Grimani

A big video wall goes into a client's living room. One center channel speaker sits below the screen and one above it, because two speakers should put the dialogue between them, right at the actor's mouth. Right

Wrong! The movie starts and the dialogue sounds smeared. It’s wide, a little hollow, and hard to follow. Nobody in the room can name the problem. Everyone unconsciously leans in to hear better.

Here is why. A left and right speaker pair works because your ears sit side by side - one to the left and one to the right. Your brain compares when a sound reaches each ear and how loud it is. Then, locate a voice in the middle from that sonic data. That’s called a phantom image.

Stack the speakers vertically and the comparison has nothing to work with. Both speakers are the same distance from your left ear and your right ear. In other words, your ears are mounted the wrong way for this to work. The voice stays blurry, and the bigger the screen, the farther apart the speakers sit and the blurrier it gets.

CenterPoint Parallel uses one speaker above the screen and one below to put the voice in the middle, where no speaker exists.

But we just said that can’t work! How does Grimani Systems make that configuration work? Magic. OK… not really. But you’ll swear it is. 

Read on…

Three things make the trick work:

The speakers. Each has a waveguide, the shaped opening at the front that controls how high frequency sound is launched into the room. Our design is completely unique in the industry.

The room. Where the speakers sit relative to the surfaces around them, and how sound is absorbed or reflected, changes where the voice seems to come from. The room and the speaker form a system. We are expert acousticians and we can design the room correctly to help this work.

The audio processing. Digital signal processing (DSP) is software that adjusts the sound each speaker plays. We delay one speaker slightly against the other, shift the timing of certain frequencies (phase adjustment), and shape the tone of each speaker, so your brain places the voice near the center of the screen.

This magic trick still works if the wall above the screen isn’t available. The upper speaker can go in the ceiling.

Parallel takes two speakers and the space and budget that go with them. So it’s more suitable for larger screens. For smaller displays, CenterPoint One might be the right choice.  (We’ll talk about that next week.) For a more novel approach to this problem, CenterPoint Reflectance (which we covered a couple emails back) puts the center channel right on the screen.

Planning a video wall or a big TV? Just click reply and tell us the screen size and how much space you have around the display. We’ll gladly help you determine which Grimani Systems solution fits best.