Room acoustics is a rather broad topic that encompasses a wide range of issues and solutions. As a matter of fact, it’s quite a science in its own right. Bart  has a bit of a passion for the science of waves, how they behave and how they can be tamed. It started off with some papers on acoustics during his engineering training, but he became rather fascinated by it when building his music/recording studio and later on his home theatre. ‘Complex’ doesn’t begin to describe it and it tends to scare off many audiophile and movie lover. But we’ll make an attempt to take you through the muck without leaving you with a headache at the end. 

Whenever I post something on Facebook about Blu-ray players or CD players, guaranteed somebody will reply:’ Do people still buy these?’ While obviously nowhere near in the same amounts as say 15 years ago, the answer is still ‘yes’. Despite the convenience of streaming and the romance of vinyl, the truth is: CDs are still an excellent music format. 

At the Rapallo home, Spotify Premium gets a lot of use for all sorts of reasons (the presence of young people not being the least of it). But we’ve also got hundreds of CDs in the cupboard, and we’re not getting rid of them. After all, the humble CD player still offers high-quality audio that trumps a lot of the streaming services out there.

This is the story of three shades of black: grey, white and black or the intriguing story of projection screen fabric.

One of the holy grails in projection is how black the “colour” black can be. As we are projecting light on a white surface, and the light is then reflected on our retina, black can never be really black. Black is an absence of light reflected on a white surface, so black becomes….dark grey, sort of. Unless, of course, you change the projection screen fabric colour from white to….black (or grey)!

At Rapallo, we have been supplying projection screens for over a decade and we have had a great relationship with our supplier. So when they sent us their new grey acoustic transparent projection fabric, we jumped at the opportunity to test it and see what the difference was. The results are interesting, to say the least.

On the back of a blog we wrote a few months ago about multi-room audio, we got the following question: Is there such a thing as multi-room video? You may scratch your head when you hear the term “Multiroom video” and think…what the heck is that? 

At Rapallo, we regularly receive inquiries from customers who would love to have the ability to share a few video sources such as their Sky box, Apple TV and Blu-ray player in different rooms. It’s a great way to save time and money. And you guessed it, depending on your situation there are a few solution to choose from. It can really be as sophisticated or as simple as you want it to be.  

Which brings us to the question: How do you go about creating a multi-room video system?