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.