Ericeira Home Cinema
Ericeira, Portugal
Rua do Farol 12, 2655 Ericeira
Designed and installed a multichannel home cinema system for a private residence overlooking the Ericeira coastline - object-based surround decoding matched to the room's actual speaker layout, from source format through to calibrated playback.
The brief
- ·Whatever ended up playing in this room, it was never going to arrive in one tidy format - physical discs, broadcast, and streaming spatial audio all needed to land correctly on the same set of speakers.
- ·The client didn't want to lock the room into one rigid channel layout either - Dolby Atmos and whatever comes after it both had to stay on the table.
Approach
Ambisonics turned out to be the right way to think about the room before a single speaker went up. It captures a full sphere of sound in a compact channel set that doesn't care about speaker layout - first-order 'B-format,' four channels (W, X, Y, Z) - which is exactly why it works as a planning reference: the same source can later decode to stereo, 5.1, 7.1, or an object-based format like Dolby Atmos, instead of being welded to one configuration from day one. Modern playback splits roughly into two camps: channel-based systems that send a fixed, discrete signal to each speaker, and object-based systems like Dolby Atmos and DTS:X that instead deliver individual sound objects with position data, decoded live to whatever speakers actually happen to be in the room.
What the source material required
- ·Physical discs and cinema masters arrive as discrete, channel-based mixes.
- ·Broadcast hands over stereo or 5.1 depending on the feed.
- ·Streaming services increasingly carry object-based spatial audio - Spotify, Apple Music, and Tidal all do it now.
- ·Consoles and VR/360 sources generate audio in real time from object-based scenes rather than shipping a fixed pre-mix at all.
Solution
The system got configured so every one of those formats decodes into exactly the layout this room's speakers expect, rather than gambling that the spatial information survives the trip intact. Matching source format to playback system properly is what actually decides whether a spatial mix holds together, not how good it sounds in isolation on a demo reel - and that held true whether the source was a physical disc from years ago or tonight's Dolby Atmos stream.