15 minute read
SMART THINKING
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Its easier to test drive a high-performance car than a home cinema
MAINTAINING STANDARDS
Ben Goff, Technical Director at Cinema Lusso argues for the importance of official standards in promoting high-performance.
As a contributing member of multiple CEDIA working groups, creating recommended practice guidelines for AV Systems, I could be accused of a biased view towards Technical Standards. Though it’s also only fair to point out that the same participation undoubtedly played a significant role in the ‘CEDIA - Best Home Cinema Level 1’ award, which now sits proudly on my desk. Some call it volunteering, I prefer to think of it as free education while creating valuable assets for the industry.
THE STANDARDS BASED APPROACH
As private cinema providers, we walk a unique line in the world of luxury retail. While other industries sell stories of engineering prowess and gloriously rich histories, we resort to throwing around nonsense terms like ‘Reference’ which no longer carry any weight or meaning they may once have had. ‘Reference’ was lost long ago to the trendy kids in the TokTik department.
We differ in demonstration too. When a client walks into a jeweller to purchase an AP or Patek, they can try it on to see how it feels on the wrist before they part with their cash. With cars its generally the same too, a Ford Mondeo, a 3 Series or a Lamborghini, when our clients choose a new car, they usually have the benefit of a test drive to understand what they are buying, with the options list clearly presented and easy to understand. The same cant be said for a private cinema.
Screen size and material, projection distance, room size, decor and furnishings etc will all impact projected image quality, so while we can demonstrate a projector, many variables dictate if the demo actually replicates the client’s final experience.
Audio is even tougher, the room has such a fundamental effect on the sound that identical equipment can and will sound completely different between a demo room and the client’s home depending on the structure, acoustical treatment and seating layout.
The solution, as I see it, is a standards based approach to the sales and specification process. If we create dem rooms which meet industry standards and design each project in the same way, we can give a valid representation of the performance the client can expect, regardless of the room size or brands used.
If brand agnostic, standards-based design, is the answer, where did the relevant standards come from and who decides how they should be implemented for our clients?
100 YEARS OF RESEARCH
The giants whose shoulders we stand on, have conducted numerous scientific experiments to confirm the performance levels which provide the most enjoyable experience. For audio alone, it’s easy to find countless peer reviewed research papers spanning the last 100 years, looking at the effects of recording, mixing and playback on listener preference and enjoyment.
The academic research then informs the standards, so by 1992 when the ITU published BS.775 (multichannel stereophonic sound system with and without accompanying picture), which laid the groundwork for every surround sound format since, it wasn’t guesswork about where to place speakers, or how to use an LFE channel. This standard can be traced back to a mountain of research as far back as the Society of Motion Picture Engineers in the 1920’s, private initiatives, such as Phillips research into stereophony in the 1940’s and BBC research into quadrophonic reproduction during the 70’s.
It’s unreasonable to expect anybody to work through this research alone. Thankfully, we have Recommended Practice papers, written as a collective effort to collate the key findings, into a single easy to follow guide.
In 2021, CEDIA became an ANSI (American National Standards Institute) Accredited Standards Developer (ASD). To achieve this, CEDIA submitted its procedures to ANSI for review, and now agrees to meet ANSI’s requirements for openness and due process. Being an ASD means that CEDIA runs its standards efforts in an open way that allows all working group members to contribute equally, leading to the creation of standards and recommended practices that can be truly considered industry consensus.
CEDIA’s standards efforts come under the R10 Standards Committee – R10 because it is a joint effort with The Consumer Technology Association (CTA) who already had R1 to R9 standards groups. R10 is unique in that whilst most CTA standards groups focus on the development of technology at a component and product level, R10 focusses on the installation of technology primarily into private environments. Split into a number of different workgroups, each of which has a chairperson and between 15 to 30 active participants, currently WG1 (Workgroup 1 – Audio) and WG3 (Video) are active. Each workgroup meets weekly over a video conference for an hour during which discussions and debate then lead to a consensus vote to agree a section of the work effort.
When a document is complete, it then goes out to review where any CEDIA or CTA member is free to question any parts of the document. The workgroup is then obligated to discuss all of the comments, and prepare a written reply if the workgroup chooses not to change the document based on a comment. This ensures that there is full transparency on the process and that the end result is considered true industry consensus.
THE RELEVANCE OF STANDARDS
Many of the standards highlighted in Private Cinema Recommended Practices are misunderstood, misrepresented, or worse still, simply disregarded by integrators who become the ‘Enemy of Excellence’. I cant count the number of cinema rooms I’ve been in, including many industry demonstration and training facilities which have such poor acoustics they leave uninformed integrators questioning the value of acoustic treatment all together.
Another favourite I hear almost every week, “but my client will never listen at Reference Level, its too loud”. Yet the client owns a 200mph supercar… I don’t recall Ferrari ever suggesting clients would like a 70mph supercar because the F40 was ‘too fast’.
If my only experience of driving was in my van, I’d be confident I never wanted to go faster than 100mph, but take a supercar to Goodwood and suddenly 100mph doesn’t feel so fast after all. So previous experience of a H-iFi pushed to distortion in a poor acoustic space, isn’t a safe position to judge how you will use a well designed and engineered home cinema.
If our clients are unable to judge what they need or want, who are we to decide that they wont want to experience the dynamic range the director intended? The same dynamic range experiences by the sound engineer in the mixing facility, as defined by standards?
If we are making our own decisions, surely then, we can also place loudspeakers whereever we feel like and not include any subwoofers, in fact let’s just make it up as we go along to suit our own taste.
By overruling a hundred years of research, because we are either under educated or simply arrogant enough think we know best, all we do is demonstrate is a total ignorance to why the standards exist. When our clients trust us to design what is an unnecessary luxury, it might be best if we don’t show a complete disregard for the experience we deliver.
CALL FOR VOLUNTEERS
The work of the standards committee is always ongoing, R10 Workgroup 3 has just begun the much needed update to the RP23 Video Recommended Practices, chaired by Joel Silver of ISF fame and there is a significant effort required to update the guidance.
With RP22 almost ready for publication, Working group 1 will soon begin our next work effort into audio measurement and performance verification.
These working groups are mainly comprised of representatives from major manufacturers, while integrators with field experience are often vastly under represented. With the value these documents provide, it’s embarrassing how few European integrators contribute. The only limit on how many concurrent work efforts CEDIA can have is the amount of volunteers that are available to contribute to the efforts. Membership of a workgroup requires that the individual is either a CEDIA or CTA member (both associations have individual memberships that allow for standards participation if an individual’s company is not a member of either association).
Instead of always asking, “what does CEDIA do for me?” It’s time to get involved, define the future recommendations and get the best free education imaginable.
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