October, 2002
New Jersey Renaissance

With a menu of equipment that includes Triad THX speakers, a Seleco CRT projector and a LutTon Homeworks Interactive lighting system, and help from a team of architects, acoustics experts and interior designers, Scrofani assembled not only a dedicated theatre, but also a distributed audio and central lighting control system that meshes with the historically-based architecture.

Although the homeowners weren't sure how much time they would spend in the theatre, Scrofani knew that once they experienced all that a quality theatre could deliver, they'd be hooked. He started with a Seleco SVD-800 CRT projector and a Silicon

Image DVDO-Pro line doubler. The top-end projector comes with seven-inch liquid-cooled CRTs and brightness levels up to 1050 lumens. It also offers two 12-volt outputs to allow motorized screens and lighting control to integrate with the start of a movie.

But Scrofani went a step further. 'The viewing surface is' a fixed 106-inch, 16:9 diagonal Da-Lite screen," he explains.

"I put in an electronic aspect ratio masking system so if you want a traditional 4:3 aspect ratio format, the motorized curtains open and the horizontal masking panels roll down from above to complement traditional NTSC sources. Also, when you press pause or stop on the Crestron STS-C wireless touchpanel, the lights come up to an intermission level so the user doesn't have to fumble around in the dark to change tapes or DVDs. Then when you press play, they dim back down to the movie level"

With a great picture assured, the next step was sound quality and Scrofani knew that quality speakers were only as good as the room's acoustics. So he called on Richard Charschan, president of Acoustic Smart Home theatre Interiors. 'There are normally two things we do: Noise barriers to keep sound from going out, and controlling the sound inside the room," says Charschan.

Acoustic Smart uses its own custom designed and built fiberglass panels and fabrics, creating an interior design that incorporates acoustical treatments into the architectural details. For example, a pair of columns covered in fiberglass and fabric to match the walls help break up the room visually and acoustically. In the back corners are bump-outs that hold the stack of electronics needed to power the theatre and distributed audio systems. Charschan also covered these in acoustic material and built them to seamlessly hide the access doors. Each space is fan cooled and vented into an adjoining utility room.

"When you go in, you get the fortress of solitude," he says of the theatre. "It's quite soothing, so that when the theatre goes on and the lights dim, you hear every nuance the director intended, to the point that you don't remember where you are."

Every nuance of sound is supplied by a Triad THX Gold 7.1 speaker system that includes a matched set of front, center, side surrounds and a subwoofer. The rear surrounds are Triad Omni in-walls. Scrofani backs this up with a Lexicon MC-1 Dolby/DTS/THX processor, and three Rane THX equalizers-one for the front channels and two for the side and rear surround channels. His team then spent almost five hours with a sound spectrum analyzer fine tuning the room to match the sound with various seating positions. "It's one of the behind-the-scenes items we use that [the homeowners] don't see but it lends to the whole experience," Scrofani says of the high-tech analyzer. "Pretty much no matter where you sit, you get great sound." Powering the speakers are Lexicon 512 and 212 amplifiers.

In the end, Scrofani was right about the room's popularity. Family members find themselves watching movies, hanging out with friends or just relaxing in the quietest room in the house more often than they ever imagined. "I thought we would never use this theatre. I thought it was a big joke that we were putting it in," muses the homeowner. "But it's a lot nicer than I ever thought. The kids use it all the time and we even have parties down there."

So far, so good: the design team has delivered a theatre with all of the requirements necessary. But entertaining happens in other parts of the house, so the next step was distributed audio. Quality sound was important here, but perhaps more important was durability. With 18 years of experience, once Home Systems finds a product that works for them, they stick with it. Scrofani went with an Elan HD control system, ultra-dependable Sonance Symphony 623T speakers and three Sonance

12-channel amplifiers. The only exception in the collection of Sonance speakers is the two pair of StereoStone rock style speakers mounted around the very unusual swimming pool.

Though flanked by a Renaissance style, the pool's functionality is decidedly modern. The homeowner says she and her family wanted to use the swimming pool year-round, but also wanted to enjoy the open air in the summer. James

Paragano, the architect behind the project, designed motorized doors that can split the pool, above and below the water, into a heated indoor section for wintertime use and security reasons, and an outdoor section. Because of the dual-purpose pool, Scrofani also split the music control for indoor and outdoor swimming. With the house divided into eight zones, the Elan Z 100/150 touch panels can call up music from an AM/FM tuner, cassette deck, one of 200 CDs or from the RCA digital satellite system.

Though not pedestrian by any standard, Scrofani still plans to upgrade the CD management with an Arq Pro 2 by Re@juest hard drive music server. He also pulled extra wire for Elan Via color touch panels-another potential upgrade.

For lighting control Scrofani chose a Lutron Homeworks Interactive system that controls the home's interior, exterior and landscape lighting from strategically located keypads and the system's built-in astronomic timeclock.

It also interacts with the security system to light escape routes and alert local authorities in the event of a fire or burglar alarm. In order to minimize wall clutter, Scrofani collaborated with Fran Murphy, the project's interior designer, to eliminate conventional lighting switches from the majority of the house and replace them with sleek, unobtrusive Lutron keypads.

While this project is rife with thoughtful details, from lighting and screen control in the theatre to split zones for music control in the pool area, one of the nicer nuances is one the homeowner rarely touches.

To make future upgrades and on-thefly changes to the home's communications systems, Scrofani pulled wire in each room for everything from simple telephone to a high-speed computer network and routed it all to a FutureSmart Pro Series P -16 distribution panel. Instead of grouping the wiring by function, i.e., cable TV, distributed audio, etc., the FutureSmart panel groups the wires by room making changes as easy as a plug and play Macintosh computer.

It's so easy, in fact, that when the homeowner wanted to add television service to a guest room, she merely rolled a TV into the room and added cable service to the room's corresponding cable connector on the FutureSmart panel. My operations manager was able to tell her how to hook it up in two minutes," Scrofani notes.

More than a year has passed since the homeowner and her family moved in to their new residence and she says there is nothing she would change. Finally Scrofani, Charschan, and the rest of the contractors can knock the last requirement off of their lists: Customer happy? Check.