Everything you need to know about sound bars… at Rapallo, we love discrete multi-channel goodness. Unfortunately, we also understand that Read More

If you spend any time at all on AV forums, you’ll run into hundreds and hundreds of posts along the lines of “Help, I have x amounts of dollars to spend on a home theater, and I haven’t got the first idea of what I should buy.” Leave it to Rapallo to set you on the road to what we consider a pretty decent middle of the range home theatre 5.1 system under $7,500. (Add a projector and a projector screen for under $12,000 all in.) Sure, that is a decent amount of money but it should give you a fair range of options. It’s about making smart choices; going for products that punch well above their weight and excel in smart high quality design without whistles and bell and fancy designs you can easily do without.Simply put, we’re out to build an excellent system for you that delivers big on sound, while remaining acceptable both within budget and in aesthetics for your other half. Yes, we can have it all.

A few weeks ago we talked you through home theatre speaker placement in the ideal case of having a separate rectangle shaped room that is dedicated to the joys of home theatre shenanigans. While this is all very nice for some, most of us don’t have an ‘ideal room’ and have to double function the living room. This means that the room might not be rectangular at all; you may have to deal with an open plan living room that opens up to a kitchen and dining area. You may not have an entire wall space dedicated solely for your 5.1 or 7.1 front speaker set-up. You may actually have to work with a tiny apartment and the last thing on the option list is a pair of tower speakers and a massive subwoofer.  Or the kids may display some early engineering skills and have a secret desire to remodel your brand new speakers.

Many a word has been spoken on the topic of speakers. They are probably the most ‘in your face’ aspect of an audiovisual set-up and prices can range from plain cheap to astronomical price tags. Apart from reading reviews and deciphering specs, what actually makes a good speaker? The obvious thing to look at is the loudspeaker driver. We’re talking woofers, tweeters, midranges and the likes.

Lets talk home theatre speaker placement. After our customer story a few weeks ago, we received several questions from you Read More

It’s been a little while now since Dolby Atmos quietly made its entrance in the world of cinema. The Hobbit and Gravity were one of the first movies with an Atmos soundtrack and a lot has happened since. A few years on and Dolby Atmos has become the ‘it’ word for home theatres too. A decent range of Av receivers and Pre-amps are now able to decode Atmos including Onkyo, Pioneer, Sony and Yamaha. Atmos Elevation (or Atmos -enabled) speakers – although a bit more slowly – are starting to enter the market as well. But how much is hype and gimmicky and how far do you really want to go to get the ultimate sound experience at home?

We get requests to design a free AV plan for our customers on a regular basis. Most of the time it is the budget, the room and some preferences in use and brands that do the talking, but every now and then there are some additional requests on the wish list.  So what do you do when the ideas of an interior designer are thrown into the equation and the brief is that it should sound like any top notch home theatre but there is no way there are going to be any black floorstanding speakers in the lounge? We decided that no challenge was too big and we put a special set-up to the test at the Rapallo lab. The results surprised us in a very good way… 

A few weeks ago we bumped into an article claiming that most audiophiles and home theatre lovers actually do not live on a big budget. It is just where their priorities are. It is what they choose to spend their ‘sanity money’ on. It got us thinking however; for which purchases do you splash out when you are building your home theatre set-up? And when are you just paying for branding and marketing? We give you our humble opinion in these matters.

One of the suggestions sometimes made on forums when discussing subwoofers is ‘going dual’. Subwoofer specialists SVS are big fans of running dual subwoofers whenever possible, and they recon they can be a great upgrade to any home theater or music system. We were allowed to borrow this excellent SVS newsletter on dual subwoofers to share with you. It sums up in a very clear way some of the benefits of running dual subwoofers in your system.

How to calculate the correct power for your amp? (part2) Last week we chewed our way through the technical background Read More