The Camellias, a luxury residential project in New Delhi which offers smartly designed homes. Premium residences are surrounded with lush greenery and a healthy environment. These super luxury residences offer unparalleled amenities, gorgeous views and truly personalized service including a private high luxury home cinema. Camellias was heavily featured at the CEDIA Awards EMEA 2021, bringing a total of four Awards (Home Cinema Level III EMEA, Best Dressed Rack EMEA, Best Documentation EMEA and Home Cinema Global) home after winning the CEPro Home of the Year Award earlier.

THE CHALLENGE

The client wished for the cinema room to also be used as a theater for live performances. All features of the cinema setup were to be controllable from a single device with the touch of a single button and the room was to be AV calibrated. For the audio cinema design, the performance objective was to maintain 105db at the listening position. This set-up is capable of playing all 3 audio formats including Dolby Atmos, Auro 3D and DTS:X. The set-up includes an immersive Trinnov layout of 21.6.10. The home cinema set-up would be used for movies, talk shows and live performances by musical bands. The sound systems and acoustics had to be customized to handle the openness of the space and provide a vibrant sound across all seats of the auditorium.

THE SOLUTION

Macbee, the system integrator, together with K-array's distributor ISD India were in charge of this entire project from start to finish; the goal was to create a unique, discrete, world-class private cinema with the largest screen possible and seating capacity for 45-50 people. If that wasn’t enough, the client also wanted the space to double up as an auditorium for five performances. All the cinema features had to be controlled from a single device at the touch of a button and the room needed to be AV calibrated. This cinema set-up includes an immersive Trinnov layout of 21.6.10. The following aspects of speaker placements have been taken into account while designing this project:

Recommendations for multiple listening positions:

Adapting the number of surround speakers to the size of the listening area

Adapting the type of surround speakers to the shape of the listening area

All rear/back speakers should be behind the listening area.

All rear left speakers should be heard at the left of the listening area.

Cross-firing is recommended to achieve best overall position and immersion for all seats at the expense of a slight compromise at the MLP.

For the placement of the front wide speakers for a normal L/R angle of ±36°, they considered the median angle method as well as the bisector angle method, involving few surround speakers or many surround speakers. When the listening area is long, the angle between the top speakers (front top, top, middle top and rear top) can become significantly larger than the angle between the other speakers. In this case, it is recommended to array the top and/or the middle top speakers to achieve more uniform loudspeaker coverage. This array should be achieved with constant power signal distribution.

For the subwoofer placement they have made a room analysis and placed the seats in the optimized zone with moderated peaking and no nulling. Modal peaks are areas where mode frequencies are blasting loud, causing distortions such as boomy bass. Modal nulls are areas where the mode frequency is canceled and becomes very quiet.  All subwoofers were positioned in the corners of the room.

The front of the room, we used two subwoofers on each side to get more gain from the subs. Total subwoofers used in this layout are six including four in the front of the room and two in the rear. They examined various aspects under these considerations including: room size and specifications, variables that add heat to the room, people (with a desired occupancy of 45-50), home cinema equipment and placement and acceptable noise level from projector fans for clear audio output in all parts of the room.

On this project, they used the following K-array products: twenty Kayman-KY102 line array speakers, twenty-six Domino-KF212, six Thunder-KSC18P and stage monitor during live performances two Turtle-KRM33P.

“The project set-up is truly discrete and well interwoven into the structural design. It is immersive and encompassing that you feel absorbed in the sound experience from all sides of the room. When combined with the visuals of the cinema set-up as well as the ambient lighting during a live show, it’s easy to forget where you are. Overall a fantastic project design visually, aesthetically and acoustically.”