The home cinema design podcast

Although we're a podcast we also run an introductory calibration course for our industry friends using RoomEQ Wizard software.This time we're joined by Tom Lanham (Lano), lead engineer at Wall of Sound, who was one of our first course attendees and a bit of a star pupil.

No particular theme for this episode - we accidentally took a few weeks off with our day jobs so we thought we'd ramble a bit and get caught up!

The RP22 performance targets cover timbre (timber if you're Northern), dynamics and spatial resolution. Spatial resolution has the longest set of metrics - there's 11 of them. This time out we go though and explain the spatial metrics in a bit more detail, what they're for and how they make your cinema better. Less sweary than some episodes - we're trying to behave properly. Ish.

This time, emotional hot-head Owen and calm, relaxed Tom discuss the emotional impact of a cinema system. We know that a better engineered system creates a deeper emotional connection with the audience, but why is that? Come with us on the hero's journey and find out.

This time out we look at the second group of RP22 metrics - timbre. The dictionary defines timbre as 'the characteristic quality of a sound, independent of pitch and loudness, from which its source or manner of production can be inferred.'Making sure the sound from every speaker is consistent, that every speaker tracks the target curve faithfully, and that the whole system has deep enough bass extension, is a tough engineering challenge. As Tom says, you won't hit these numbers by accident.

This time around we go deeper into the RP22 metrics, which divide into Dynamics, Spatial and Timbre (or Timber, if you're from Stoke).We start off with dynamics - Sound Pressure Level, Low Frequency Effect, and particularly, Noise Floor. And Tom throws a bit of a tizzy. Awww.