CEDIA Expo provides a unique opportunity for custom installation industry professionals to experience cutting-edge technology via ongoing home theater demonstrations. Attendees line up outside the pre-fabricated booths where these demos take place, eager to sink into the plush home theater seating – another popular product category at the show – and take in carefully curated movie and music clips.
For me, these demos are CEDIA Expo’s highlight, because, unless you’ve got the cash to pay for a truly awesome home theater installation, you’ll never get to experience movies looking and sounding this good outside of an IMAX or Dolby Vision theater. In a word, it’s showtime, and manufacturers painstakingly fuss over the presentation quality in their booths. I was amazed to hear that one demo at CEDIA, booth, gear, and all, had been initially set up and fully calibrated in Italy, and then shipped overseas and re-assembled with its audio and video calibration almost perfectly intact for the show.
To tie a bow on TechRadar’s Home Theater Week coverage, I’ve compiled a list of 5 demos that left a strong impression on me at CEDIA Expo 2024. Since these demos took place in fully darkened rooms, my accompanying images only hint at the high-tech happenings going on inside, but a look at the equipment listed for each should give you an idea of the hardware horsepower behind the scenes. Wish you were there!
Barco / madVR / Seymour-Screen Excellence / Kaleidescape / Trinnov / Perlisten / Officina Acustica
This was the first home theater demo I caught and it set the standard for what was to come at CEDIA Expo 2024. The system used a Barco Nethus RGB laser projector with 32,000 lumens brightness paired with a madVR Envy Extreme MK2 video processor and a Kaleidescape Strato C Movie Player and Terra Prime server. An 189.3-inch Cinemascope aspect ratio Seymour-Screen Excellence Enlightor Neo screen was used for the screen.
A Trinnov Amplitude audio processor (check out our How room correction upgrades your home theater sound feature for more information on Trinnov and the unique Waveforming tech used for this demo) fronting a Perlisten speaker system with 19 speakers and 14 subwoofers – yes, fourteen subwoofers, eight in front and six in back – provided the system’s audio. All of this was installed in a custom-built Officina Acustica home theater room, the same one shipped from Italy mentioned above.
The demo started with music, specifically, Eric Clapton playing an acoustic version of Layla, followed by Ashes to Ashes from Sting: Live at the Olympia Paris. Both tracks had exceptional vocal clarity and impeccably clean and deep bass. Next up was the final transformation scene from the film Lucy, and the white background of the opening image was so bright that I literally winced. A typical home theater projector can’t touch the pro-level Barco Nethus when it comes to brightness, and this one even had its light calibrated down to a more standard-for-home-theater 300 nits.
Christie / Lumagen / Seymour-Screen Excellence / StormAudio / Ascendo / Moovia
This stunning demo used a Christie Griffyn 4K35-RGB laser projector capable of 36,500 lumens and 98% coverage of the Rec. 2020 color space. The projector was paired with a Lumagen Radiance Pro 5244 video processor, with a Kaleidescape movie player and server system – a standard component in CEDIA demos – serving as a source. A 13.5-foot wide Seymour-Screen Excellence Enlightor-PRO (0.9 gain) acoustically transparent screen surface mated to the company’s 4-way Adjustable Ratio Theater (ART) Masking System was used for the screen.
On the audio front, a StormAudio ISP Elite 32 Digital AoIP MK3 processor was paired with an Ascendo Black Swan hybrid AoIP 13.12.10 system, with the system’s AoIP network-enabled amplifiers digitally connecting to the Black Swan speakers and subs via Cat6 cable. Last but not least, the theater featured three rows of super-comfortable Moovia Marbella seating.
If you caught Dune 2 in an IMAX theater, you will have some idea of how powerful this demo looked and sounded. A clip where the Fremen do battle with the Sardaukar started with the roar of a giant sandworm, and the effect of that roar and ensuing fighting was the very definition of immersive sound. Another demo clip, from Ford Vs Ferrari, had Matt Damon’s character recklessly piloting an airplane with a group of terrified auto executives onboard, and when that plane zipped above a crowd of people, the accompanying sound effect traversed the theater’s ceiling with pinpoint precision.
Digital Projection / Kaleidescape / Screen Innovations / JBL Synthesis
JBL is an old hand when it comes to explosive CEDIA home theater demos, and the Synthesis system they were showing off total system cost: $156,666) continued that tradition. I didn’t get details on the video portion other than they were using a Digital Projection projector and 222-inch Screen Innovations perforated screen, but the audio part consisted of 15 SCL-series speakers and 4 SSW series subwoofers, all of it powered by a JBL SDP-58 16-channel processor and 6,800 total watts of class-D amplification.
This system was calibrated using the Harman default target and employed Dirac Live room correction and Sound Field Management processing to correct bass for seat-to-seat variation in the large room. Whatever was going on, Lady Gaga’s vocals when singing Always Remember Us This Way in the movie A Star is Born sounded remarkably lifelike. And when JBL played that insane train escape scene from Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One, the sound of sliding furniture in the various train compartments as they collapsed around Ethan and Grace was frighteningly visceral.
Sony / Kaleidescape / Focal
This demo in the Sony booth had a relatively modest video component compared to others at the show – the new Bravia Projector 9 projector, a winner of a TechRadar Best of CEDIA Expo award, only costs $32,000 – but the premium 9.2.4-channel Focal Utopia in-wall speaker system more than made up for it when it came to home theater bling.
The Bravia Projector 9’s picture had stunning contrast despite its modest 3.400 lumens light output compared to other projectors at the show, and its new XR Processor for Projector with features like dynamic frame-by-frame HDR tone mapping provided a standard-setting level of shadow detail for a projector. This could easily be seen in a dark clip from the movie Zero Dark Thirty, while another from the new Bad Boys: Ride or Die demonstrated the projector’s rich color reproduction.
Sony / Kaleidescape / Wisdom Audio
Micro-LED video walls remain an option only for the very well-heeled home theater fanatic, but Sony’s demo room utilizing its Crystal LED CH-Series 137-inch video wall gave the rest of us a peek into a luxury micro-LED-based home theater.
Along with that massive video wall, the system consisted of a Kaledescape Strato S Movie Player and 6TB server. A Sony STR-AZ7000ES 13.2-channel AV receiver was used as a preamp for a 9.4.4-channel Wisdom Audio sound system, which consisted of Wisdom Audio Sage Cinema Line 2 Source (front LR and surround sides and rear), Sage Cinema Series HLS (center), and four SRS RTL subwoofers.
Sony and Wisdom Audio also used Always Remember Us This Way from A Star is Born for its demo (it’s a popular home theater demo clip) and Lady Gaga’s voice sounded as full, clear, and lifelike as it had in the JBL Synthesis room. But he real star of this demo was a pursuit scene from Mad Max: Fury Road, which looked and sounded so over-the-top intense that I was gripping the arms of my plush theater seat.
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