Grimani Systems Redefines Dialogue with their Reflectance Sound Projector

Video walls have been around for years, mostly in commercial spaces like museums, corporate boardrooms, retail spaces, and government facilities. But if you talk to luxury integrators, you’ll find that they’ve also been installing these displays in megabuck homes, for high-end home theaters and multi-purpose media rooms. They’re also used in some professional post-production facilities and screening rooms. Specialist companies like California’s Quantum Media Systems make MicroLED displays with phenomenal image quality, and you’ll find them throughout Hollywood. Unfortunately, they are staggeringly expensive. (Think six figures.) But as MicroLED becomes a more mature technology, consumer companies like Samsung and Hisense are starting to build these displays specifically for the consumer market. At CES, Hisense showed a market-ready 136-inch MicroLED TV, which will be available to buy this year, alongside a larger 163-inch prototype and a smaller 108-inch prototype. Samsung is now building consumer-oriented MicroLED displays in four home-friendly sizes, ranging from 89 inches to 114 inches, also displayed at CES 2025. (Samsung also makes a 146-inch version, and even larger LED walls for commercial movie theaters. See our articles Samsung And Steinway Lyngdorf Create The Ultimate Home Theater Package and Samsung Reinvents The Movie Theater With Its Onyx LED Cinema Screen.) The existence of these new consumer-ready MicroLED TVs suggests that, though currently still expensive, video walls are likely the future of premium home entertainment video playback.

And there is good reason for this; these video walls offer a number of unique advantages. MicroLED displays can be scaled up to almost any size you want, so they certainly offer projector-sized images. But unlike projectors, MicroLED video walls also offer true, OLED-level black levels, resulting in virtually infinite contrast. They deliver the wide viewing angles, vibrant colors, and lightning-fast pixel refresh rates of the best OLED TVs, while also offering incredible brightness for extremely impactful HDR performance, even in bright rooms. That makes them more appropriate for multi-use spaces than projectors, which don’t perform well in the presence of ambient light. Even in ideal conditions, no projector can match the raw power and light output of a MicroLED display. If cost is no object, MicroLED makes a very compelling case for itself as the best-of-all-worlds, at least when it comes to image quality.

But there are drawbacks. Unlike a regular TV, a MicroLED video wall is not a single piece, but is instead assembled on-location from a number of smaller tiles. If you’re sitting too close, you might be able to see the seams in some circumstances. Video walls are also complex to install, and quite heavy compared to a projection screen. And of course, they are very expensive. Even if the sky-high prices are not a concern for you, MicroLED video walls present the user with one serious problem: it’s hard to achieve excellent sound (or even acceptable sound) when using a video wall because the front LCR speakers can’t be placed behind the screen, as they would be with an acoustically-transparent projection screen. Video walls are solid, and at least a few inches thick. And because the displays are so large, there often isn’t room to place speakers above, below, or to either side of the display. Even if you could place speakers in those locations, they would be so far off-axis that the sound would be sub-par. Have you ever listened to a system with the center-channel speaker sitting on the floor? It’s a sonic mess. Nowadays, even regular TVs are getting large enough to present this problem. TCL’s 115-inch QM89 ($20K) was one of the most talked-about TVs of 2024, and the company showed a less-expensive version at CES 2025. Hisense showed off a 116-inch TV at CES. In a smaller room, these TVs would take up an entire wall, making speaker placement all but impossible.

Most of the solutions out there result in significant compromises to audio quality. One popular approach is to place speakers on the floor or ceiling and aim them at the video wall. The sound waves then reflect off of the solid screen to create virtual speakers. This often leads to a distorted, time-smeared sound, but some companies have managed to make it work. One successful example of this approach is the Grimani Systems Reflectance System ($6,300/ each), which launched last year. 

The Reflectance center channel delivers a lifelike, immersive virtual center image with precise dialog and makes the entire front stage feel like it’s emanating directly from the screen. The ceiling-mounted Reflectance System features a 1-inch annular compression driver in a specifically designed waveguide.. It includes a 320-watt DSP amplifier with advanced Bass Sharing and Room EQ processing.

For more information see Grimani Systems

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