Ok. It’s confession time.

Bart has been a movie lover since his teens. Sure, I love a movie. But not LOVE a movie, the way Bart does. So, when our time came to get into the real estate market, a home theatre was very high on Bart’s wishlist. Every home that had our name on the purchase agreement was pre-wired for home cinema. However for many reasons the actual dedicated home theatre he’d been dreaming of didn’t materialise until a few years ago.

For the last few years, Bart spends every night in his home cinema. Every night. And every Friday, it’s ‘date night’ and I join him for a Friday night movie session.

And here’s the confession: I’d never thought I’d say this but having a home theatre is awesome! I’d prefer to watch a movie in our home cinema a million times over a visit to Hoyts (Sorry Hoyts, but it’s true). I thought I didn’t care much about large screens, immersive viewing, Dolby surround sound and great contrast. Boy, was I wrong.

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. 

If you’ve never installed a projector or screen before, the process can be quite intimidating and maybe even confusing. The general idea is simple, and you probably already have a good idea of where you want each piece to go, but the specifics are unclear. Which is mounted first, the screen or the projector? How far back should the projector be from the screen? How high should the screen be? How do you fine tune the projector’s position to fill the entire screen? This guide answers all of those questions, and hopefully any others you have about how to mount a projector and screen as well.This guide answers all of those questions, and hopefully any others you have about how to mount a projector and screen as well.

Lately, we’ve been chatting about a lot of things, but we’ve been a bit quiet on the home theatre projector front. It’s easy enough to think that nothing much is happening  when it comes to projectors, but frankly, you couldn’t be further off the ball. Things are moving; and they are moving fast. In the last year, projectors have become cheaper and technology is getting more and more sophisticated. What used to be reserved for the fat wallets of the elite, is now accessible for most people who are passionate enough to forego some of the other perks of life.So what is our crystal ball saying about the near future of home theatre projectors? 

Setting up a home theatre -dedicated or not- is a pretty big project. One that requires planning and researching, but also time for proper set-up. To get the most bang for your buck when assembling an audio or audio/video system, it’s important to make each piece of equipment and the room all work together as a team. Simply buying good pieces of equipment isn’t enough, and the chain is only as strong as its weakest link. While we understand that no situation is ideal, that rooms may have multiple uses and that compromises need to be made, some errors are just too sad for words.We sum up the things you want to do in order to avoid those common goofs so you can enjoy every moment of the precious pennies and time spent.

You just spent your hard-earned money on a new home theatre projector or a new OLED television. 

So, why is the grass blue? 

In a home cinema, picture quality is everything. Calibrating contrast, brightness, colour and sharpness is not most people’s idea of a good night in – get someone to visit any picture menu during a movie and you’re bound to get a barrage of groans.

But while not most of people’s favourite activity, calibrating your television or home theatre projector properly is rather important. A correctly calibrated TV or home theatre projector will create a much more natural image that is more pleasing to the eye, and may — depending on its light output afterward — draw less power and even last longer. 

It’s not the first time we’ve grumbled about the war on formats going on in the home entertainment world. It’ll be no surprise that we can announce a new one: two types of high dynamic range (HDR) video technologies – HDR10 and Dolby Vision. 

We’ll dive into the differences between the two in a minute but, before we do, we should review what HDR is and how it ended up with two different formats.

There is no job more awesome in this world than the one that helps people realize a lifelong dream.  We at Rapallo are in the business of just that and we love it!‘This is the best place ever!’ are Gabe’s words as soon as we walk through the door for this interview, a few weeks after completing his new home.Gabe and his wife have moved away from the rat race now that the kids are grown up and have moved out. They went for the dream home and got exactly what they had it mind.  For Gabe’s wife that meant a kitchen with a sea view, for Gabe it was a home theatre that topped the list. Once they started planning the home theatre a multi-room audio system was added to the project.

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.

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…