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A 20-pound sound projector, a reflective display surface, and left and right speakers.
That's what it takes to replace the center speaker with a Grimani Systems' Center Point Reflectance solution.
Your client has just installed a video wall, and it looks spectacular. It sits beautifully on the wall, it's only a few inches thick, and it's completely solid.
Then someone asks the question every integrator confronts sooner or later. Where does the center channel go?
On a projection screen the answer is behind the screen. A video wall blocks sound, so that spot is gone. Above or below the display puts the voice above or below the actor's face (there may not even be room).
Of course, the farther a listener sits from the center seat, the more obvious that spatial mismatch becomes. A speaker on the floor is a compromise most of us have heard once and hoped never to hear again.
We have a different answer, and it sounds like a trick the first time you hear it – and it is.
It's a bit of Grimani Systems acoustical magic!
Allow us to explain the mechanism, the specifications, and the limits, and you can judge it yourself.
Reflectance is a sound projector that mounts above the audience and aims the center channel audio at the display. The display surface reflects that sound into the room, and listeners hear a center image that seems to come from the screen. The video wall that blocked the speaker becomes the reflector.
(Remember your high school geometry - angle of incidence equals angle of reflection? And you thought you'd never use it!)
Here is the reason it works. The signal enters as analog or AoIP and passes through DSP, including delay and a crossover. Everything from about 1 kHz and up goes to the Reflectance waveguide.
Reflectance is a 1-inch annular compression driver mated to a special version of our patented CSA waveguide. This waveguide controls where upper midrange and treble sound travels.
So energy meets the display at the angle we design for and reaches the seats from there. Below 1 kHz, the wavelengths are too long to steer that way. So the left and right speakers' amplifiers take that range through complementary DSP.
Like magic, the voice arrives whole, with the top end reflected from the screen and the low end supplied by the speakers beside it.
Since we localize sound based on higher frequencies, we localize it to the screen, where the actors' lips are moving.
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