THE BRIEF
During our visit to Barco Residential in Kortrijk, Belgium, we had the opportunity to experience one of the most impressive reference home cinema environments we have visited.
Barco has an extensive history in professional and commercial cinema projection, and its Residential division brings that technology into some of the world’s highest-performance private cinemas. The demonstration facility in Kortrijk provides an opportunity to experience this technology in a properly designed cinema environment and, importantly, to compare different projection solutions in the same room.
The cinema itself has continued to evolve as new Barco technology has been introduced, making it as much a demonstration and development environment as it is a finished home cinema.
The video system
At the front of the room is a substantial 4.5 metre wide DT Screens acoustically transparent projection screen, incorporating two-way masking so that the visible screen area can change to correctly frame different movie aspect ratios.
This is particularly important in a high-performance home cinema. Rather than displaying black bars around content, the physical masking closes around the image, maintaining a properly presented cinema screen whether the content is 16:9, 1.85:1, 2.39:1 or another format.
The room provides demonstrations of several Barco Residential projection platforms, including the Barco Freya+ and, in the more recent configuration of the facility, the Barco Heimdall+ Cinemascope.
The Freya+ represents technology derived directly from Barco’s professional cinema platforms. It combines native 4K three-chip DLP imaging with an RGB laser light source and up to 13,500 lumens of output. The result is enough light output for genuinely large cinema screens while retaining the colour accuracy, image uniformity and precision expected from a reference projection system.
The newer Heimdall+ Cinemascope demonstrates how much of this performance can now be delivered from a considerably more compact projector. Its native Cinemascope imaging architecture, RGB laser light source and wide colour gamut make it particularly interesting for purpose-built residential cinemas.
madVR Envy video processing
An important part of the video chain is the madVR Envy Extreme MK2 video processor.
Rather than relying entirely on the projector or source device for video processing, the Envy performs sophisticated processing before the image reaches the projector.
This includes:
- Dynamic HDR tone mapping
- High-quality video scaling
- Aspect-ratio detection and management
- Subtitle management
- Image geometry and screen optimisation
- Control of variable-aspect-ratio cinema presentations
Together with the masking screen, this allows movies of different aspect ratios to be presented properly without requiring the viewer to manually adjust the cinema between films.
It is an excellent demonstration of why the projector should never be considered in isolation. The screen, projector and video processor operate together as a complete imaging system.
Dolby Atmos audio
While Barco understandably places considerable emphasis on picture quality, the room is also a fully immersive home cinema.
A TPI Cinema loudspeaker system is installed throughout the room in a Dolby Atmos configuration, creating a large and highly dynamic sound field around the seating positions.
Surround sound processing is handled by Lyngdorf Audio, integrating the numerous loudspeaker channels into the room and creating an immersive soundtrack capable of matching the scale of the projected image.
Control and system switching are integrated so that the different demonstration configurations can be selected without requiring the cinema’s underlying complexity to be exposed to the person using the room.
Our experience
What makes a room like this particularly valuable to us is not simply seeing expensive home cinema equipment installed together.
It gives us an opportunity to experience what happens when projection, video processing, screen design, audio, acoustics and control are considered as one complete system.
With a screen approaching commercial-cinema scale, the image still needs to remain bright, detailed and convincing. The sound needs sufficient dynamic capability to match that scale, while remaining precisely located around the audience. And despite the substantial amount of technology behind the room, the experience for the person watching a movie should remain extremely simple.
Visiting reference facilities such as Barco Residential in Kortrijk gives us an opportunity to experience technologies at the very top of the home cinema market and to bring that knowledge back into the cinemas we design for our own clients.
It reinforces one of the principles behind every high-performance home cinema we design:
The best cinema is not defined by any single projector, processor or loudspeaker. It is the result of designing the entire room as one integrated system.
