Experience Real

Let’s get basics out of the way.

You know you want a home theatre system.

You have the space, the spending capacity and most of all the passion for a great experience of sound and image.

You want it to watch movies, to play games or to simply unwind to music as it should be heard – purely.

Here’s what you should know.

Home theatres work on recreating the purest of an audio-visual experience by taking care of some fundamental requirements – how the sound and imagery – especially the sound – will reach you for it to be a theatre experience – not a theatre-like experience.

There’s a difference.

Pick up any good commercial surround sound system and you’re likely to hear sounds from all around you.

Add to that a large-screen TV and all you need is popcorn and dimmed lights et voila – a theatre-like experience.

Like. Not actual.

Home theatres? Now that’s giving the Imaxes, the Inoxes and the other bad boys of cinematic experience a run for their setups.

For starters there’s the acoustics – the ability for the sound to reach you perfectly. If you have a room which is highly reflective then you’ll experience reverberation or echo depending on the size of the room. Sound on its own gets reflected and absorbed by everything around you. The walls, the paint on the walls, the furniture... you get the drift.

Which is why when you hear sound in a regular setting you are treated to reverberation – where the sound comes to you with a little drag in it – hellooooooo. If the room is extremely spacious you're probably going to hear the 1/10th of a second gap. That's echo – hello hello hello.

To arrest these issues, home theatre companies like Goa-based Sygnus Technologies spend attention to detail in creating the acoustics of your room.

Siddhant Amonkar of Sygnus Technologies was a crazy movie buff who spent the weekends as an engineering student catching the overnight train to Mumbai from Ratnagiri, alone, watching a movie at India's first Imax theatre at Wadala, getting back on the train and to his hostel.

Then he’s had that rare experience of being raised with music playing around him 24x7 thanks to his parents. He’s dabbled in speakers and amplifiers, so home theatre setups were the inevitable next step.

So when a home theatre project comes to Sygnus, Siddhant focuses mainly on the acoustics.

Layers and layers of material go into making the walls of the room absolutely right for a home theatre setup.

There’s wood, glass wool, foam, felt and all types of other material that enable the sound to be absorbed and reflected just right.

For instance wood is great for base sounds.

So it’s not just the sub-woofer you’ve invested in, it’s the layers of reflector-enabled walls you have in your setup which will decide that the boom you hear is exactly what the director of the movie or music score intended.

There’s more.

The furniture and the distance your furniture is placed from the screen/s and speakers are deliberate.

Sound travels through waves and waves just like those in the ocean have crests and troughs. You don’t want to be sitting in a trough, you won’t hear the sounds as someone sitting in a crest will.

That’s where calibration of the Audio-Visual Receiver (AVR) comes in. To ensure that what the director had in mind for his movie or music is what you are getting to the T.

It also ensures that you have a positive experience, not a disturbing one. Because sounds, poorly calibrated, can affect you physically.

So yes, you can create your theatre-like experience or actually have a theatre at home.

The difference is in the one you hire to do this for you.