Three Home Cinemas, One Day: Ber Street on 5th November
Think of the last film that made you glad you had gone to the cinema rather than waited for it to turn up at home. What you remember is probably not the picture. It is the moment the whole room went silent, or the bass you felt through the seat a fraction before you heard it, or something that seemed to pass somewhere above and behind you. A large, sharp picture is easy enough to buy now. The rest of the cinema is harder to bring home, and that is what we will be demonstrating all day on 5th November.
It is Bonfire Night, as it happens. Ours will be indoors, from 10am to 7pm.
This is an open day with no set times and no appointment needed, so call in whenever it suits. Three cinema systems will be running a curated playlist of films, and Karl Brett, Kaleidescape's brand ambassador, will be here with the new Strato K movie player.
Start downstairs
The downstairs cinema room is the place to begin, because it is the most modest of the three. Speakers from Fyne Audio's F500E series run in Dolby Digital 5.1: F501E floorstanders at the front, the F502E centre channel, and F5E surrounds. Driving them is an Anthem MRX SLM 4K, a slimline AV receiver, with three REL HT/1205 MkII subwoofers and a 77-inch television.
This system may not suit everyone's taste. It does show how far a television moves on from a soundbar once proper speakers surround the seats, and nothing here has to go into a wall.
The media wall: keep the television, lose the boxes
The second system is designed for a living room or a snug. You see a television on a wall and, as far as you can tell, not much else. Three Bowers & Wilkins CWM 7.3 S2 in-wall speakers sit across the front (we are, for the record, the second oldest Bowers & Wilkins dealer in the world). B&W ceiling speakers handle the overhead work, including the Dolby Atmos height channels, while Gallo A'Diva speakers take the rear positions in the ceiling, and two REL HT/1510 Predator II subwoofers take care of the low end. The media wall also carries Vicoustic acoustic panels.
At the centre of it is Arcam's new Radia AVA35 AV amplifier, which we are showing for the first time. A Panasonic 4K Blu-ray player and a Control4 Halo remote complete it.
The layout is Dolby Atmos 5.1.2, and the ".2" is the part to listen for: two speakers overhead. It is what makes an Atmos mix like the flying sequences in Top Gun: Maverick work, with aircraft passing over your head as well as across the screen.
The Snug, where we stop making allowances
The Snug is our dedicated home cinema, and the most complete thing we can show you. It is a room built for one purpose: Dolby Atmos 5.2.4, Meridian DSP active loudspeakers in the walls, a Trinnov processor, a 4K Sony projector and Kaleidescape as the source. Meridian have been part of what we do for decades, and this is the room where that experience shows most clearly.
For the open day the Strato V usually in the room makes way for the Strato K. Kaleidescape describe it as the first movie player certified by the 8K Association, though the projector here is 4K. The Strato K also introduces Kaleidescape's 4K Cinematic format, with full chroma (up to 4:4:4) and much higher bitrates than their standard 4K files. Karl can explain why that matters better than we can.
A dedicated room's real advantage is quiet. A film such as A Quiet Place, which spends long stretches near silence, shows how much you can hear when the room adds nothing of its own, down to a bare footstep or a held breath. Everything in the Snug collection is online if you want to read up first.
Make the visit worth the journey
Hearing all three on the same day is the point. A step up is easy to judge with the previous one still in your ears, and much harder from memory a week later.
We are at 85-91 Ber Street from 10am to 7pm on 5th November. If you have questions before then, call 01603 627010 (or WhatsApp 07554 687137), or drop us a line.
Martins Hi-Fi
85-91 Ber Street, Norwich NR1 3EY
01603 627010
info@martinshifi.co.uk
