Jeff Smith of Majestic A/V

Majestic A/V is a custom installer (retailer) of media equipment specializing in dedicated theater rooms (Tulsa, OK market). Jeff Smith is founder and president of Majestic Audio Visual and offered the following:

I believe the experience is what most people are looking for and they trust us to know how to define it.

How do we know what makes for a great experience? A person could say it’s the stuff (the products themselves), or the room environment…the ambience. Some may even say it’s all about the film production but ultimately it’s the balance of all those things!

Several areas are important in putting these elements together with synergy and balance. Knowledge, experience, skill set and training are important to name a few, and I don’t believe any one person has all of those elements.

My name is Jeff Smith, and I own a company in called Majestic Home Theaters, Inc. I’ve been in this business for 15 years professionally and believe that creating a “Round Table” of experts is what achieves this great experience! I’ve tried to be very careful and deliberate as to who sits at that table.

This “Round Table’s” ability to look at the end result (the experience) and back fill his way to the starting point…the concept to design is vitally important. Every project is like a blank canvas waiting to be painted. My “Round Table” is able to see the rendered painting before we start to paint. As I’m sure you can relate the client gives us a poor canvas to paint on more often than not.

Once a budget is established the room should be addressed structurally, dimensionally, and then interior finishes. The system design should be secondary…for what would a painting be without the right canvas.

This leads me into the topic of ‘active room correction”, something I feel is very important but not in place if “passive room treatment”!

I know I can’t sit here and argue with some of the great minds behind the “active room correction devices” but I can speak from experience. I like to relate the difference between acoustic treatment and active room correction systems to building a home. Acoustic treatment is like the foundation, implemented properly with knowledge and purpose; you’re creating an environment for a home that can stand for a very long time. Active room correction on its own would be like not paying attention to the foundation or earth it resides on. Sure you have the foundation (the room) to build on but not much attention to leveling it or getting the concrete mix right…not to mention it may be on soil with a lot of sand and very shifty.

I always go back to physics and balance, you need to treat the room first passively (acoustic materials) then correct the remaining set up and room anomalies electronically (active room correction). The key here is if you don’t have knowledge or software to provide accurate placement of the right materials you should work with someone who does! You could end up creating more problems than had originally.

Here is an actual project that used passive acoustical treatments and active room correction.

Belmont

We did a show home for a builder we work with called the “The Belmont Street of Dreams Tour”. Now, in most of these amazing homes we still get left over’s, in most cases low budgets and little design freedom…nothing different here! Although we had more budget than most projects with this profile there were still many compromises that had to be made. We couldn’t do much with room dimensions, which in this case were square, roof lines that prevented height flexibility, and overall structural integrity for sound quality and sound transmission. So we looked at the compromises and the budget and came up with a solution that would offer a “point of diminishing returns” with balance and purpose. We worked with Phase Tech and their DART System for speakers and Auralex Acoustics and their Custom Fabric System for acoustics.

One of the points I believe is critical for those believing that active room correction super seeds, replaces, or is more effective than passive acoustic treatments is the fact that you can only correct what comes out of the system. When you’re qualifying a client’s needs there’s so much more to consider than sitting in a chair quietly watching an event. Most people use these spaces for multiple types of events…for instance, watching sports with more than two people conversing and screaming and yelling for their team, maybe they want to hook a microphone into the system with a little monitor and have Karaoke night with the kids or friends, or possibly just sit in a space that’s audibly pleasing to read a book, all purposes that don’t come from the system…You address those needs with passive acoustic treatment.

Getting back to this room, not only was the show a success it was interesting to hear the feedback. We had many people sit in a chair and before the demo say “wow, this room just feels comfortable and it’s so easy to talk at low levels”, and that was with back ground music. Everyone commented on the performance and was surprised that other homes on the tour didn’t have the same quality or feel; nor did they understand why until we explained it. I always enjoy the look on their face when were comparing it to a room that’s considerably more money as well.

Again I want to stress that “Active Room Correction” is very important as well and was implemented on this project. Starting with the foundation, the room, the treatment then electronically correcting the anomalies that budget, location, and multiple seats present is the right approach. The balance between the two made for a great experience and the client that purchased the home during the tour said “this was the best Theater I have owned and is not the most expensive!

This client’s own words give good background to the use of acoustical treatments and active room corrections. The client heard the room on the first day fully calibrated with no acoustical panels on the treatment. The ceiling treatment didn’t show up until several days after the show had started…the client came back to show with a buddy after we installed the ceiling panels and asked why the system sounded better especially in the area of speech intelligibility. We pointed out the ceiling treatment that wasn’t there previously. The end result was the house was purchased in part because of the theater performance and his buddy asked us to address the needs of an existing system he owned, a new customer.

Great experiences create valuable referrals!

Jeff Smith