Grimani Systems CEDIA 2018 Show Report

Welcome to the Fun Room Light, bright, and inviting. Walls & Ceiling look like drywall Comfortable seating for friends and family. Glass wall visually connects the Fun Room and Courtyard  High Points Think beyond the theater box Great entertainment can be in nearly any space New technology provides more flexibility New design solutions open the door for Interior Designers Overview Good news! With the latest technologies, we can move past the dark and secluded home theaters of the late 20th century! No more man caves isolated from the rest of the house. No more rows of theater seats formally lined up, as if ready for battle with action heroes. Imagine even having a glass wall or window so we can stay connected to the rest of the world? Instead of just a "Home Theater", we want a "Fun Room". But, and this is a big but, can we still have all of this and a great cinematic experience? The answer is Yes , and...

This client was referred to us by the integrator, who completed this installation about 10 years ago. The room was a dedicated three-row home theater in an upscale neighborhood of Detroit. All the gear was state-of-the-art for its time - from the studio-grade speakers, to the professional HD video projection system. But the surround decoder finally gave up the ghost after several years of faithful service. The client heard that Dolby Atmos® was the latest thing, so he sourced a new processor. He expected it to be an automatic upgrade, but wasn’t aware that he also needed to add speakers for the Top and Wide locations. At any rate, it was time to install, configure, and tune the system for the new processor. I took the job and carved out two days - right before Christmas - for a quick jaunt from my temperate San Francisco Bay Area home to frigid Detroit. (Who doesn't like a little cold for the holidays?) While planning the trip, I found out that the system didn’t include any ...

Anthony Grimani was invited to speak to the San Diego Music and Audio Guild on the importance of acoustics for listening rooms and home theaters; more than 50 audio hobbyists attended.  In a thank-you note, Guild organizers B. Jan Montana and Jim Lindstrom said, “Your presentation was entertaining, logical, progressive and comprehensible by neophytes. It removed all doubts about the importance of acoustics. We’ve been advocating room treatment and EQ for years, but they keep wasting money on wires and turntable stands, rather than dealing with the real problems. You've brought God's honest truth home to them. You're doing more for accurate sound reproduction than any audio magazine.” 

Working on another great project with Karl Mautner and Integr8 in China , Anthony Grimani flew to Shanghai to do the final calibration on a world-class home theater. The home is marvelously appointed with the finest materials. Located next to an indoor lap pool, the theater is a fusion of classical and Chinese design form, and is dressed with Cine-Living fabrics. The Triad Cinema Plus speaker package is driven by a set of Theta Dreadnought amps, all controlled by AMX. The system includes a 16 channel Ashly digital audio processor to fine-tune the nine speakers and 12 subwoofers. An awesome dual-stacked Runco  D-113d projector lights up the 180” wide 2.39 screen. Wow! World class! While in China, Tony also met with several AV technology, design and architecture press, including Insider and LP - click the links below to see these articles.   http://www.evolife.cn/html/2014/75365.html   http://dh.yesky.com/hometheater/336/35896836.shtml#top

With this Newport Beach, California project, the client wanted a dedicated home theater that could open up into the rest of the house for a variety of entertaining options. They wanted a rustic look to match the rest of the entertainment area of their waterfront property, evoking a comfortable feeling with a soft, light décor. In the lifestyle uses of the room, sometimes it would be open for entertaining and sometimes it would be closed down for private screenings. A large opening with sliding door was a huge challenge for the sound isolation and the acoustical reflections in this room. A door system was designed with acoustic absorbers built into the panels and seals all around the frames. The room had limited height so the sight lines had to be very carefully studied. A layer of resiliently suspended sheet rock was added to the concrete structure in order to reduce standing wave resonances. Structural posts in the right concrete wall were enclosed in resilient wall structures and c...

This is a jewel box dedicated theater in an ultra-modern home. Sleek décor and lighting with comfortable seating. The objective was to give a really small room the feeling of a big-sound, big-picture screening room, with high-quality styling and equipment. The clients wanted a sleek and elegant look to match the luxurious aesthetic of rest of their modern home, with high-end architectural values. They wanted a room with a warm vibe, with styling that departed from the traditional theater with columns and proscenium. before after The left wall door was at a critical acoustical location and we placed an absorber panel on it. The entire back wall was originally hard wood cabinetry, so we cut out some of the doors and installed fabric panels, both to conceal wideband absorbers and to take advantage of diffusion from inside the cabinets which contained shelving, CDs, gear, etc. We specified a 153” PMI 2.0 acoustically-transparent screen with 2:1 aspect ratio, along with a 4k proje...

The main objectives for this project were to create a 10-seat home cinema with outstanding picture and sound, privacy from the main living spaces of the residence, and a design style that flowed naturally into the rest of the home. The client wanted the basement cinema in their new custom beachfront home in Dana Point, California to follow the traditional architectural look of the house. It had to retain the classical decor while being comfortable and delivering high performance quality. Located underneath the Great room, the initial plans for the cinema made no effort to provide sound isolation or noise control. So we redesigned and reconstructed the wall structures, ceiling structures, and floor layouts to provide STC65 sound isolation, proper sightlines, and proper sound reflection decay times, all while respecting the original architectural style.   A ventilation supply duct for the Great room transitioned through the top right corner of the cinema, so we had to ful...

This refined high-quality Orange County, California, dedicated home cinema features full-on sound isolation, carefully engineered AV, acoustics, ventilation and noise control, along with an interior style that matches a modern-whimsical interior décor in the rest of the artistically conceived house.   The homeowner is a fan of high-quality products, but couldn’t tolerate any level of product failure or control system uncertainties, so t he project had to yield a dedicated home cinema room with high quality sound and picture, proper sound privacy, carefully crafted esthetics standards, and ease of use. The original framing scheme in this basement room tied the wood structures to the joists of the ceiling system. We had to rebuild the framing to isolate it from the joists, in order to reach the requisite sound isolation. The traffic flow and ergonomics required a rework of the doorway, and the size and location of the equipment closet on back right of room. The original ventila...

PMI offers a whole range of services, from acoustical layouts of the simplest entertainment space, to interior and lighting design, full space 3D renderings, and concierge service. This is an example of a project where we helped a small integrator by providing a full suite of services including complete project management. In a small town in Virginia, this was the first large-scale project for a local integrator who called upon the experts at PMI to not just engineer the space, but to roll out white-glove concierge service for his discerning client. What the integrator also realized was that bringing in a higher level of expertise and big-picture thinking enabled him to build increased revenue into the budget by getting the client excited about the additional value and functionality he could achieve with the space.  The homeowner is CEO of a large coal mining company and he had very clear ideas about what he wanted for his dedicated – and not at all prototypical...