PMI is a team of highly organized and seasoned professionals who sweat the details. In fact, we’ve been known to spend dozens of hours on wiring diagrams alone! Our services run the gamut from room design and layout through to audio + video commissioning and calibration. We offer excellent project management to orchestrate any level of process, from the simplest project to the most complex.
Having designed and engineered more than 500 purpose-built and multi-purpose entertainment spaces, we've pretty much seen it all, and yet we continually encounter new challenges along the way. Our expertise lies in the detail with which we approach each project, and the many tools and resources we’ve developed to fulfill our mission of “doing it the right way.”
PROJECT BRIEF
This project is a sleek, modern home with an industrial flair in the trendy South of Market neighborhood of San Francisco. The interior of the home feels cool and spacious, not what you’d expect from condensed city-living. The bones of this home are a highly complex, high-end commercial-grade infrastructure. Even though it’s a residence, it has a very organized and mechanical structure – perfect in every way.
THE CHALLENGES
Because the house is basically a steel and concrete structure, any sound hitting attached sheet rock radiates throughout the entire building. The first challenge became how to turn the building into a high-performance entertainment space whle maintaining sound comfort in adjoining rooms. Another challenge was sound isloation from the outside areas, including noisy outside traffic. To achieve these goals involved a multitude of painstaking details.
WHERE FORM MEETS FUNCTION
THEATRICAL PRESENTATION
PMI also designed the rest of the home to include audio-video playback in all of the indoor and outdoor spaces so it was important to acoustically design and tune these rooms, as well.
Manny LaCarrubba and Bob Levy testing the polarity of sound reinforcement speakers.
Manny and Bob with multiple acoustic test microphones for spatial averaging of the speaker response.
Here's an almost-final view looking around the room:
Ultimately, this project gave the client exactly what they wanted: a truly multi-purpose entertainment space with a high level of function, remarkable flexibility, and style!
Having designed and engineered more than 500 purpose-built and multi-purpose entertainment spaces, we've pretty much seen it all, and yet we continually encounter new challenges along the way. Our expertise lies in the detail with which we approach each project, and the many tools and resources we’ve developed to fulfill our mission of “doing it the right way.”
PROJECT BRIEF
This project is a sleek, modern home with an industrial flair in the trendy South of Market neighborhood of San Francisco. The interior of the home feels cool and spacious, not what you’d expect from condensed city-living. The bones of this home are a highly complex, high-end commercial-grade infrastructure. Even though it’s a residence, it has a very organized and mechanical structure – perfect in every way.
The homeowners love to entertain and wanted to create a space that could function as screening room, live performance space, art gallery and workshop, recording studio, and dance club. Giving new meaning to the term “multi-purpose room,” the space has been designed to go from a sit-down banquet to a heart-pumping disco with remote-controlled ease. We call it NASA meets RAVE!
THE CHALLENGES
Because the house is basically a steel and concrete structure, any sound hitting attached sheet rock radiates throughout the entire building. The first challenge became how to turn the building into a high-performance entertainment space whle maintaining sound comfort in adjoining rooms. Another challenge was sound isloation from the outside areas, including noisy outside traffic. To achieve these goals involved a multitude of painstaking details.
THE ENGINEERING
Working with builder Larry Christiani, PMI created a highly detailed plan set, and four drafts later, we were ready to start the build-out.
With the many structural materials used in this building – including corrugated aluminum pan deck, red steel beams, tension cable – the visible eye cannot really see that the finished architectural ceiling is actually flown several feet below the structural lid of the room – and it’s done so with a resiliently mounted sound isolated ceiling. Painstaking care was taken with each and every one of the penetrations into the ceiling, including the down-lighting, sprinklers, cables, and large format speaker mounts.
WHERE FORM MEETS FUNCTION
The client wanted a clean aesthetic so we settled on a wood paneled look. Had we used regular wood it would have created a giant echo chamber. We specified Murano acoustical wood paneling which is porous to sound. This allowed us to install combinations of four-inch-thick absorption panels and diffusion strips behind some of the areas to optimize the reverberant field.
This is the back window of the "rave" room which looks onto an alley with nearby neighbors; double-layer, three-quarter inch plate glass windows were installed to preserve privacy.
Plumbing isolation collars were used throughout inside the walls in order to reduce rattling from vibrations in spots where metal touches metal. These small details make a big difference!
Acoustically-rated ductwork is installed throughout, in order to reduce noise and sound transmission through the HVAC system.
Shallow profile subwoofers are flown from the ceiling on vibration isolation spring hangers.
PERFORMANCE + FLEXIBILITY
The surround channel speakers are housed at ceiling-level, attached to a truss that motors up and down on flown cables. These can be lowered to approximately seven feet off the floor so they’re positioned at the optimum height during a film presentation. There are also sound reinforcement speakers in the corners for dance music/nightclub speakers which play at an incredibly high level of sound pressure. The ceiling area conceals deep absorption for broadband control of the sound reflection decay time.
Given their different functions, speakers were carefully selected to ensure that the direct and reflected soundfield ratios were optimized for the overall acoustical character of the perforated wood-wall schemes. Because of the range of uses for the multi-purpose room, digital signal processing and channel routing are implemented with a multichannel BSS Audio processor. The sound system configuration and performance flexibly convert to adapt to the room usage and are all seamlessly controlled but the Crestron automation system. Multiple subwoofers were installed in the ceiling to distribute multiple points of bass radiation for smoother standing waves.
THEATRICAL PRESENTATION
PMI commissioned Triad CinemaPlus speakers behind the screen. The screen has 2-way masking plus a fabric cover that comes down to protect the screen when not in use. Wood is Murano Acoustics paneling, wood which is acoustically open to let sound go through it and into the absorptive materials behind it.
LET'S PARTY!
Inside the big window that faces the street outside, we engineered a motorized set of vertical blinds that are all black on one side to shut out the light, and are all white on the other side so the client can project still or moving images onto the window.
PMI also designed the rest of the home to include audio-video playback in all of the indoor and outdoor spaces so it was important to acoustically design and tune these rooms, as well.
Manny LaCarrubba and Bob Levy testing the polarity of sound reinforcement speakers.
Manny and Bob with multiple acoustic test microphones for spatial averaging of the speaker response.
Here's an almost-final view looking around the room:
Ultimately, this project gave the client exactly what they wanted: a truly multi-purpose entertainment space with a high level of function, remarkable flexibility, and style!
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