Press - Germany & Austria
On the acoustic side the expenditure is no less, and the concept the same: Kipnis calls it his orchestra, which in view of the multiplicity of the amplifiers is quite appropriate. In classical circle arrangement around the center leather sofa are eight Full Range Tower Arrays (FRTA) and eight Subwoofer Tower Arrays (STA) standing just as tall and taller than a man. In front of these arrays are the amplifiers and behind them are the outboard crossovers and Digital to Analog Converters, all arranged on specially constructed Suspension Stands so as to decrease any possibility of coloration or sonic resonances in the equipment. Each loudspeaker section is fed by its own amplifier, 36 in total. When it comes to the power that drives the loudspeaker arrays, the Kipnis Studio Standard treats this in the same manner as screen brightness: One can never have too much. Because, as with the theory and application of the light output, sound behaves differently with free speaker placement in a large room. The soundfield is clearly heard to be three-diminutional, even when seated off center. Normally, one really needs only one or two Subwoofers to present a mix faithfully. But with eight channels, even the deepest frequencies are present and always immediate, contributing enormously to the overall sound fidelity. A frequent attender of live concerts, whereby Kipnis continuously refreshes his impression of the the way things actual sound in a large space, he is very probably more conscious then most acousticians with regard to the character and nature of sound propagation, both live and in his Cinema. "Each seat in a KSS is by far better than anything that one can experience in a normal cinema, or concert hall, even if of the very best class", he states, "however, the real sound potential can only be truly experienced when one sits directly in the center seat!"
Also, the Theta Casablanca III, which prepares the digital audio signal, cannot adjust the sound specifically and simultaneously for both a listener sitting front right and also for someone sitting at the rear left at the same time perfectly. One must therefore sit centrally on the Arizona leather couch, where a point of view panorama of 45 degrees between adjacent channels exists alone. Exactly in the place of the screen, there was once a stage, "my father had the building designed specifically as a private concert hall and practice acoustic", Kipnis continues to tell. A local architect designed it to be acoustically perfectly (see box above). Only in 2002, when the senior Kipnis died, finally came the plan to make from this room the best cinema and listening facility on this planet. But there is for Jeremy Kipnis always still urgent improvement needed at all times. Thus he is always in close contact with the AV reader Wolfgang Mayer from Munich, and is concerned in particular with the question of how such a system can display 3D Cinema, that looks exactly like reality. Because one usually loses half the light output in such a system, the next acquisition is the Sony SRX-R220, with again double the light output again. Then, genuine Cinemascope width is to become a reality using special anamorphic optics. Recently, Kipnis was once again attending the cinema, seeing "Beowulf" in IMAX 3D this time. He was particularly proud thereafter by the comment of his wife, Carolina: "this film would look and sound so very much better when we can see it at home in The Kipnis Studio Standard", she said. This desire is very instructional!
Picture Caption 7:
The Room
The cinema in the Kipnis house is accommodated in an area with 210 m². The floor consists of 2.5 centimeters strong maple boards, which lie on 10-cm rafters of Plywood, in the scarce distance of 30 centimeters. Those again rest on one approximately 50 centimeters thick concrete slab, which itself sits on solid steel girders directly down to the bedrock, under it. All walls and the ceiling are non-parallel, so that no standing waves can develop easily. All smooth surfaces are coated with ten centimeter think acoustic wedge foam from Auralex. Thus, the theater area is perfect in all its characteristics for the requirements assigned to it, which exceed standards by organizations such as Ansi, SMPTE or AES for professional studios and testing facilities. In addition, a speciality of the room are the numerous light emitting diodes (LED) used for the lighting. Lamps are Chauvet ColorSplash 200B and contain 196 LEDS each in the three basic colors of red, green and blue, with 38 altogether in the area distributed evenly. The somewhat smaller Chauvet Color Rain PAR 56 radiates more strongly as a spot light, and 28 are used to highlight the equipment in the room, with each lamp featuring 99 LEDS total. The LEDS make no heat and do not use much electricity. They are therefore essentially invisible from an acoustic perspective. The light show is steered by a lighting system likewise by Chauvet, show express plus with altogether 512+ DMX channels for control of individual effects.
Picture Caption 8:
Projection Booth: All electronic components stand on absorbers, which are to keep stray vibrations and resonances away; the De-Magnitizer by Furutech (right picture in the foreground) treats all media before the performance, here also is a MUSE Laserdisc Player made in Japan.
Once you’ve experienced a demonstration,
you will believe!
AudioVision - February 2008 - The Kipnis Studio Standard
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The Greatest Home Theater On The Planet!
The normal technical fetishist knows all their home theater's specifications by heart. Therefore for example, the distribution of the different frequency ranges for each type of loudspeaker or driver in a playback system. Perhaps then you also know of Jeremy Kipnis, but he defines it differently. "Each loudspeaker channel (of the 8.8) in my system is divided into six sections, i.e. Bass, Baritone, Tenor, Alto, Soprano and Coloratura." The fact that he divides the individual sections according to the vocal ranges of opera singers lies in his family background. In fact, his grandfather, Alexander, was the famous Ukrainian opera bass who sang throughout the world, and whose performances matter greatly to many in the music world, and his father, Igor, was the world renowned German born American Harpsichordist and Pianist. They made their escape from Berlin in 1934.
Jeremy has great love for the cinema. "As a child, my father would take me to the very largest cinemas and movie palaces in New York City and the surrounding cities and towns", he tells, "and therefore this probably explains the desire that I have always wanted to possess such a grand cinema at home." Kipnis Jr. has been, among other things, a photographer, music producer and audiophile recording engineer for the renowned label Chesky Records, and today predominantly concerns himself with the design and installation of the very finest audio & visual systems in the world.
Picture Caption 1:
Owner: Carolina and Jeremy Kipnis live in Connecticut, together with their dog, Asta (right picture on the sofa)
Picture Caption 2:
In the circle: Clearly no dwelling is like the Kipnis Studio Standard; in the back is the projection booth, which has yet to have the final isolation wall put in place, since the Sony projector generates a full 65 dB SPL of fan noise while it is in operation.
And, as is the case in America, where each bar or restaurant offers the coldest beer and the freshest coffee in the world, "then so is my design approach to cinemas and listening rooms", stresses Kipnis with superlatives: "I've searched for 37 years, in order to find the very best equipment on the planet, and I have integrated them together here in my cutting-edge home theater design." He calls it, The Kipnis Studio Standard and wants thereby to create a new reference and benchmark for picture and sound quality - better than the largest IMAX cinema and more precisely than the best Academy Screening Rooms in Los Angeles or anywhere else. And all in the idilic setting of Redding, Connecticut, one-and-a-half hours by car north of New York City.
Different, also than the usual superlatives one might hear, Jeremy Kipnis can say them with a autonomy. With a dedicated approach and reverence for the art of cinema, this is what drives Kipnis forward He sees large cinema also as an art form, exactly like opera or live theater. "Cinema is considered generally a disposable commodity these days", criticizes Kipnis, "seen by people as something to consume constantly and in large quantities, exactly as television and music files downloaded from the Internet - easily obtainable!" On the other hand, Cinema can produce a large screen viewing experience, but not without certain distortions like flicker and frame judder, so it needs perfecting using electronic technologies. "It's all wonderful programming, all the same whether film, music or television, and under ideal conditions, one should be able to fully enjoy these", he says, "as if one were 15 years old, again." Further, "I have had guests here who wept tears of joy, simply because they were so involved in the presentation they were hearing and seeing." Everyone expects the best reproduction from their home theater system. But with each improvement in equipment and design, one discovers new details of the presentation which one did not hear before or did not see.
Nevertheless, it is time for the raw system data: On the screen, four films in full High-Definition quality can be projected simultaneously, because the projector, which is the new Sony SRX-R110, supplies 4k-resolution, thus an image with a width of 4,096 and a height of 2,160 pixels. And Jeremy swears that material on BluRay Disc and HD-DVD looks noticeably superior, even before any upscaling applied to reach "4K" by the projector. Similar to the approach known as Digital Reality Creation (DRC) used in consumer HD televisions, the specialized scaler electronics of the projector examine each digital picture sample and, by recognizing what that information is, can improve and enhance it to previously unseen levels. His desire would be it expand upon this with the help of broadcast experts from companies such as Terranex or Snell & Wilcox, in order to develop a truly high-end scaler for Full HD to 4k conversion, or even higher. He has spoken with them, already. But whether the market is ripe for such extended resolution just yet seems still open to question.
Still, how much more beautiful would it certainly be to play genuine 4K material at 4K. The correct player is already on hand in the Kipnis Studio Standard, a server designed according to the Digital Cinema Initiatives (DCI) specifications, the Sony LMT-100. Hollywood Studios guard their film's distribution certainly better than the US government does with the gold at Fort Knox, which is why Kipnis sees only one way to view this material: "I would gladly register as an International Presentation Cinema." Then he would get his own hard drive of new movies to decode in the genuine 4K eight-megapixel cinema standard, with nothing more in the way. But the projector resolution is not the only area of improvement for KSS.
Picture Caption 3:
Ultra High Resolution: 4,096 x of 2,160 pixels are possible, presented on the Stewart Screen from the Sony Media Server LMT-100 (shown). Still the license from Hollywood must certainly be negotiated.
His 5.5 meter (18 feet) wide movie screen would have been well served by the smaller of the two Sony projectors, the SRX-R105 with 5,000 ANSI lumens. Kipnis, however, selected the larger model with double the light output, from two 2,000 watt Xenon bulbs. His standards exceed those of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers rather greatly, and he floods the Stewart Snowmatte Screen with three times as much light as is recommended for THX cinemas. He related thereby the usual judgement that the eye gets accustomed to everything - as on a bright sunny day the landscape looks completely differently than on a completely rainy day. Radiating so much light onto the Screen with enough output to create the sensation of daylight produces image quality that can only be compared to reality. The reason is simple! When the iris of the eye continues to close down in aperture, the optical characteristics of the lens and the resulting images on the retina improve greatly. At the same time, the daylight light levels provide accurate contrast ratios and color saturation, which one needs to obtain a perfect calibration.
And of calibration, Kipnis understands quite a bit. For eleven years now, he has studied with the Imaging Science Foundation and other companies like SMPTE and AES, which are concerned with the fine tuning of large and smaller professional cinemas, together with video technical guru, Joe Kane ("Video Essentials"). "We are near the ideal for perfect color reproduction", he states, because he compares digital projection not only with film, but also with the quality of being at the best real life events.
AudioVision Technical Tip:
Actually this box must remain empty, because one becomes easily speechless in view of the expenditure, which Jeremy Kipnis has undertaken. Nevertheless two important things can be discussed on the basis this installation. The loudspeaker position: All speakers are arranged in a circle according to his design,which is the classical Tone Meister Studio arrangement. The 210 Square Meter room offers itself up perfectly for this purpose, as long as no obligation exists to expose as many possible visitors to sound directly and simultaneously. Even the best processor in the world cannot prevent differing sonic perspectives for those sitting in the lateral seats of the auditorium, which are physically closer to the lateral loudspeakers. To that extent the circle arrangement limits the Sweet Spot, thus the zone of the best sounding experience, relatively strongly - more strongly anyhow than the classical cinema arrangement with box rows to the side and from front to back. On the other side of this argument, the circle guarantees the optimal three-dimensional sound, but again - only in the center. And this is what Kipnis was trying to realize. The pixel number: On very high level material, the same fantastic quality exists as in the Professional Cinemas. But with standard DVDs, buyers of Full HD televisions are experiencing less dilution of the picture through their smaller sized screens. The question is whether the picture becomes better, if it is represented with substantially more pixels, than the source actually supplies. Or whether the pixel-native representation would not be the optimum. For a normal Home Cinema, it is reliably the representation of an accurate Full HD picture that is the best solution; Signals upscaled to 4K resolution cannot be illustrated at all anyway because of the non-square pixels natively. Under certain conditions however also projection is meaningful. In addition an even-numbered repeated belongs to the respective resolution, which is given with 4k. In order to head for the more than eight million pixels however really optimally, one needs a scaler, which is not yet entirely developed.
Picture Caption 4:
Center Channels: The Snell LCR-2800s stand under the screen, because a placement behind it would reduce sound quality and result in light loss through the required perforated screen.
Picture Caption 5:
The perfect remote control: The complete KSS Cinema System, with all functions including the lighting, is controlled via the iPHONE created by Apple.
Illustration Caption:
The screen [1] extends exactly the angle of the front left and right channel speakers [2], whereby from the center seat of the sofa can be seen an interior angle of 90 degrees [3]. Each of the eight loudspeaker columns [4] is a Snell Tower Speaker, and a double Subwoofer, output stages with analog transducer and outboard crossovers. Behind the circle is the projection booth [5] with the Sony projector, not yet walled off in its own area.
Picture Caption 6:
Steep wall: The shelves at the side of the cinema are filled with approximately 40,000 LPs, an inheritance from his father.
AudioVision Magazine
February 2008
