Just like with everything, price doesn’t always correlate to performance. It’s how it’s executed, how it’s designed, and what’s right for the room, that matters.

Case in point – we recently visited another store pushing what they were calling a $300,000 cinema system. Being in the industry, we could quite easily identify that the cost of the equipment in the room, the cinema seats and the cinema equipment rack amounted to no more than $70,000, so where was the other $230,000 worth of claimed value? In the acoustic treatment. The room was so overly engineered with acoustic treatment, and knowing the commercial arrangement, that particular store makes more money on the acoustic treatment. Needless to say, the performance was extremely lacklustre.

There are a lot of variables that go into a cinema system – audio, video, room treatment, chairs – so there’s a lot of room for less scrupulous cinema designers to push what they want to sell, rather than what’s right for you.

Contrast this with another store we visited, experts in the field that we respect a lot. Their $150,000 cinema blew the other cinema away at half the value. So be wary! The large majority of the value of the cinema package should be in the active equipment – after all, that’s what you’re paying for.

It used to be the case where a 9.4.4 was the largest number of channels you can get. In more recent years, we’re seeing 16.6.9 or 21.8.12 and even higher, crazier numbers. Unless you have an auditorium in your house, this is just a marketing gimmick! In the world we live in where society believes “more is more”, it’s just purely a way to attempt to stand out from the crowd.

Larger cinemas (and by large, we mean commercial size) need more channels simply because they’re bigger, and so they need more speakers to get more coverage. A typical residential theatre just isn’t that big, and trying to squeeze all those channels into it ends up with a wall of speaker, with no separation between them, which is fundamentally poor audio engineering. There’s a pretty obvious reasons that even some of the world’s best processors on the market start at 16 channels – that’s because 16 channels is going to be more than enough for residential theatres.

It causes us great despair when we experience some theatres in the market. The system fires up, and all you hear is bass. Speech and FX sounds like there’s a piece of cardboard over the speaker.

Here’s how to judge the audio:

Speech – when people speak, is it crisp, lifelike, and detailed? Can you hear the sibilance that is commonly lost in inferior systems?

Bass – is the bass tight and impactful, or is it muddy and overbearing? Do you feel it in your chest, not just the seat?

Surround effects – honestly, being able to recreate surround sound in all planes (XYZ) is rudimentary now – if the cinema isn’t recreating all the overhead and surround effects, walk straight out.

- You need to judge based on something you have a reference for (no one knows what Optimus Prime is “supposed” to look like). Watch a scene with a human being in it and see if you can see all the details that skin, hair, moles, pimples, are supposed to have.
- Do real life scenes look, well, like real life?
- A proper cinema is supposed to be anamorphic, i.e. 2.35:1 aspect ratio.
- Does the cinema system scale and fill the screen across a wide range of cinema content?