Best Innovation Installation

Reinventing the Wheel

Commercial cinema and home theater come together like never before in this amazing private screening room.

This magazine has featured many dual-purpose home theaters through the years—rooms that are capable of screening first-run Hollywood films, as well as the latest high-definition home video formats.

In that respect this home theater, which is owned by a Miami-based Hollywood financier, and bears the audacious nickname “Prometheus,” does not appear to break new ground.

However, most of the so-called “Bel Air Circuit” theaters we’ve seen are comprised of two disparate A/V systems—usually one 35mm film-based and the other videobased, with as many as three different sound processors—all crammed into one room, and tied together tenuously with extremely complicated control systems.

This amazing and innovative private home cinema, designed by custom installer Peter Montoulieu of Cineramax, does it all with one integrated digital system. Montoulieu basically re-created the wheel by combining two incredibly complex systems into one. And he did so masterfully.

Starting from the top, the room boasts a modified Barco DP-1500 2K Digital Cinema DLP Projector. “No matter how good a consumer projector is, whether it costs $100,000 or $150,000, the level of image quality delivered by a true digital cinema project is going to be far and away better—especially in terms of the contrast in the details in the high frequencies,” Montoulieu says, adding that he modified the theater’s amazing—and amazingly huge—Barco projector extensively to achieve the above-mentioned two-in-one goal.

To take advantage of the projector’s superior performance while increasing the overall contrast ratio to levels more appropriate for home theater, Montoulieu’s team joined forces with Moving Image Technologies in Fountain Valley, Calif., to develop a series of modifications and filters that boost contrast to 5000:1 without voiding the projector’s warranty.

But dealing with the dissimilar sound formats output by the cinema and video systems necessitated another collaboration: “The room has a Dolby [Show Store DSS100] server—which is the equivalent of having all of those big 35mm rolls of film—but it’s only one unit, three rack spaces high,” Montoulieu says. “It puts out eight channels of AES/ EBU digital audio, uncompressed—not a format that anybody can handle, except for Dolby equipment made specifically for movie theaters, [which] won’t do DTS and doesn’t have HDMI.”

With TacT Audio, Montoulieu developed a custom digital cinema sound processor based on the company’s TCS MKIII surround-sound decoder—one of three in the world—which can handle sound from the Dolby cinema server as well as the room’s DirecTV tuner, Xbox 360, and Denon DVD-A1UDCI Universal Blu-ray Disc Player. “It’s a very complicated piece of equipment,” Montoulieu says. “One thing I love about it, [which] I want to take advantage of one day, is that it allows you to have five audio channels behind the screen, like SDDS.