It’s been a little while now since Dolby Atmos quietly made its entrance in the world of cinema. The Hobbit and Gravity were one of the first movies with an Atmos soundtrack and a lot has happened since. A few years on and Dolby Atmos has become the ‘it’ word for home theatres too. A decent range of Av receivers and Pre-amps are now able to decode Atmos including Onkyo, Pioneer, Sony and Yamaha. Atmos Elevation (or Atmos -enabled) speakers – although a bit more slowly – are starting to enter the market as well. But how much is hype and gimmicky and how far do you really want to go to get the ultimate sound experience at home?

We get requests to design a free AV plan for our customers on a regular basis. Most of the time it is the budget, the room and some preferences in use and brands that do the talking, but every now and then there are some additional requests on the wish list.  So what do you do when the ideas of an interior designer are thrown into the equation and the brief is that it should sound like any top notch home theatre but there is no way there are going to be any black floorstanding speakers in the lounge? We decided that no challenge was too big and we put a special set-up to the test at the Rapallo lab. The results surprised us in a very good way… 

A few weeks ago we bumped into an article claiming that most audiophiles and home theatre lovers actually do not live on a big budget. It is just where their priorities are. It is what they choose to spend their ‘sanity money’ on. It got us thinking however; for which purchases do you splash out when you are building your home theatre set-up? And when are you just paying for branding and marketing? We give you our humble opinion in these matters.

One of the suggestions sometimes made on forums when discussing subwoofers is ‘going dual’. Subwoofer specialists SVS are big fans of running dual subwoofers whenever possible, and they recon they can be a great upgrade to any home theater or music system. We were allowed to borrow this excellent SVS newsletter on dual subwoofers to share with you. It sums up in a very clear way some of the benefits of running dual subwoofers in your system.

How to calculate the correct power for your amp? (part2) Last week we chewed our way through the technical background Read More

How to calculate the correct power for your amp? (part1) This is a question that we get on a regular Read More

Here’s a question for you: What is the oldest profession in the world? Nah…not what you think: it is the cable guy! How else did God get the light to go on that very first day of creation?Now that I have your attention and all joking aside… a factor that is commonly overlooked in choosing wiring is the material that the wire is made from. Copper and aluminum are the most commonly used wire materials and there is an important difference in quality, power handling and signal transfer between these materials.

Compact speaker systems have a reputation of being easy on the eye and budget, but compromising on sound quality. Wrong! We introduce the SVS Prime satellite 5.1 system.

Buying a home theater projector can seem daunting. There are many models on the market at any given time. But where do you start in determining which projector is the right one for you?  The key, as with anything, is to find out what you need. What it boils down to is to determine your answer to these seven questions.

The second part of our Rapallo Home Theatre Projector buyers guide. We discuss LCD/DLP/LCoS, budget and installation in this blog.