on the customisation. Anne-Karine Agius, marketing and sales director, Goldmund says that the company has collaborated with different companies that are highly specialised in manufacturing components to bring out the best quality. The components are then assembled at Geneva with careful precision.

The aim of custom designing a home theater system is to immerse the viewer in the movie, quite literally. Aguis says, “Building the emotion in the viewer is the main purpose of our company. The level of involvement our customers reach when using their home theaters, and the feeling of being in the movie instead of merely watching is what we try to create using our technology.”

For instance, a gunshot in a movie has to be played at the same volume as it would be in real life, otherwise, the effect would be ruined. The Leonardo Time Alignment, a proprietary technology developed by Goldmund, corrects the distortion in the sound. The exclusive Goldmund media room brings this experience alive by producing sounds at 120dB from 8Hz to 30kHz, and can set you back by over ₹3.3 crore. For every home theater design, the company mathematically models the room to define the number of speakers to achieve a realistic sound level, which is usually 120 dB.

For those pure music aficionados, Backes & Muller (B&M) from Germany brings the perfect music setting for you. Along with providing acoustic solutions in rooms of differing sizes, B&M loudspeakers have the established cylinder wave emitters, and horn technology, which are equalised with the digital signal processor, to make your music experience a live performance. The fundamental sound area of the BM Line 100 bass jets, are harmoniously framed to give out accurate sounds even across long listening distances. When viewed from the front, the clearly visible shafts on the right and left sides of the loudspeaker serve the reproduction of the deepest tones. “This is the most stable position since stability is a prime precondition in order to master these primeval forces,” says Khushrau Jilla, owner, Nexus Audio Video, which is the authorised service dealer of B&M in India. “From a technological point of view, this is an analogue control technique developed by B&M called DMC technology. This measures the movements of the bass membranes and then optimises them for impulse fidelity and reduction of decaying oscillations. This results in a linear phase reproduction in the bass path,” he adds. A B&M home theater system can cost about ₹3 crore, depending on the customisation.

Isn’t it time to forget the small screens, and embrace the big ones with a custom-made surround sound system?