St James, Dolby Atmos home cinema

A brief overview of this project: We are building this home cinema in a room that is 6.2m long x 4.2m wide x 3.0m high. The front screen wall construction is 350mm deep, which allows us enough space to locate our subwoofer behind the screen wall. Placing the subwoofer in the front of the home cinema. We have used an M&K Sound speaker package in this home cinema. We have worked with M&K Speakers for many years due to their high quality, transparent and incredibly dynamic performance. A strong recommendation for anyone looking for a high quality home cinema speaker.

The M&K speakers are being driven off an Anthem MRX 740 surround sound AVR. We have been using Anthem AVR’s for many years. The Anthem “ARC Genesis” room correct is one of the best available and enables us to ensure that the audio sounds as good as the room we have built. The power delivery from the Anthem AVR’s are high quality and ensure that we can offer enough amplifier channels for our home cinema requirements.

We have implemented a Control4 EA1 room control unit. This takes care of all commands within the room, from light dimming, to switching on the television and changing channel on the DSTV decoder (or any other set top box). We are using Control4 light switches and dimmers to control the lighting scenes in the home cinema room.

All HDMI cables are by HDAnywhere, these are tested and certified cables to meet our video requirements of 4k60 in HDR from the Apple TV as well as 4K60 from the DSTV decoder. The HDMI cable from the AVR to the television is an HDAnywhere Opticmax 15m 48GB HDMI cable.

The video display is a Samsung 85″ Crystal UHD display. Capable of displaying 4K HDR content.

Cinema seating is the Cinema Pro 4 seat recliner by Cielo. The front 2 seating elements are Weylandts Cubist Sofa’s.

Project timeline is roughly outlined as:

4 July 2022 – Initial client meeting

6 July 2022 – Presentation of conceptual diagrams & overview budget

7 July 2022 – Verbal acceptance of Mirror Edge Networks home cinema design package & budgetary outline.

8 July 2022 – All electronic hardware ordered from: Anthem AV / Control4 / M&K Sound

11 July 2022 – Procurement of all construction hardware begun.

15 July 2022 – Delivery of all construction hardware to site & home cinema construction commenced.

15 August 2022 – Completion of final trim-out and snags of home cinema & handover of completely functional home cinema room.

We brought in the professional calibrations services of Charl Lotter at iDetic to assist us with Calibration of this home cinema. We started with a basic 1 hour video calibration. This includes: Disabling all Samsung processing features on the television. Setting minimum and maximum brightness levels for back light of the televisions display. Correctly setting all colour settings.

With the strength of Anthem ARC Genesis, we carried out the Anthem ARC audio calibration of the cinema. we found that the calibration carried out by the processor was very close to how we wanted the cinema to sound. Once we had a baseline from Anthem ARC, we made slight adjustments to the gain on some of the speakers and crossovers front sound stage. This was enough calibration to get the sound to a point where we were happy and the client was happy too.

To view a comprehensive video detailing the build process of this home cinema, please head over to our YouTube video: