Some home theater renovation blog

[Puoskari]

Hi there!

I just wanted to share some images about our home/movie theater renovations. The last proper renovation was done 10 years ago so now that the theater is starting to fall apart we decided to do an extensive facelift. The theater is called Kinopoli, which is run by our fantastic student volunteers .

The specs in short: 4k projector, 9.1.4 Dolby atmos (custom main and center speakers, 10 x Genelec 8320A for surround, one large custom subwoofer), 2.40:1 aspect ratio screen.

Here's an image of the theater before renovations:

The main reason we wanted to start the project was due to the seats coming to the end of their life. They have a folding mechanism, which has required some recent welding to keep somewhat operational and in general they just do not fit in our image of a premium theater. Thankfully, we managed to source new seats from a local broadcasting studio, which was a major kickstart for the whole ordeal. The seating layout will be completely changed.

A picture of the Nucau main speakers that are sadly hidden by the whitescreen. The full specs of the Nucau's can be found here.

The old subwoofers had some mass. 4 x 18" drivers in a 1500 liter enclosure. The drivers will be reused for the new closed enclosure design.

We used to be able to say that we are the best movie theater in Finland (specification wise), but now due the arrival of imax, that is no longer the case. After the renovations though, that will again be the case, since we will be upgrading the projector to a native 4k laser projector.

I will update this post as the renovations progress, feel free to ask anything about the project!

 

[Puoskari]

Hi there!

Long time without an update, not a lot of interesting stuff has happened. We're in the process of building new stands for the seats as well as upgrading the ventilation system. The new lighting (sponsored by Ensto) is also almost finished and after that is done we can start installing the new Ecophon acoustic panels (also sponsored). Ecophon was really great in that they just responded to our requests with "what do you need?". I'll try to do a post about the acoustics later once they are more finalized.

Subwoofers are now almost finished, save for the painting process! The workshop we're using is quite packed at the moment due to the Protone-project going on at the same time, which means that for example the good orbital sanders are often in used for building those speakers. Thankfully the university allowed us to use this workshop for both of these project for no cost. It's been a literal project saver!

The new subwoofers are 320l 18" closed enclosure design. The driver impedance was first measured and the enclosure was matched to said measurements using VituixCAD. One will be placed into each corner to create a more stable response throughout the room. Compared to the previous centralized design, the backseats should have as good of a bass response as the front seats.

One enclosure: The dimensions are roughly 95 x 90 x 53 (hwl). The drivers are recycled from the previous version, as we found them to be more than good fit for these enclosures as well. Enclosure is made from birch plywood.

They are quite intimidating when stored, ready for sanding and painting.

Thanks for reading

 

[Puoskari]

Hi there,
Apparently the images from previous post broke for some reason, here they are again:
one enclosure, painted:

other enclosures:

But I did have some other things to update as well!

We started dampening the roof with the acoustics panels. The ceiling tiles are Ecophon Focus A T24 with couple of gamma variants mixed in to control the dampening. We don't want the room to be dead after all. Behind the ceiling panels is old Extra Bass wool stacked behind it to tighten the bass response. The left wall is actually a bass trap that yelded a master's thesis in acoustics way back when it was built. There will also be Ecophon Industry Modus TAL +PE panels on the side walls to lower the reverberation time to acceptable levels. Our goal is 0.1-0.15s of reverberation time.

Quite a bit of glass wool! It was amazing to see how the music quality increased after each panel installed. In total this small room will have approximately 3-4 cubic meters of glass wool and other acoustics material.

Again, we can't thank Ecophon enough for providing the materials.