First established in 1978, Len Wallis Audio is located in an expansive interactive showroom, office and warehousing complex in Lane Cove’s shopping precinct on Sydney’s North Shore Australia. LWA is a multi-award winning company comprising of management, sales consultants, project managers, installers and AutoCAD draftsman, picking up award year after year for their custom work, including Best International Integrator by Crestron and CEDIA Dealer of the Year.
We interviewed Alberto Vangi, Len Wallis Audio senior sales & design consultant, regarding one of his most recent and special cinema project’s to date, built to perfection by multi award winning Sydney builder Joe Fuda of Innovative Building Services.
Which Were The Challenges And Objectives Inherent To This High-end Home Cinema Set-up?
The challenges were that we first had a room which had a complete glass wall, as the right glass wall, when looking at the screen. The owner wanted to show off the house from the outside too. So the owner agreed to build custom made pillars to allow for the three side speakers to go into, which would line up in with each row. We then used heavy curtains for acoustics and to block out the light. They are also motorised and can easily be opened to allow natural light when required to enter the room. The other challenge was that we did not have a curtain running from the front to the back at the owner’s request. So the symmetric acoustic balance would require Trinnov’s magic audio compensation model to fix this, which it did. As we also had three rows and a limit to how high our ceiling could be, the owner had to build a custom-made raked central higher ceiling at the back section of the room.
Can You Elaborate More On The Speaker Layout?
With speaker placement critical we found a perfect balance for the Dolby Atmos to be in the lower part of the rake ceiling and above the seating positions facing the screen, which worked really well. With the sheer size of the room I found that to avoid having empty areas of sound, that quite a few speakers would be needed to bring the cinema sound experience to life. So we went with three front as normal being left, center and right. What we then did have is Auro 3D upper left, center and right forming six speakers behind the screen. This also provided quite an effect with such a deep and spacious room size. With four sub woofers at the front and four at the rear, 8 Dolby Atmos and eight surrounds, the challenge we had was how to have this many speakers so that each channel could be discrete. And that’s where Trinnov came into the picture. And it was the best decision ever.
Why Did You Pick The Altitude 32 As The Processor For This Luxury Home Cinema?
Having provided a slight introduction to the reason why Trinnov was chosen, the reasons were endless, where I will stick to the key reasons for the moment. Firstly we had many speakers to account for, 30 in our case, whereby the Altitude having 32 channels ticked this first box for us. Then we had to factor in the acoustics of the room and the Trinnov’s capability in being able to brilliantly calibrate the sound via its 3D Microphone is absolutely unique. The sound created by the flexibility and pure accuracy of the Trinnov was absolutely magic. Hence, the grant from the French government and the fact that Trinnov is not only being used in many of the world’s best home cinemas but also commercial cinemas really says so much about the product’s capability. Being such a highly technical product, can I also add the support, enthusiasm, and knowledge shown by the whole team in France was so professional, I cannot recommend them more highly. They sure live up the product’s worldwide exceptional reputation.
How Was The Response From The Client To The Sonic Of The Final Project?
Words like “this is so much better than being at the cinemas” are relayed continuously to me. They are also hearing the same words from all their friends and guests. The owners also tell me time and time again “we spend virtually every chance they have in the cinema and absolutely love it”. Also, saying “we very rarely use any of their other 12 TV’s”.
This particular project is an exceptional one, to say the least, where the client was invited to hear one of my previous cinema project’s and said “I want the same after having experienced this other cinema”. After having seen this client’s own room, being over 2.5 times larger in volume, I felt in every way, it was my duty not to rush into this project with the previous words as guided by the client. Instead, a professional approach was taken to carefully determine what the solution I should be presenting to the client, based on the room size and their love of movie, sport, gaming, TV, and concert watching to name a few. I was able to move forward and provide a truly special result for the client. With Trinnov delivering an absolute masterpiece of surround sound quality. A magic part of the cinema. Thank you Trinnov.
