Home Cinema Design and Install

Amazing immersive surround sound

A great cinema surround sound system only goes part-way to achieving cinema-like sound quality. The rest comes down to the acoustics of your home theatre room.

Crystal-clear dialogue, razor-sharp clarity, pinpoint focus and wrap-around sound depend as much on the cinema room design and construction as it does on the equipment in it. The shape of your room, where you sit, where your speakers are placed, the location and materials of your furnishing and fittings—all of these elements contribute to maximising audio performance.

Cyberhomes has the expertise to overcome the acoustic issues every home cinema room or commercial viewing room faces.

Sound Reflections

As sound travels from a speaker to your ears, it bounces off the walls, floor and room furnishings. Too much of this ‘reflection’ will muddy the sound; too little creates an unpleasant artificial ‘dead’ sound.

Cyberhomes acoustically treats your private cinema room to get the right balance. Generally, more sound absorption is needed at the front of the room to reduce reflection, which sharpens dialogue and increases clarity. More diffusion at the back of the room typically improves the surround sound experience.

Low frequency sounds

Low bass sounds can become distorted in a small room like a home cinema. The tone of the sound can become uneven, and you might find it difficult to hear a film’s dialogue. What’s more, standing waves can cause dips and booms in the sound. By fitting bass traps, for example, Cyberhomes can improve the clarity, balance and timbre of your cinema room's sound.

Envelopment

At its best, surround sound lets you feel like you’ve been transported into the scene you’re watching. Focused sounds match up with the images you see, taking the realism of your home cinema experience to new heights.

Sound isolation

You’ll want to banish distracting household noises from your home cinema room, and experience the full power of your surround sound system—without disturbing the peace for everyone else in the building.

Cyberhomes’ specialists know how to deal with the complexities of sound isolation. Where possible, this means creating a ‘room within a room’, allowing us to control all the acoustic elements that affect the sound in your home theatre system.

By minimising sound pockets and vibrations in your home cinema room, Cyberhomes gives you the fullest possible dynamic range (that’s the difference between the softest and loudest sounds you can hear). This is what you need to pick out even the quietest details of a film, without having to turn the volume up.

Acoustic calibration

Once we’ve acoustically treated your home cinema room, we can fine-tune the audio equipment to achieve optimal audio performance. You can also choose to have your home calibrated by a Cyberhomes recommended Home Acoustics Alliance-trained sound engineer.

Stunning surroundings

Classic, Art Deco, Hollywood glam, space age or funky: we create the look you want for your home cinema room, whatever your style. Our interior designers work with you, and/our your own interior designer, to give your room the ‘wow factor’, unspoiled by the sight of equipment or cabling.

Hidden away

We use acoustically-transparent materials to hide speakers in the walls and ceiling of your home cinema—without compromising on immersive surround sound quality.

In multi-purpose media rooms, we use motorised screens and projectors that appear and disappear at the touch of a button.

Beautiful lighting

Thriller, romcom or live sport? Select the ideal lighting conditions for any occasion at the touch of a button.

When programming settings into your home lighting automation system, we consider every detail. You might want your lights to dim as the film starts, to build a sense of excitement. A signle tap on your app will let you pause your film, bring up soft lighting and open the bar curtains. And as the film ends, your lights can come back on slowly to bring you back gently into the real world.

We also ensure your home cinema lighting doesn’t interfere with your home cinema experience. This means making sure your fixtures, fittings and transformers don’t create noise or interfere with sound transmission. It also means making sure your light fittings—or any other fitting and fixtures for that matter—do not reflect distracting light.

Flawless high-deifinition visuals

Creating the perfect picture requires more than high-spec home cinema equipment—it demands the technical expertise to get the most from your technology.

Our engineers and home cinema designers consider every detail, to give you cinema-quality visuals with vibrant colour, high definition, the sharpest contrast and immaculate clarity.

Screen size

For a truly stunning home cinema experience, you need to be able to see every detail of every image, across the whole of the screen. We’ll calculate your optimal viewing distance, and find the best screen size for your room.

Aspect ratio

Film and TV content are shot in a different aspect ratio (the width to height ratio of the image). That’s why you sometimes see black bars around a film when watching it on TV. We can banish these from your screen with an anamorphic projector lens, or by using motorised masking that changes the shape of the viewable screen according to the content you are watching.

Resolution

The latest generation of 4K Ultra-high Definition (UHD) screens have arrived, with double the horizontal resolution and double the vertical resolution of traditional high-definition (HD) screens for four times the detail.

You can take advantage of the 4K streaming services offered by Netflix and Amazon Prime Instant Video, or install a Sky Q 4K satellite receiver, a 4K Kaleidescape player and/or an Ultra-HD Blu-ray player.

Automated Lighting

Watching a movie in the dark can be exciting, but your eyes can’t adjust to take in the film’s full dynamic range of lights and shades. However, the room must be sufficiently void of light contamination to give you the right contrast ratio and immaculate image detail.

Cyberhomes sets the perfect ‘bias lighting’ into your home lighting automation system. So at the touch of a button, you can watch stunningly vibrant images in ideal lighting conditions.

Screen material

The material your screen’s made of can make a huge difference to your viewing experience. With exactly the right material colour, your screen will reflect the precise amount of light to give you accurate colour reproduction. The material must also be acoustically transparent if you want the benefits of positioning your speakers behind the screen.

Video display calibration

Once your home cinema is installed, you can choose to have your screen and projector finely calibrated by a Cyberhomes recommended Imaging Science Foundation (ISF) visual engineer. To give you the best picture possible, their specialist equipment will analyse the projected image to allow the precise configuration of your screen and projector, in conjunction with the unique lighting conditions and layout of your room.

High Dynamic Range (HDR)

Many of the very latest televisions and projectors support High Dynamic Range (HDR) which allows the screen to display a wider and richer range of colours, much brighter whites, and much deeper, darker blacks. HDR content allows you to see more detail in the darkest and brightest areas of a picture. The benefit is more natural, true-to-life colours that are closer to how we expect to see them in real life.

Breathtaking audio

The best multiplex cinemas give you sound quality that pulsates through your body. They wrap you up in atmospheric sound, making you feel like you’re in the thick of the action.

Cyberhomes provides you with a clarity, richness and depth of sound that brings that magic to your home cinema system. You can opt for a traditional surround sound system, or the kind of 3D immersive Dolby Atmosound experience that’s raised the bar in home cinema design.

Surround sound

Surround sound in your living room or media/cinema room would traditionally come from a 5.1 system: five speakers and a bass subwoofer. In a larger space, you might opt for a 7.1 system, which places two additional speakers behind the audience.

Each group of speakers acts as a channel for different types of sound. Front-centre speakers relay dialogue; those to the side and back provide ambient sound effects, like rustling leaves or cheering crowds. With noises coming at you from different directions, you feel like you’re surrounded by sound.

3D immersive sound

You’re taken even deeper into the action with 3D immersive sound systems such as Dolby Atmos, Auro 3D and DTS:X.

Sounds and images are more closely linked than ever before, letting you experience sound as you would in real life. Your eyes and ears can track the flight of a helicopter coming in overhead, or even a bullet fired from a gun.

Dolby Atmos achieves this by isolating individual sounds into something called an ‘audio object’. The system intelligently moves these objects around your three-dimensional space, via multiple speakers in the walls and ceiling. So you’re not just surrounded by sound, you feel like you’re in the movie.

The right stuff

Our engineers and designers consider every detail to give you the ultimate home theatre. And they supply and configure equipment from the best cinema suppliers on the market.

We give you the lowdown on the home cinema equipment you’ll need, and the brands we trust to give you the best possible and most reliable experience.

Screen

A high-spec projector and screen are a must for stunning visuals. For your media room or living room, you’ll probably want these to be motorised so they are out of sight when not in use.

That means they can be hidden away when you’re using your LED/OLED screen for everyday viewing, and appear at the touch of a button when you’re ready to watch the big screen.

Audio Amplifiers and Speakers

The essential elements of an audio system are the same for a dedicated home cinema or a multi-purpose media room:

Speakers: For a traditional surround sound set up, you’ll need left and right, centre channel, surround and rear speakers at least. For 3D immersive sound, you can have multiple speakers in the walls and ceiling.

Subwoofers: Generally the largest speakers in your sound system—the subwoofers deliver deep ‘body moving’ bass sounds. Typically, we will install two subwoofers, but more if the room allows.

Surround sound processor and amplifiers: A receiver can be installed for all video and audio processing and routing. It might include an AM/FM/DAB tuner, network access (for streamed music), an amplifier, an audio processor to direct sound to the appropriate speakers, and a video processor to enhance the picture on your high-resoultion display. Larger systems will use separate equipment for each of these tasks.

Media Sources

Cyberhomes will make sure your home cinema system will play content from all your preferred sources, including cable, satellite or streamed IPTV, a Blu-ray/Ultra-HD Blu-ray/DVD player, game console or computer.

We can even provide a movie server, such as Kaleidescape, so your whole film collection is instantly available without having to look for the disc.

Equipment rack

An equipment rack is needed to store your cinema room equipment, and connect the mass of cabling that comes with a home cinema system. It will ideally be sited outside your cinema room, to avoid noise and light pollution and manage heat.

Cyberhomes has a dedicated rack-building facility. This is where we design, build and test all our equipment racks and specify the cable schedules that make your cabling easily identifiable, fit for purpose, and accessible for servicing.

Control system

Once your home cinema system is in place, you’ll want to be able to use it with ease. We’ll provide you with a single user interface, integrated into any existing home automation system. As approved installers of Savant Pro, Crestron and Control4, we’ll recommend the control system best suited to your requirements.

This means you can operate every element of your home cinema system at the touch of a remote control, wall-mounted screen, smartphone and/or tablet. We’ll set you up so that children and visitors can easily watch a film on the big screen when they want—either in your dedicated home cinema or media room.

Cyberhomes will work with you to design and create your perfect private cinema room for home or work. Whether it’s in your lounge or media room, a dedicated theatre room, part of a new build home, or a commercial screening room for TV, film or video game production. We’ll manage the project from start to finish. We work with you to design, build and install your dream private cinema room system.

Initially, we’ll talk you through different concepts and develop a personalised mood board of interior finishes and colours. Our award-winning experts will then: