video walls Archives

All About Digital Canvases

Our articles on digital canvases and video walls provide a comprehensive guide to the emerging category of digital art in the home

ART

your home is your canvas

emerging technology is going beyond just making homes smart to making them expressive

“Everchanging sound and image installations are particularly appealing to those who collect interactive fine art. Modern collections are anything but static. Anyone with a serious NFT collection will attest that they need new ways of displaying artwork. And excitement is just beginning to build around burgeoning artists who work in emerging media, designing original pieces with generative audio and visual elements that constantly change and reflect the dynamic elements of the modern home.” read more

bringing the gallery home

museums and galleries have a lot to teach about the best ways to display digital canvases in home environments

“What is it about looking at fine art that creates a moment of pause instead of merely lulling you into a soporific state? We probably can’t answer that question in this brief piece of writing, but we can address how fine art is typically displayed in galleries. And we can examine how we might make sure these new digital works get the same treatment as the other “static” pieces of art in our homes.” read more

natural wonder

artist Akiko Yamashita discusses the process of translating her large-scale video works from public exhibition to satisfying display at home

“It wasn’t until I encountered Akiko Yamashita’s artwork that I sensed a new kind of intangible spark that leaps from a creation to the person experiencing it. Her large-scale interactive animations, 3D immersions, and light installations invite people to move and create something more entrancing together. The work is interactive in a way that goes beyond technical wizardry. It’s not just cool, it’s more human.” read more

enriching the artist’s digital palette

Barco’s Tim Sinnaeve says artist Akiko Yamashita’s recent comments show that the creative community is beginning to embrace the potential of digital canvases

“Knowing that there are specialized integrators who have established themselves as curators of digital canvases and that there is a mechanism to ensure that the artist’s intentions are honored is something everybody can feel good about. It’s very encouraging to see both artists and collectors starting to pick up on this and to see the increasing enthusiasm for digital canvases in the home.” read more

bringing the gallery home

destinations | artechouse

these tech-meets-art spaces are a must-see (and hear) for anyone eager to experience the leading edge of digital art

“Artechouse is the house that digital art and tech built. If you’ve heard a lot about digital art but have been so far unimpressed by jokey jpgs and trending crypto disasters, try the these New York, Washington, and Miami-based galleries for a really moving view of the newest fine art.” read more

a garden of immersive delights

Ed Gilmore’s midtown Manhattan showroom offers a both thrilling and soothing escape for the senses

“Certain spaces are more memorable because of what they make you forget. That’s how it feels to walk into one of Manhattan’s unforgettable high-end residential-technology hideaways, Gilmore’s Sound Advice. As I stepped into this sensorially refined environment, I forgot my crazy commute and instantly remembered why the showroom is the scene of so much great conversation and innovation.” read more

bringing the gallery home

VIDEO WALLS

video walls go boutique

video walls from the mainstream brands remain a big investment, but that doesn’t mean they’ve worked out all the bugs yet

“LED walls will inevitably shed their training wheels and continue to improve as time goes on—although perhaps not as quickly as other residential video-display technologies. In the meantime, companies like Quantum will attempt to bridge the performance and reliability gaps with highly customized premium offerings like the Cinematic XDR.” read more

great video wall sound is here

an opportunity to audition a center-channel solution in his own home theater showed the author you can have a micro LED wall without compromising the sound

“To have a speaker system that can be optimized without compromise, allowing you to place a pure, strong sonic image exactly where you want it, is going to be a game-changer for creating high-quality sound to go with LED video walls. Given the potential of what I experienced with this system in my own theater, I am looking forward to calibrating the system in the Florida installation next month, which will allow me to take the Movement System from an experimental situation into a real-world home theater environment.” read more

making video walls better

Quantum Media Systems’ Ken Hoffman on what he’s doing to create video walls that live up to the technology’s potential

“It might seem odd to single out one provider of video walls as a luxury-focused solution when the entire category operates in the stratosphere of the high-end entertainment market. But Quantum Media Systems is quickly establishing itself as the go-to provider of video walls that stand out not merely in terms of sheer size but also image quality, reliability, scalability, and—believe it or not—comfort.” read more

great video wall sound—another solution

famed acoustical designer Anthony Grimani offers his unique approach to solving the problem of where to put the center speaker in a video-wall home theater

“The problem of how to design sound systems to support massive LED video walls is one that continues to motivate audio professionals working in the luxury home entertainment space. The fact is this is such a custom domain that it’s hard to imagine a one-size-fits-all panacea that provides optimal sound for every wall in every installation.” read more

million-dollar wall—hundred-dollar sound

video walls have become a big status thing—and an even bigger investment—but getting them to sound good isn’t as easy as you might think

“Video walls can often take up an entire wall but you don’t have the option of putting speakers behind them like you do with a projection screen. SH Acoustics’ Steve Haas has checked out many of the existing audio solutions for LED walls and found them all wanting. But realizing that video walls are quickly becoming the likely future of viewing in premium home entertainment spaces, he’s been more than motivated to try to determine who has the best approach and how it can be optimized.” read more

Making Video Walls Better

making video walls better

“we can create spectacular whites and phenomenally dark blacks simultaneously, so if you’ve downloaded a 4K HDR movie from Kaleidescape, you’ll be getting everything that picture has to deliver”

Quantum Media Systems’ Ken Hoffman on what he’s doing to create video walls that live up to the technology’s potential

by Dennis Burger
January 31, 2023

It may seem odd to single out one provider of LED video walls as a luxury-focused solution when the entire category operates in the stratosphere of the high-end entertainment market. But as we speak with integrators installing these solutions about the pros and cons of such gargantuan screens, one name continues to rise above the buzz surrounding any nascent technology. Quantum Media Systems is quickly establishing itself as the go-to provider of video walls that stand out not merely in terms of sheer size but also image quality, reliability, scalability, and—believe it or not—comfort. What follows is a conversation with company CEO Ken Hoffman, an industry veteran with more than two decades of experience creating world-class private screening rooms, luxury commercial cinemas, post-production facilities, and more, about why Quantum created its Cinematic XDR LED video wall.

Since there are quite a few video wall solutions already, why did you feel it necessary to develop your own? What problems was the XDR system intended to address?

For many years, we worked in digital cinema either building or being part of teams that built screening rooms, post-production facilities, color suites, etc. But we decided around 2014 that we wanted to get back into the residential space and work with integrators, particularly on projects where the clients were approved to be on the Bel Air Circuit. That required Digital Cinema projectors, servers, video processors, etc.

Over the years, we’ve looked at using LED walls as opposed to projection, but the technology just wasn’t there yet. It looked good, but it wasn’t the high-end image quality needed in installations at that level.

So, after more than five years of R&D, we took the plunge about three years ago and decided to see if we could come up with our own approach, and instead of just buying somebody else’s wall and trying to make it better, we became an original equipment manufacturer working directly with component manufacturers. We specify the components—which diodes and integrated circuits to use—and create our own control and processing systems, taking the knowledge about image science we’ve accumulated from years of working at the very high end and from the motion-picture industry and applying that to video walls.

Which problems with the existing technology were you most interested in solving and how successful have you been?

One of the major advantages—aside from purity of color—is light output. Most LED walls will give you 600 or 800 nits, tops, in terms of peak brightness. Our newest wall is rated at 1,200 nits, and that’s calibrated. Uncalibrated, it’s more like 1,600 nits. Once you calibrate it for accurate color, you do lose a little brightness but that still enables us to do HDR better than not only other video walls but than many televisions.

Most HDR content has been created with 1,000 nits as the peak brightness target, and we’re able to provide that and typically more. By doing that, we can produce spectacular whites and phenomenally dark blacks simultaneously, so if you’ve downloaded a 4K HDR movie from Kaleidescape, you’ll be getting everything that picture has to deliver.

Video Walls Go Boutique

also on Cineluxe

Great Video Wall Sound Is Here

Bringing the Gallery Home

Million-Dollar Wall, Hundred-Dollar Sound

Achieving Serenity

Many integrators are concerned about the intense heat coming off video walls from many of the established manufacturers. People have joked that they feel like they’re going to get radiation burns standing in front of those things. Have you done anything to address that?

It is a big problem. That was part of our motivation for making a better wall. We wanted to make our system much more power-efficient. Simply put, if you get better results while using much less power, you generate less heat. We also use other techniques to dissipate heat better.

Nothing kills electronics quicker than excessive heat. Is that a contributing factor to the reports we’re hearing about reliability issues and longevity concerns with other video-wall solutions?

It could be. I agree with you: Heat is always an enemy. So, by generating a lot less heat and dissipating what little heat we do generate, that’s not as much of an issue for us. But in addition, we’re basically theater guys, and we’re helping our integration partners with theaters and media rooms where comfort is a real issue. With many video walls, you need a lot more air conditioning. If your front row is ten feet away and you’re feeling all this heat radiating off the screen, is that really conducive to enjoying a film? That was also a big consideration for us. You can walk right up to our wall and hardly feel any change in temperature.

You mentioned seating distance, which brings up the issue of screen size. What are the theoretical upper limits for the size of your wall?

Functionally, there are no limits. Our LED walls consist of a multitude individual cabinets, and within our cabinets, we have multiple modules. Each cabinet is basically a building block and we install those together to create a screen as large as the client wants, or as large as the room will accommodate.

The only issue is that as you get a lot bigger, the video processing gets a little more involved and you need more processing power, but we have the ability to do very large walls. If someone wanted a 100-foot wall or greater, no problem. It just takes a lot more processing power.

LED video walls are sort of akin to what OLED was ten years ago. Back then, people were paying $25,000 for a 55-inch OLED TV. Their failure rate was super high and the longevity wasn’t great, even on panels that didn’t fail within a year or so. But we’ve come a long way since then. So what would you say to the tech-savvy luxury homeowner who assumes LED video walls are going to follow the same trajectory?

I think there are some similarities but it’s not one-to-one. You can’t just treat this like a large TV. Some companies are trying to move in that direction. By making the installation of their video walls simpler, they’re trying to create economies of scale, so instead of a 100-inch TV, they can sell you a 120- or 130-inch video wall and treat them functionally interchangeably. It works, and the pricing is coming down, but the quality isn’t there. You’re going to see lines in between the modular elements, for example.

Do you mean the lines between each module or the lines between each row of pixels?

If the cabinets and internal modules aren’t aligned correctly you’ll see those lines. And the closer you get to the wall, the more you’ll see them. We’re spending a lot of time during the installation process so that we’re aligning the modules and cabinets optimally. We’re also spending a lot of time in the calibration process.

Would it be fair to say that what you offer is as much a service as a product?

It’s a combination of the two. It’s a much better LED wall, it’s a dramatically better video processing system—it’s a complete package. And then we provide on-site installation and calibration where we spend not just one or two but many days getting everything installed, aligned, integrated, and calibrated. It’s a turnkey solution. We’re focused on the pinnacle of image quality in cinematic environments.

What else might influence a high-end client to decide between a luxury projection system and a QMS Cinematic XDR video wall system?

Since we have a lot of experience with all different brands of projectors, we can explain that projectors can’t provide uniform light across the screen. When we do calibration on projectors, on a typical screen we look at 25 locations, and we get 25 different brightness values. Sometimes the differences are small, sometimes they’re large, but with the LED wall, it’s one value. The screen is 100 percent uniform.

Another consideration is convergence. Many projectors use different chips for red, green, and blue elements of the image, and you have to align those three chips as best you can. Usually, you can get most of the pixels converged but some of them aren’t. In movie theaters, there can be multiple pixels off on convergence. In the home, you’re so close to screen that you can’t be off that much. With LED walls, there are no convergence issues. Each red, green, and blue element lines up perfectly with its mates.

Another issue is that no matter how good your lens is, with a projection system, you can’t have perfect focus over the entire screen. You’re going to lose some focus, especially toward the edges of the screen. So having uniform focus, uniform convergence, and uniform light are major advantages. Add to that the truly deep blacks no projection system can deliver, along with the enhanced brightness no projector can give you, which helps with things like HDR, it’s just a dramatic advantage over projection.

“the truly deep blacks no projection system can deliver along with the enhanced brightness no projector can give you, give our video wall a dramatic advantage over projection”

Dennis Burger is an avid Star Wars scholar, Tolkien fanatic, and Corvette enthusiast who somehow also manages to find time for technological passions including high-end audio, home automation, and video gaming. He lives in the armpit of Alabama with his wife Bethany and their four-legged child Bruno, a 75-pound American Staffordshire Terrier who thinks he’s a Pomeranian.

Great Video Wall Sound Is Here

“Using the TPI controller, I was able to place the sonic image in the exact vertical position where my traditional center speaker
is located”

An opportunity to audition a center-channel solution in his own home theater showed the author you can have a micro LED wall without compromising the sound

by Steve Haas
January 19, 2023

Last June, in “Million-Dollar Wall, Hundred-Dollar Sound,” I talked about how difficult it can be to achieve acceptable sound when using a video wall in a home theater since the front speakers can’t be placed behind the screen as they can when using a projection screen. I mentioned that almost all of the solutions I had encountered resulted in significant compromises but that TPI’s Movement System showed promise, mainly because it includes a controller that uses digital signal processing (DSP) to allow you to adjust the height of the sonic image created by the front speakers.

I recently had a chance to audition the Movement System in my own home theater and was extremely happy with the results. This system uses speakers placed both above and below the video wall to create a phantom sonic image (similar to the horizontal imaging of stereo speakers except done vertically) to match the effect of a traditional center-channel speaker mounted at ear level. And it can accomplish this without the use of additional DSP and without having to employ the services of a professional calibrator (although both are still necessary to achieve optimal performance). Based on my hands-on experience with the TPI system, I have every reason to believe that this solution, along with others based on the same concept, will significantly accelerate the use of video walls in home theaters in place of projection systems.

from theory to reality

I know from my work with solid video screens in museum and commercial environments that effectively placing the sonic image vertically is both achievable and worth the effort. Some people contend that our brains can’t comprehend a vertical image shift as readily as a horizontal one. While there is some truth to that, A/B comparisons of vertical placement show that it can allow the sound of dialogue to be placed where we expect to hear it emanate from when watching a movie or a TV show, which is between half and two-thirds of the way up from the bottom of the screen.

I had been eager to evaluate the TPI system because of its potential to create precise vertical positioning in a home theater environment—particularly since I will soon be calibrating a very large residential project in Florida that uses the Movement speakers.

TPI sent me the two speakers and controller necessary to create a virtual center channel. While I could have requested additional speakers for the left and right front channels as well, I decided to use just the center so I could focus on dialogue. If the system could do dialogue well, I knew it would also be able to handle the left and right positions.

above | Quantum Media Systems‘ Cinematic LED Wall

Million-Dollar Wall, Hundred-Dollar Sound

click on the image to enlarge

TPI’s Movement System uses speakers placed both above and below a video wall for the left, center, and right front positions. A controller is used to adjust the vertical position of the sound coming from each top/bottom pair, to create the same effect as if the speakers had been placed behind the screen.

also on cineluxe

Rooms for Improvement

Video Walls Go Boutique

Achieving Serenity

Bringing the Gallery Home

I set the system up in my home theater, which uses a traditional left-center-right (LCR) speaker array positioned behind an acoustically transparent Stewart projection screen. I then used both objective measurements done with pink noise and subjective listening with program material that contained a lot of dialogue to position the phantom sonic image by way of the controller. I also employed Symetrix DSP to assist with the A/B comparisons of the top/bottom vs. behind-the-screen imaging, as well as with top-only, bottom-only, and top/bottom image comparisons.

Using the TPI controller, I was able to place the sonic image in the exact vertical position where my traditional center speaker is located. I then used the Symetrix DSP to tonally optimize the system so the sound from the top and bottom speakers closely matched that of my existing center speaker, even though they are from two different brands.

What was especially interesting is that the top and bottom pair exhibited a unique fullness of sound that wasn’t due to any type of distortion or phasing but that only added to their presence. Even though I had set the sound from the speakers to arrive at the listening location at exactly the same time, this presence took on an immersive quality because the sound was coming from two different directions, even though it created a solid sonic image in one specific location.

problem solved

The combination of objective measurements and extensive listening has convinced me the top-and-bottom-speaker solution will work. And it has significant advantages over the other existing approaches. By using direct-radiating sound as opposed to reflecting—or bouncing—sound off the video-wall screen, it avoids problems with the reflected sound from the screen becoming mixed with direct sound from the speakers, which creates distortion. Also, having large speakers mounted on the ceiling and aimed at the screen can be both unattractive and distracting. The top-and-bottom approach is especially effective with larger video walls where it can be difficult, if not impossible, to place the center-channel image at an acceptable height using LCR speakers mounted either above or below the screen.

Another advantage is that sound can be optimized for positions in addition to the traditional sweet spot in a theater, which isn’t possible with a single speaker no matter how well it has been calibrated. The type of system considered here would allow for the creation of presets to shift the sweet spot if the homeowners, for instance, wanted to sit in the front row instead of the center row because of the type of programming they were watching.

Also, the shallow height and depth of the Movement speaker cabinets allows them to be easily placed in the relatively small areas available above and below large video walls and allows for flexible placement within those areas. Admittedly, they can’t be used if a client wants an LED screen to fill the whole wall, but doing so would also create basic, non-audio-related problems with things like sight lines. It would be possible, though, to incorporate the speakers into a angled proscenium that would allow them to be positioned forward of the screen, an arrangement that could accommodate any desired screen size.

To have a speaker system that can be optimized without compromise, allowing you to place a pure, strong sonic image exactly where you want it, is going to be a game-changer for creating high-quality sound to go with LED video walls. Given the potential of what I experienced with this system in my own theater, I am looking forward to calibrating the system in the Florida installation next month, which will allow me to take the Movement System from an experimental situation into a real-world home theater environment.

Steve Haas is the Principal Consultant of SH Acoustics, with offices in the NYC & LA areas. Steve has been a leading acoustic and audio design & calibration expert for over 25 years in high-end spaces ranging from home theaters, studios, and live music rooms to major museums and performance venues.

a rendering of TPI’s Movement L center speaker

Video Walls Go Boutique

also on Cineluxe

Million-Dollar Wall, Hundred-Dollar Sound

Your Home is Your Canvas

Destinations | Artechouse

Keeping the Spies at Bay

Video walls from the mainstream brands remain a big investment, but that doesn’t mean they’ve worked out all the bugs yet

by Dennis Burger
October 31, 2022

It’s not hard to understand why people lust after video walls. These modular, direct-view screens combine the scale and scope of a traditional projector & screen setup with the viewing flexibility and brightness of TVs. But even though they come mainly from mass-market brands like Sony and Samsung, there’s nothing mass-market about their sizes—or their prices. And while they’re the hottest thing going in luxury home-entertainment spaces, we’ve been hearing reports from the field that there can be problems with both quality and reliability.

Mind you, that’s to be expected with any new display technology. When OLED TVs first became available a decade ago, those tiny but exorbitantly priced screens had the life expectancy of a goldfish won with a ping pong toss at a county fair. Fast-forward to 2022 and OLEDs are ubiquitous. But LG and other OLED manufacturers had one advantage the makers of LED video walls don’t—economies of scale. In other words, the need to keep up with the tremendous demand for OLEDs spurred the technology to evolve more quickly.

But the six-figure price of admission for video walls—a number unlikely to come down any time soon—has led to them just beginning to appear in high-end homes. And given that they’ve been released into the wild before being fully weaned, issues have emerged with performance and reliability, leading to some smaller, more boutique companies offering a more custom approach to these high-end displays.

One of the companies working to make video walls more viable is Quantum Media Systems, which recently launched its customized Cinematic XDR LED video wall, designed to address the issues that specifically affect luxury entertainment spaces. By investing in upgraded electronics, processing, and image-enhancement and heat-mitigation technology (important, given that most video walls seem to generate more heat than light), QMS has developed an expandable, highly customizable wall that can be configured for virtually any screen size and shape.

Quantum claims its display systems can deliver color rendering and brightness as good as high-performance HDR TVs, and that it can achieve screen sizes every bit as big as a two-piece projection system, but with only four inches of space required behind the screen. What’s more, because the Cinematic XDR LED video wall produces as much light as it does, its image can be clearly seen even in fully sunlit rooms.

LED walls will inevitably shed their training wheels and continue to improve as time goes on—although perhaps not as quickly as other residential video-display technologies. In the meantime, companies like Quantum will attempt to bridge the performance and reliability gaps with highly customized premium offerings like the Cinematic XDR.

Million-Dollar Wall, Hundred-Dollar Sound

“The subjective result of bouncing sound off the screen is a very profound distortion. The sound isn’t crisp and tight and clear. It’s smeared in time.”

Video walls have become a big status thing—and an even bigger investment—but getting them to sound good isn’t as easy as you might think

by Steve Haas
June 24, 2022

While most companies don’t yet heavily promote that they sell their video walls for residential use, you’d be hardpressed to find a luxury integrator who isn’t installing them in high-end homes. But they present an interesting challenge. They can often take up an entire wall, but you don’t have the option of putting speakers behind them like you do with a projection screen. Acoustician Steve Haas of SH Acoustics has checked out many of the existing audio solutions for LED walls and found them all wanting. But realizing that video walls are quickly becoming the likely future of viewing in premium home entertainment spaces, he’s been more than motivated to try to determine who has the best approach and how it can be optimized.

—ed.

The question of how to achieve good sound with a video wall isn’t a new one but the latest version of the problem of what to do with sound when you’re dealing with any kind of solid screen. While many projection screens are created with holes that allow the sound to come through when speakers are placed behind them, many are not, in order to maximize light gain and other aspects of video reproduction.

LED and Micro-Tile video walls have existed in commercial spaces like museums for quite some time. Between our work with those and with multimedia theaters with solid screens, we’ve had to design plenty of workarounds to match the quality of the ideal “speaker behind acoustically transparent screen” approach. When the video contains dialogue with talking heads, we’ve achieved decent success by placing the speakers above and below and then using vertical panning techniques for the audio. If there’s no dialogue, we have a lot more liberty to simply deliver sound from above or below, or even reflect it off the screen. But these approaches definitely result in some degree of compromise. So when a leading speaker manufacturer developed a system for reflecting the sound from speakers mounted to the ceiling off the LED wall, we had a good understanding of the challenges involved in making that work efficiently.

We have several issues with this approach that stem from the fact that speakers radiate sound off the sides and rear of their cabinets differently at different frequencies. Higher frequencies will be directed right at the LED wall, but lower frequencies will reflect from most speakers boxes and combine with the same frequencies that are also projecting from the front of the speaker. In museum installations, we often have the room to put big barrier clouds below the speakers so the sound coming off their cabinets isn’t audible over the sound of what’s being reflected.

Steve Haas

Having a solid screen in this exhibition area at the Kennedy Space Center Exploration Space gallery meant speakers couldn’t be placed behind the screen but had to be positioned above and below it instead.

photo | BRC Imagination Arts

Even if you can ignore having three large speakers hanging from the ceiling shrouded in multiple layers of plywood sandwiched with other damping materials, the listener can still hear those lower frequencies coming from the backs of the speakers before they bounce off the screen along with the upper midrange and treble. The subjective result is a very profound distortion of the sound. It’s not crisp and tight and clear. It’s smeared in time.

A number of speaker manufacturers are developing reformatted speakers that fit into a tight space below or above a video wall, and Wisdom Audio, Ascendo, and others have come out with completely new products that are meant to address the LED wall market. The issue is: Do you place those speakers above the screen, below the screen—or both?

There are times when a bottom placement would work, mainly in a media room with a couch and no second row. Then there are times when top placement could work by itself, if the speakers aren’t jammed up against a hard ceiling and creating strange reflections that cause comb filtering and other distortion if not properly treated. In either case, it’s difficult with only one set of speakers to optimally localize the sound at the proper image height without employing processing techniques developed by the manufacturers. We’re still evaluating the effectiveness of those techniques.

CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO ENLARGE

In this proposed solution, the sound is directed at the primary listening position from speakers placed above and below the video wall and then blended to create a phantom sonic image

The UK-based company TPI offers a variation of the above systems, called the Movement system, which uses speakers designed to fit within very tight boundaries below and above the video wall—something like 8 inches of height for each of them in their smallest configuration. That approach is similar to what other companies are doing, but TPI has also developed a black box that allows you to sit in the primary listening position and change the combination of level and time delay between each pair of top and bottom speakers so you can adjust the height of the sonic image.

This approach—which is much easier than doing the hard calculations of time delay and relative levels between top and bottom speakers—is appealing even to us at SHA, who specialize in that sort of thing. It just takes away one task in an already complicated calibration, and there aren’t too many variables you can mess up.

Our role is to minimize the compromises, and that’s true whether you’re using a projector and screen or an LED wall. It’s really a matter of everybody involved—the display manufacturers, the speaker manufacturers, the dealers, the installers, the calibrators—working together to find an optimal solution. You can’t have a movie without picture and sound, and the picture and sound need to work together. So we have to make them work together and not have either element be an afterthought.

No matter which approach one entertains for delivering audio with a direct-view wall, the experience at all seats in a theater or media room won’t be the same without being able to locate the sound sources directly in line with the image. Fortunately, some variation of sound/image localization can be accepted if all other aspects of the room and system are designed effectively. Advanced calibration of each of the audio system types mentioned above can at least ensure that the row with the primary listening seat(s) will be optimized with the exact sonic image height, while the other rows in front and behind will have as little deviation as possible.

We look forward to continuing this exploration and seeing the variety of manufacturers work to perfect their offerings.

a rendering of the Movement L center speaker, part of the TPI Movement system designed specfically for video wall installations

A Garden of Immersive Delights

ALSO BY KIRSTEN NELSON

Natural Wonder

Your Home is Your Canvas

In the Service of the Senses

click on the images to enlarge

the Sound Advice space features a diverse collection of digital artwork, shown on Planar video displays and other media

Ed Gilmore’s midtown Manhattan showroom offers a both thrilling and soothing escape for the senses

by Kirsten Nelson
April 7, 2022

Certain spaces are more memorable because of what they make you forget. Outside, there might be a jumble of noise and visual clutter. But once you step inside, it’s all soft lighting, curated playlists, and video imagery so subtly stunning, it can be a soothing backdrop or a foreground showstopper, depending on the intention.

That’s how it feels to walk into one of Manhattan’s unforgettable high-end residential-technology hideaways, Gilmore’s Sound Advice. As I stepped into the sensorially refined environment envisioned and built by Ed Gilmore and his team of designers and manufacturer partners, I forgot my crazy commute and instantly remembered why the showroom is the scene of so much great conversation and innovation.

I was there to see a truly exotic specimen in the landscape of residential tech—the finest grade of pixel-perfect Planar LED video wall installed anywhere outside the factory at that exact moment. But there will be more released into the wild soon, especially with the rapid evolution of the trend I was also there to discuss: Video walls and large-scale video surfaces of every kind are moving into homes.

And it quickly made sense why this is happening. Casually strolling into the home theater room with Gilmore, I immediately felt the mood boost that only the shiniest, most amazing technology can provide. Glowing at only 30% of its brightness capacity, and shyly only displaying a 4K content stream when it could of course handle 8K without drama, the video wall was everything that defines luxury. It’s extremely high-performance, but it’s also extremely rare.

“It’s a unique type of experience,” Gilmore affirmed, and definitely one that is a generation ahead in terms of technology—and maybe if you want to be crass, also in terms of budget. Sure, it’s out of reach for most. “But for those who can, it’s here now.”

No motion artifacts to be detected, and “it’s completely impervious to ambient light,” Gilmore pointed out. “It’s non-reflective, unlike flat panels.” In short, you could put this anywhere. Which is what NFT collectors, gamers, sports fans, movie buffs, and even audiophiles (yes, if you like live music documentaries or you’re considering hosting livestreamed concerts in your home, potentially with a Steinway Spirio piano accompanying the scene, talk to Gilmore).

But this wasn’t a tech demo, this was a conversation in a beautiful room that happened to have a large direct-view LED wall in it, along with some cozy furniture and the perfect glow of carefully calibrated lighting. Also there was a LaserDisc of Pulp Fiction that caught my eye, and a copy of E.B. White’s Here Is New York on the table next to me, which I promptly picked up and obsessed over.

Clearly this was a room designed for people with taste. So we settled in for a fireside chat warmed by the glow of this new technology—which really did put out a little bit of heat if you got close to it, as Gilmore pointed out. Be sure to think about thermal management, he said, not to mention energy management: “There are three 20-amp circuits feeding this thing,” he noted with a wry grin.

At first, we did talk about all of the excitement around the display of massive and/or complex digital artworks on expansive architectural surfaces. Gilmore is installing a couple of those for a collector—one of the displays will be mounted on the ceiling, in fact. And just outside the room we were in, a couple of the other Planar displays in the space were rotating through artistic imagery in a variety of configurations. Digital artwork really is a thing now, and not just as a means of hiding the flat-panel display while it’s in “off” mode.

But then we got into the good stuff around all of that artwork. The home is now a digital canvas, expressing ideas and reflecting moods through curated blends of sound, video, and lighting—particularly human-centric lighting, which of course we had to talk about as the ultimate “wellness” option for homes. These are the emotional reasons people are looking for something new at home—to be comforted, uplifted, and also dazzled by the immersive possibilities of well-designed technology-enhanced spaces.

Gilmore talked about the delicate balance his designers and engineers have to strike in creating a home that not only looks good but makes you feel good. “We harness technology to its ultimate expression to provide great experiences for clients,” Gilmore noted. “You can’t commoditize that.” That’s because real human experience has always been the core of residential technology design. And specialists are starting to tap into new ways that the senses can be engaged (or soothed) by technology, to thrilling effect.

“I’ve never been more excited about our industry than right now—there’s so much potential,” Gilmore said. Because as he knows well, you have to be both an artist and an engineer to make a home resonate with real feeling.

Kirsten Nelson is a Brooklyn-based writer, speaker, event content producer, and podcast host who writes frequently for technology brands, integration firms, and experience design agencies. She was the editor of SCN magazine, and before that, co-launched Residential Systems. Kirsten is also a co-founder, editor, and writerly salon host of CreativeStack, a newsletter for the experience design community.

a next-generation 136-inch Planar video wall is the center of attention in Sound Advice’s home theater room

showroom photos & video |
John Frattasi, Gusto Multimedia

Ed Gilmore

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