05/09/2026
This room took 18 months. The client's part took about thirty seconds.
He Googled "home cinema Melbourne", found us, and sent a message. That was it. Everything after that was ours to figure out.
We designed the room in TCD before anyone touched a wall — where the speakers had to sit, what the acoustics needed, and where those two things fight each other. Then we wired to that design. Not to where the couch looked good.
The step isn't a step. It's 300mm high and packed with insulation, so it lifts the back row and stops the platform ringing underneath you. Most risers are a hollow box. A hollow box is a drum.
He didn't want to see any of it. No panels on the walls, no speakers, nothing hanging anywhere. So everything went inside — Monitor Audio Creator Series W3M behind the 160" screen, C2L in the ceiling for the height channels — and then we wrapped the whole room in fabric, so the acoustic treatment is the wall.
The only thing we left out in the open is the subwoofers. Two SVS PB-17s. We talked it through and made the call together: burying them would have cost him performance he'd already paid for. Not every compromise is worth making.
Then one LED strip, running up the left wall, across the ceiling and down the right. Lights down and the room turns into a spaceship. That was more or less the brief.
Eleven channels off an Integra DRX 8.4. The PB-17s run a 295MHz Analog Devices processor with 56-bit filtering — SVS say it's the most powerful DSP ever put in a consumer subwoofer, and the practical upshot is the Auto EQ gets the subs right without needing a miniDSP in front of them.
Then Dirac Live across the whole system to set the house curve. That's the step that turns good gear into a good room, and it's the one almost nobody does.
Eighteen months. One message.
Got a room you don't use? Send us a photo of it. That's genuinely all you have to do 📸
