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November 2009

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A Visual & Auditory Feast (for the Senses)

The best visual and auditory experience yet created in a home theater room and costing six million U.S. dollars - The Kipnis Studio Standard (KSS)!

Written by: Li-Wei Zhang

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Do you recall the last time you were impressed by listening to music, whether in a professional concert hall setting or in a dedicated home theater room? What struck you about the experience? Was it the quality of hearing well reproduced music under ideally suited conditions? No matter how it is that one creates a home theater to sound as realistic as possible, the performance of music and its reproduced sound quality remain extremely complex forms of human expression. Music is not merely numbers that are decoded and transmitted as digital signals, but actually the heart and soul of human communication that touches our emotions most directly.

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Connecticut was one of the first independent states of the United States, and one of the original 13 colonies that revolted against British rule during the American Revolution. Not only has it always had an air of new freedom and promise, but also a very strong cultural atmosphere that has grown there during it's 400+ year history. Classic English styles (featuring Greek and Roman overtones) are the most prominent architectural form, with Colonial era monuments, European city designs, quaint villages, and sprawling cultural landscapes. The famous Yale University is located here in New Haven, Connecticut, nearby to where Jeremy Kipnis and his family have lived for 40 years. Such historical legacies have affected Mr. Kipnis' history and professional growth in many different and amazing ways. Let us delve into his complex background and experience the unique design vision of the world's top home theater system. Simply put: it (re)produces experiential reality with shock and awe!

Kipnis is a one man music production company. He is an excellent recording producer / engineer and award winning professional large-format photographer, who also has worked extensively in the television and film production industries. Moreover, his father, Igor Kipnis, was the internationally recognized classical keyboardist and raconteur, who many will know for his award winning performances on harpsichord and piano (both modern and historic), and his grandfather was the world renowned operatic Basso. When the young Kipnis was only four years old, his father took him regularly to New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Washington D.C. to experience countless movies and live concert performances at the very best venues like Radio City Music Hall or Symphony Hall, and thus gave him the initial taste, idea and inspiration to professionally design the ultimate of home theater rooms normally reserved only for dreams. His goal became to create a perfect sound playback system capable of fooling the human senses completely, and combining this with a film or video projection system of the very highest color fidelity and resolution possible and integrating these technologies into the most immersive home theater experience attainable. In so doing, he has defined a new level of expectation for movies, television, video games, and even just listening to music which he calls the Kipnis Studio Standard (KSS), his ultimate audio-visual home theater statement that offers dedicated scalable custom home theater rooms for upwards of six million U.S. dollars.

First, he built a prototype (called KSS - Ciné Beta Screening Room, and which also serves as a testing and review facility) that is a nearly 10 square-meter dedicated room built from the ground up specifically to avoid any parallel reflective surfaces. With a specially cut light-tan walnut floor assembled on top of special thick pine studs and featuring a two-foot concrete pad, the entire building is isolated on four 47 meter steel girders that extend all the way down to the bedrock for the best possible physical isolation. At the top of the room there are an array of 66 LED lights that can be computer controlled to adjust the individual beam parameters for differing spread, color, and intensity. The ceiling and surrounding walls have various carefully chosen acoustic treatments installed to control the propagation, absorption, and diffusion of sound very very carefully. Kipnis designed this room for a variety of acoustic playback purposes (including simply listening to music), and to achieve the best possible sound fidelity with respect to each source being presented. Obviously, this unique audio-visual room is a very special place, indeed, as you will soon see!

Most home theater rooms are designed and decorated purely to look like a modern movie theater with a cinema screen in the front, and several rows of seating for the audience filling out the rest of the room. But this is only one kind of home theater design, points out Kipnis, and there are many other and more enjoyable possibilities that can achieve better or even optimal picture and sound quality. In his prototype, an orchestra of 50 (not a typo) hand-built American McIntosh amplifiers power a chorus of 8 specially built Snell THX certified loudspeaker towers, 3 matching Snell THX center channel speakers, and 16 Snell subwoofers (almost a half-meter in diameter each) arranged in a circular orientation around a centrally located leather sofa seating six. It is an intimate setting for Kipnis, his family and friends, allowing for a level of sonic and visual immersion that takes one's breath away while creating a mind boggling, riveting experience. From a technical point of view, such a unique design created the opportunity for the world's first 8.8-channel surround sound system, whose effect is to reach the closest facsimile of the true multi dimensional auditory experience that we call life. Whether listening to the sounds of animals out in nature, or the human voice found in musical performances, Kipnis has reached the very pinnacle of reproducing sound while still remaining completely musical and emotionally involving.

The Perfect Visual Accompaniment to Unerring Sonic Reproduction

At the very back of the KSS - Ciné Beta Screening Room, you will find a very attractive set of projection equipment, thoughtfully arranged in a special purpose projection booth that allows all three to operate simultaneously, allowing instant comparisons of the different technologies. First, there is the Sony Ultra-High-Resolution 8.85 Megapixel Cine Alta Professional video projector, model SRX - T110. The 4096 × 2160 3-chip silicon reflective technology (known as SXRD) is capable of projecting previously unheard of detail (presented in 3D when the source allows) along with daylight levels of 11,000 ANSI Lumens of light output using a specially constructed Fujinon programmable motorized zoom lens with a range of 1.56 - 1.90 times the screen width.

Then, there is also another powerful LCOS (Liquid Crystal on Silicon) based projector: the Meridian 810 Reference Video System featuring nearly 10 megapixels of resolution. A companion external control system scales and cleans up all formats of incoming video and perfectly focusses them through a special 2.35:1 anamorphic lens. This is the ideal projector for showcasing hollywood widescreen movies, such as Star Wars, Lawrence of Arabia, or the newest James Cameron film, AVATAR. Its 4,000 ANSI Lumen output creates startlingly realistic, bright as life images that appear like you are looking through an enormous open window.

Finally, there is a supplemental projector: a Sony Qualia 004 - the first high-end 1080P consumer projector introduced, with a brightness of 2,000 ANSI Lumens, using a short-throw Carl Zeiss lens, with a throw specification of 1.43 - 1.86 times the screen width and used for bonus materials found on Blu-Ray, HD-DVD, and Music-Only video discs. At the front of the room is a huge professional Stewart Filmscreen Snowmatte-type multi-masking projection screen, designed originally for laboratory evaluation, whose size is wider than 8-meters across. To fully realize the capabilities of these 4K projectors, Kipnis created an interlocked network of four Apple 2.66 GHz Macbook Pro laptop computers to act as a 4K Digital Media Server, along with Sony's LMT-200 4K Media Block, which is a professional movie theater media server showcasing films that are currently in theaters, as well as concerts and subscription live sporting events in High definition (HD). In addition, there are also three Blu-ray players and two HD DVD players, a JVC's HM-DH5U D-VHS high-definition video recorder, two MUSE HD LaserDisc players, and countless other top-end recording and playback equipment.

Of course, the perfect visual enjoyment is also much more than just that, says Kipnis, both in the design of his home theater room and the integration of its equipment. In the past, a home theater set-up involved a fixed-size screen, perhaps with either top and bottom or side masking. But because film, television, and video games are created in different aspect ratios and with different audiences and seating distances in mind, Kipnis has incorporated not only the 4-way multi-masking system, but also an automated zoom and focus control into his projectors, allowing for each image to become whatever size works best and is most enjoyable for the audience at the push of a single touch-screen button on an Apple iPhone. Consequently, rather than having to move closer or farther away from the screen to view a larger or smaller image, one simply selects the size they want and the system automatically takes care of the rest, optimizing and achieving the best visual experience possible with each program.

Caption:

"Every lover of audio and video will be dreaming of owning their own KSS Ultimate Home Theater System in order to achieve this specific level of picture and sound immersion, and my dream is to design and build these rooms into a world-wide standard that is the most complete and most realistic of any home or professional cinemas in the world!"

- KIPNIS

Following along the same lines of thought as the picture quality is the sound system spoken about earlier. In keeping with Kipnis' KSS standards, his home theater audio design uses a unique 8.8-channel surround sound system. The stock Snell Speakers he chose in particular for this room (designed by Kevin Voecks for George Lucas and Tom Holman's first THX approved home theater speaker system) consisted of a 5.1 design, with 2 towers, 2 subwoofers, 1 center channel, and a pair of diffuse surrounds. But look closely; you will find that the number of speakers in this room is much greater than that. It turns out that after extensive experimentation, Kipnis felt he needed a bit more, and that 8 Snell Towers with 3 matching center channel Snell LCR-2800 speakers were necessary to achieve near total transparency. His specifications originally called for 8 subwoofers to be used, and for most people this would have been more than enough to meet their audio demands. But not Kipnis. He desired an effect like "being there" that he found only occurred when utilizing 16 subwoofers, carefully arranged in mirror image pairs to form eight massive subwoofer monoliths reaching more than 3-meters tall, arranged in an octagon shape. This produces "the earth moving under your feet" visceral feeling he was listening for. Thus, by increasing the number of subwoofers and carefully matching all components by hand, low-frequency sounds become more plentiful and accurate with respect to reality, and it just plain feels right to your body. Kipnis also embarked on adding 10 MuRata ES103A super-tweeters to balance out the frequency response of the top end. The result is audio frequency response from 10Hz all the way up to and beyond the ultrasonic high-frequency of 100 kHz, allowing a KSS system the ability to reproduce the most true to life full-band audio possible.

In order to provide the most stable power supply for his "out of this world" audio-visual KSS standards, Kipnis installed two massive General Electric power transformers outside his theater building which supply 800 amperes of current, each! Additionally, his intergalactic power supply design includes two 100 kVa Equitech balancing transformers, as well, which cancel out any power interference and inaccuracies creeping in through common mode noise rejection! Specially commissioned 40 ampere Oxygen Free Copper (OFC) breakers and electrical panel boards feed each and every component with power, individually, eliminating any possibility of crosstalk or intermodulation distortion normally associated with audio reproduction.

Even more surprising is that Kipnis uses 48 McIntosh Vacuum Tube MC-2102 and two MC-2301 power amplifiers, with each utilizing 8 KT-88 amplification tubes that produce upwards of 450 watts per amplifier - 11,315 Watts of continuous power. But here again, Kipnis specially upgraded and matched those tubes, had them all cryogenically frozen and demagnetized and in so doing further refined these product's performance at the nanotechnology level. Additionally, 10 solid-state amplifiers made and modified by Mark Levinson and Crown International handle the subwoofers, effortlessly. Here, nothing is left to chance, so that each component has several thousand dollars worth of refinements found nowhere else. This is home theater precision on a grand scale that most general audiences would never imagine possible or even necessary, but which makes all the difference in the world if one's goal is the exact reproduction of reality.

In the wire department, Kipnis is in love with George Cardas and his specialized cable products. He uses his speaker cables, interconnects, power chords, and even in-wall ROMEX, specially commissioned for this prototype KSS installation. Cardas' factory has been producing the finest high-purity copper conductors (individually coated in enamel and with special air-TEFLON dielectric insulation tubing) for several decades, now. Imagining such a complex audio-visual system design, one might assume a very large number of wires would be visible, but Kipnis has designed his wire layout to be very reasonable and inconspicuous by installing them under the floor suspended on top of Cardas' Myrtle wood isolators. Therefore, Kipnis' precisely designed and immaculately laid out 8.8-channel KSS Ultimate Home Theater sound system can be directly compared (very closely) to the live sounds one experiences every day in life. Once experienced along with the incredible picture quality, it becomes very difficult (if nearly impossible) not to commission a KSS Ultimate Home Theater for oneself!

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