The Cinema Suite

Where the Grand Cinema Suite argues for scale, this room argues for disappearance. The loudspeakers are behind the screen and cannot be seen, the amplification makes no noise, and nothing in the room draws attention to itself while a film is running.

Planar magnetics behind the screen

The front channels are Wisdom Audio planar magnetic loudspeakers, mounted behind an acoustically transparent Stewart Filmscreen. The driver is a light film suspended in a rare-earth magnetic field and driven across its entire surface, rather than a cone pushed from a voice coil at its centre.

Two things follow from that. The moving mass is a fraction of a conventional driver’s, so the diaphragm starts and stops closer to the moment the signal tells it to. And because the drive force is applied evenly across the whole surface rather than at one point, the film does not flex against itself the way a cone does when it is pushed hard from the middle. The result is high sensitivity and low distortion.

In the line source configurations there is a third consequence. A tall, narrow radiating surface behaves differently from a point source: it projects evenly across the width of the room, and floor and ceiling reflections are largely cancelled rather than arriving milliseconds after the direct sound. In a cinema with more than one row, that is the difference between one good seat and a room of them.

The screen

An acoustically transparent Stewart Filmscreen is what makes the arrangement possible. Placing the loudspeakers behind the picture is not a packaging convenience — it places the sound at the image, which is where the mixer assumed it would be. Dialogue comes from the actor’s mouth rather than from a cabinet somewhere below the frame, and a sound travelling across the screen tracks the object making it.

Amplification

Amplification is Wisdom’s own SA-3: three channels, 500 watts each into four ohms with all three driven simultaneously, in a 2U chassis running at roughly ninety percent efficiency. Balanced XLR in, Cardas connectors out.

That efficiency figure matters more than it sounds. Ninety percent efficiency means very little waste heat, and very little waste heat means no cooling fans. No fans means a genuinely silent room, which is what allows the noise floor of the recording to be the noise floor you hear. In a cinema the loud passages are easy; it is the quiet ones that expose a system, and a room with fan noise in it has already set a floor beneath which nothing can be heard.

Processing

Processing is the Trinnov Altitude16, which brings the full Altitude platform into a twenty-channel system. Dolby Atmos runs to twenty discrete channels, DTS:X Pro to twenty, Auro-3D to 13.1, with IMAX Enhanced support. The Optimizer and Trinnov’s patented 3D Remapping correct the room rather than equalising a curve — the microphone establishes where each loudspeaker actually is, and the processor steers sound elements to where the mixer intended them to arrive.

In a room where the front channels are hidden behind a screen and the surround positions were dictated by the architecture rather than chosen freely, that distinction stops being academic.

Picture and source

Sony handles projection. A Kaleidescape server handles the library, downloading films at bitrates well beyond Blu-ray with lossless audio intact — which is the only way a system of this resolution is given source material worth its capability. A streamed film would waste most of what this room can do, and in a room built to this standard that waste is audible rather than theoretical.

The system in this room

• Wisdom Audio planar magnetic loudspeakers — behind the screen
• Wisdom Audio SA-3 amplification — three channels, 500 W each into 4 ohms
• Trinnov Altitude16 immersive audio processor — twenty channels
• Stewart Filmscreen acoustically transparent screen
• Sony projection
• Kaleidescape movie server
• Custom acoustic treatment

Hearing it

This is the room for anyone whose cinema has to live inside a finished architectural space rather than a dedicated blacked-out box, and for anyone who wants to hear what planar magnetic drivers do with a soundtrack. It is the direct counter-argument to the Grand Cinema Suite along the hall, which puts a seven-foot line array in plain sight and makes the opposite case entirely.

Hearing both in one visit is the most useful hour available to anyone specifying a cinema, because the two rooms disagree with each other honestly and the disagreement is the information.

The Cinema Suite is in the Scottsdale showroom. Walk in during business hours, or book ahead if you want the room prepared with your own material.