The principles of home cinema: immersive
We’re big home cinema fans at Epitome Living.
They’re fun, luxurious, and perform far better than any commercial cinema.
If you’re not convinced about why you’d need one, our blog on the matter might change your mind.
We recently covered that we specify products for home cinemas based on each individual project. If you came to us today wondering which speakers or screen we’d use for your space, we genuinely wouldn’t know until we’d seen your plans and heard about what you want from your cinema.
In that article we outlined that home cinemas should be built on four fundamental principles:
Immersion
Quietness
Visual and acoustic cleanliness, and
Comfort
Over the next few weeks, we’ll be sharing what each of these elements add to the overall experience of a home cinema.
Let’s start with why home cinemas should be immersive, and how we build them to be.
In on the action
Earlier this month we hosted a CPD about home cinemas during a thunderstorm. Whilst we didn’t intend to deliver the presentation with sound effects, the rolling thunder throughout certainly drove home what we were trying to say about the impact of immersive cinema.
Storytelling is at the core of good content. Whether you’re watching the latest blockbuster, keeping up with the housewives of who-knows-where, or building a town in Minecraft, you’re invested because of the story that content’s telling.
We can’t comment on the quality of the stories you’re enjoying, but we can help you up their emotional impact with a high-quality, professionally designed home cinema.
Immersive cinema experiences are created through our senses - namely sight and hearing. In any cinema, good audio and visual practices help to absorb you in your stories without distractions.
Cinemas have always been a place of escape, and when they’re put into private spaces, they become an oasis for family time, hobby enjoyment, or switching off. When that home cinema is built correctly, the viewer can experience full immersion and emotional investment in the stories they love.
What matters for that attention absorption?
Immersive audio
Filmmakers use sound to encourage us to feel a certain way during movies. Music and dynamics are important methods of achieving this. Speakers reproduce the sound that causes the emotions stirred in us during movies.
TV and radio are generally kept at even volume level. Films are different: the loud bits are loud and the quiet bits are quiet. This range in dynamics is what causes us to jump when something unexpected happens.
The right speakers, in the right places, reproduce sound exactly as it was intended. Whispers need to be audible, and crescendos have to be clear and clean. The sound mustn't distort, and the dynamic range needs to be maintained.
Sound has become 3D in cinema, and this is replicated in home cinemas. Achieving this immersive effect takes a lot of strategic work, and a lot of speakers. Equipment designed for a ‘normal’ front room won’t perform well in a home cinema as the properties of the room are engineered to perform best when particular conditions are met.
In a medium-sized home cinema, there can be over 15 speakers installed to create a fully immersive experience. Some of these are ‘front channel’, some of these are ‘surround sound’ and some of these are ‘overhead’. Sound traveling in waves through all of them at once makes us feel like we’re fully in on the action as it reaches our ears.
Whilst we said that TV and radio are generally kept at an even volume level, it’s also true that this kind of audio experience isn’t solely reserved for movies anymore. Since 2019 Sky has broadcast the Premier League with Dolby Atmos compatibility for surround sound. Even in a simple living room set up, you can now feel like you’re in the football stadium with the crowd.
In our next article on why home cinemas should be quiet, we’ll cover even more on the sound engineering needed to get the best out of home cinemas. The key to know now is that having an audio system that’s capable of handling a high dynamic range is how the tense onscreen moments feel tense, and the big, celebratory moments feel big and immersive.
Screen size matters
Projectors are almost always used instead of TVs in home cinemas. That’s to create the immersive effect required at a reasonable cost. There’s a much greater range of sizes available in screens for projectors, which allows the screen to be chosen specifically for the room it’s being placed in.
You could be installing a home cinema for any number of reasons. The primary reason, of course, is normally to watch movies in, but the space can also be used to watch sports in (as described above) or to game.
Most films are created in ‘cinemascope’. If your home cinema will be used mainly to watch films, your installer will likely suggest a cinemascope screen to match. Exactly which screen will be chosen and installed is decided by what’s best for the space as recommended by the installer alongside the preferences of the client.
A great solution for maintaining immersion as content changes is to choose a screen of one size that’s adjusted with aspect masking. A black surround around the content moves depending on what’s being watched, transitioning the screen from 16:9 aspect ratio to cinemascope as needed, and vice versa.
Once a screen is chosen, seating will be installed so that the viewers’ eyes are as close to level with the centre of the screen as possible. This golden area for seating brings the viewer as close to being right in the thick of the onscreen action as possible through the combination of viewing and speaker positions. This immersion is lost in commercial cinemas as so many of the seats are outside the goldilocks area for sight and audio.
Your installer will know the technicalities of how to achieve this golden area of viewing for as many seats in the house as possible. This is a particular challenge if seating is tiered in the home cinema, as one level will naturally be less in line with the centre of the screen.
These technical challenges are extremely satisfying for home cinema installers to overcome. We love to be immersed in the building process to create the most immersive experiences for our clients as possible.
If you’re going to have a home cinema, it should be done correctly.