August 2006

Take a drive North out of Miami to Bal Harbour and you’ll pass some of the most desirable real estate in Florida. This is America’s answer to St Tropez or Monaco where the sumptuous waterfront mansions all come with the obligatory yacht moored on the Intercoastal. The leafy palm-lined estates don’t hide the salubrious lifestyle that these Floridians are living, but what you can’t see are the equally impressive home theatre installations that so many of these luxury houses possess.

Home theatre is big business out here and professional installers like Hed South and system tuner Mike Chaffee are kept busy with clients all over southern Florida. This particular job on Bal Harbour Drive for clients Helen and John is a fine example of their work and a lesson in hidden cinema… Instead of a dedicated home theatre, John wanted to adapt the large reception room into a general entertaining area with a pool table, plenty of comfortable seating and a state-of-the-art home entertainment system that would magically appear at the push of a button. This would allow them plenty of room to read or shoot pool in the day, while the room would convert itself into a home theatre for movies in the evening. Its invisibility was a key factor because the cinema had to fit harmoniously with the interior designer’s vision of the room, which definitely did not include trailing cables or piles of electrical components.

Now all Hed South needed to do was make it happen. This presented a number of challenges. The room was particularly big – twenty by twenty feet and another ten high, so it would need a powerful system to fill the space convincingly. It didn’t help that the entire North wall was given over to elegant floor-to-ceiling windows that opened onto the leafy atrium. It might be pretty, but home theatres work best in the dark, and some kind of blackout blinds would need to be fitted. Also, Hed South had to leave room for the pool table, bookshelves and John’s collection of baseball memorabilia that included a signed Redsox bat and ball. The trick was going to be hiding all of the speakers, electronics and display devices that would be needed to turn this large space into a multimedia room.

Specifying the equipment was the easy part. Genelec’s active monitors are among the few speaker solutions that could drive such a large theatre with total accuracy and no danger of distortion or ear-strain. The hefty Genelec HT208 centre channel is more commonly found in professional recording studios thanks to its flawless timing and attention to detail. AIW26 monitors – also a popular choice in the pro market - were used for fronts and rears and mounted into the walls in each case. The walls themselves, like most dry walls in the US, have a cavity that’s just right for sinking quite large speakers. The interior would later be panelled with maple in parts and covered with Hessian cloth in others that would completely hide all of speakers and caballing. John and Helen’s desire for an ‘invisible’ home cinema would come true.

For the rest of the electronics, Hed South chose some other trusted favourites of the installation world: a Lexicon MC8B AV processor and a Sony DVP-NS775 DVD player. These would be neatly recessed into the wall too. For regular TV viewing a 42in Fujitsu TV sat within the custom built panelling at the front of the room, while a motorised 105” Stewart screen rolled down from a recess in the ceiling when it was movie time. Installing the projector was rather more complicated. To meet the clients requirements, Hed South decided to have the projector platform descend from the ceiling mechanically to a point where it could fire directly at the Stewart screen. Quite a feat of engineering in itself, but this was something these installers had done many times before.

Four large roller blinds were installed to black out the windows on the North wall and another on the South wall. These too were motorised and wired in to the Crestron control system. Together with the lighting (a total of 21 spotlights were also sunk into the ceiling) and the AV system, the touchscreen Crestron remote control effectively operated the entire room. Helen had commissioned Marjorie Shushan, a highly respected interior designer from New York, to style the room and it was crucial that the home cinema didn’t encroach on her design. The maple and Hessian wall covering gave the room a rustic taupe background that induced a relaxing atmosphere. It also did a great job of hiding all of the speakers and meters of cable that Hed South had installed, so both parties were satisfied.

Hessian is not acoustically transparent however, so Mike Chaffee, had to spend some time adjusting the ‘tilt’ of the room and tuning the system to perfection – something he had spent much time doing in his previous life as a sound engineer in the music business. Luckily the Genelec speakers Hed South had specified are capable of breathtaking clarity when called for and the end result sounded as clear as a bell in a recording studio.

With some clever programming, Hed South had enabled a macro button on the Crestron remote control to switch the room form daytime mode to movie mode with a single press. John and Helen were delighted when they were invited to press this button for the first time and watch the blinds and Stewart screen lower, the lights dim, the projector spring to life and the DVD player begin to roll. This was a real ‘lights, camera, action’ moment for everyone.

Clients: John & Helen
Interior Design: Marjorie Shushan

• System contractor Hed South, Hollywood, Fla.
• Room build out and acoustical treatment - Cinema Design Group, Boca Raton Fla.
• System tuning - Michael Chafee

Equipment Used:

• Left and right main speakers: Genelec Aiw26 in walls
• Center speakers: Genelec HT 208
• Rear speakers: Genelec AiW26
• Processor: Lexicon MC8B
• DVD player Sony BVPNS775
• Screen Stewart 105" motorized
• All under Crestron control, as are the Lutron lights