VISIT TO AUREA, MADRID. PART 2

Visit to Aurea – part 2

This is where the cinema demo room comes into the story. After lunch (fabulous by the way), we were taken into the residential cinema demo room (I really don’t want to call it a home cinema room) and treated to a playback using the Screen System products. These are like slightly scaled down versions of the pro cinema speakers and to say they sounded epic is an understatement. It was just like being at the Odeon.

Next Luis switched to the In-wall series – these are the speakers we were using at EI Live back in September if you came to one of our demos. It was astonishing how similar the sound was to the Screen System speakers – OK there’s more bass from the bigger boxes, but the crucial midrange and high frequency information was identical. Dispersion, precision, clarity – they were all the same, which is thanks to the use of compression drivers to delivery the sound at the SPLs required evenly throughout the room. We were blown away by the similarities and the possibilities it presents for mixing an matching the large scale Screen System speakers (say for LCR) with the In-wall range for surround and height duties.

Next up we visited the media room – designed like a domestic living room with a 50” TV instead of a 4m projection screen, it featured the Neo range of speakers. While these may be small – around the size of a regular set of compact standmounts – they too share exactly the same voicing as the speakers we’d just heard next door. OK, there’s not as much of it, and certainly not as much bass, but the tonality, and that all important clarity and precision in the mid and high frequencies, was all there. 

They kept the best until last. So, if you are a hi-fi speaker manufacturer, you’ll have a demo room that’s somewhat similar to a typical lounge. If you’re a home cinema company your demo rooms will be like a media room and a projection based ‘double garage’ size cinema.

But what if you make cinema speakers – you know, proper cinema speakers? It’s obvious really, your demo room is going to be the same size as your local cinema. Ok there were only two rows of seats – they don’t need to fit 500 people in – but the size of the room, the screen and the number of speakers said ‘commercial cinema’ out loud.

We were treated to a number of demo clips played through one of those ‘small car’ size cinema projectors and an enormous rack of the LW Speakers amplifiers and DSP modules. At the time they were auditioning on a new design of centre speaker, with its ‘cylindrical wave’ technology that ensures absolute even response and SPL in every seat in the house.

The result? It kind of left us speechless, having never heard cinema sound as good as this. Sure there was an enormous amount of bass – but superbly well controlled and balanced – and more than sufficient SPL to fill the space (it was probably only turned up to 3 – imagine it at 11!), but the thing that got us was the midrange and high frequency performance. You’ve probably guessed it already, it was identical to the Aurea models we’d heard before – the same clarity, precision and dispersion. This was the icing on the cake, the proof of the pudding (or any other metaphor you care to choose) – Aurea speakers are cinema speakers, not home cinema speakers. They just happen to be packaged in cabinets that could can fit into a residential environment.

Hear them for yourself and you’ll see what we mean. Install them in your customers’ homes and they’ll thank you for the best home cinema experience they’ve ever had.

If you missed part 1 of this account, please click HERE

Learn more about Aurea speakers HERE