5 Incredible Home Theater Demos at CEDIA Expo 2024
CEDIA Expo offers a unique opportunity for installation professionals to experience cutting-edge technology through continuous home theater demonstrations. Attendees gather outside the prefabricated booths where these demos take place, eager to sink into plush home theater seating—another popular product category at the show—and watch carefully curated film and music clips.
For me, these demos are the highlight of CEDIA Expo, because unless you have the money to buy a really great home theater setup, you’ll never see and hear movies that sound this good outside of an IMAX or Dolby Vision theater. In short, it’s showtime and manufacturers care about the quality of presentation in their booths. I was surprised to learn that one demo at CEDIA, booth, gear and all, had been initially set up and fully calibrated in Italy, then shipped overseas and re-edited with the audio and video calibration almost perfectly intact for the show.
To round out TechRadar’s Home Theater Week coverage, I’ve compiled a list of 5 demos that left a strong impression on me at CEDIA Expo 2024. Since these demos took place in completely darkened rooms, my accompanying images only hint at the high-tech goings-on inside, but a look at the gear listed for each demo should give you an idea of the hardware horsepower going on behind the scenes. I wish you were there!
Barco / madVR / Seymour-Screen Excellence / Kaleidescape / Trinnov / Perlisten / Officina Acustica
This was the first home theater demo I saw and it set the standard for what was to come at CEDIA Expo 2024. The system used a Barco Nethus RGB laser projector at 32,000 lumens of brightness, paired with a madVR Envy Extreme MK2 video processor and a Kaleidescape Strato C Movie Player and Terra Prime server. A 189.3-inch Cinemascope aspect ratio Seymour-Screen Excellence Enlightor Neo display was used for the screen.
A Trinnov Amplitude audio processor (check out our feature How Room Correction Improves Your Home Theater Sound for more information on Trinnov and the unique Waveforming technology used for this demo) on the front of a 19-speaker, 14-subwoofer Perlisten speaker system – yes, fourteen subwooferseight in the front and six in the rear – provided the system’s audio. All of this was installed in a custom-built Officina Acustica home theater room, the same one shipped from Italy as mentioned above.
The demo started with music, specifically Eric Clapton playing an acoustic version of Laylafollowed by Ashes to Ashes by Sting: Live at the Olympia Paris. Both tracks had exceptional vocal clarity and impeccably clean and deep bass. After this was the final transformation scene from the film Lucyand the white background of the opening image was so bright that I literally left. A typical home theater projector can’t match the professional Barco Nethus for brightness, and this one even had its light calibrated to a more standard-for-home-theater 300 nits.
Christie / Lumagen / Seymour-Screen Excellence / StormAudio / Ascendo / Moovia
This stunning demo used a Christie Griffyn 4K35-RGB laser projector rated at 36,500 lumens and covering 98% of the Rec. 2020 color space. The projector was paired with a Lumagen Radiance Pro 5244 video processor, with a Kaleidescape movie player and server system—a standard component in CEDIA demos—as the source. A 13.5-foot-wide Seymour-Screen Excellence Enlightor-PRO (0.9 gain) acoustically transparent screen surface coupled with the company’s 4-way Adjustable Ratio Theater (ART) Masking System was used for the screen.
On the audio front, a StormAudio ISP Elite 32 Digital AoIP MK3 processor was paired with an Ascendo Black Swan hybrid AoIP 13.12.10 system, with the system’s AoIP network amplifiers connecting digitally to the Black Swan speakers and subwoofers via Cat6 cable. Last but not least, the theatre featured three rows of ultra-comfortable Moovia Marbella seating.
If you are captured Dune 2 In an IMAX theater, you’ll have an idea of how powerful this demo looked and sounded. A clip of the Fremen battling the Sardaukar opened with the roar of a giant sandworm, and the effect of that roar and the ensuing battle was the definition of immersive sound. Another demo clip, from Ford vs Ferrarihad Matt Damon’s character recklessly pilot a plane with a group of terrified auto executives on board. As the plane flew over a crowd of people, the accompanying sound effect reverberated with pinpoint precision through the ceiling of the theater.
Digital Projection / Kaleidescape / Screen Innovations / JBL Synthesis
JBL is a longtime veteran when it comes to explosive CEDIA home theater demos, and the Synthesis system they showed off (total system cost: $156,666) continued that tradition. I didn’t get any details about the video portion, other than to say that they used a Digital Projection projector and a 222-inch Screen Innovations perforated screen, but the audio portion consisted of 15 SCL Series speakers and 4 SSW Series subwoofers, all driven by a JBL SDP-58 16-channel processor and 6,800 total watts of Class D amplification.
This system was calibrated using the Harman standard target and used Dirac Live room correction and Sound Field Management processing to correct the bass for seat-to-seat variation in the large room. Whatever the case, Lady Gaga’s vocals while singing Always remember us this way in the movie A star is born sounded remarkably lifelike. And when JBL did that insane train escape scene Mission Impossible: Dead Account Part OneThe sound of shifting furniture in the various train cars collapsing around Ethan and Grace was terrifyingly visceral.
Sony / Kaleidescape / Focal
This demo on the Sony stand had a relatively modest video component compared to others at the show – the new Bravia Projector 9 projector, a winner of a TechRadar Best of CEDIA Expo award, only costs $32,000, but the premium 9.2. 4-channel Focal Utopia in-wall speaker system more than made up for that in home theater bling.
The Bravia Projector 9’s image had stunning contrast despite its modest 3,400 lumens light output compared to other projectors at the show, and the new XR Processor for Projector with features such as dynamic frame-by-frame HDR tone mapping ensured a standard level of shadow detail for a projector. This was easily seen in a dark clip from the film Zero Dark Thirtywhile another from the new Bad Boys: Ride or Die demonstrated the projector’s rich color reproduction.
Sony / Kaleidescape / Wisdom Audio
Micro LED video walls are still the preserve of the very wealthy home theater enthusiast, but Sony’s demo room, featuring the Crystal LED CH-Series 137-inch video wall, gave the rest of us a glimpse into a luxury home theater with micro LED technology.
In addition to the massive video wall, the system consisted of a Kaledescape Strato S Movie Player and a 6TB server. A Sony STR-AZ7000ES 13.2 channel AV receiver was used as the preamplifier for a 9.4.4 channel Wisdom Audio sound system, consisting of Wisdom Audio Sage Cinema Line 2 Source (front LR and surround sides and rear), Sage Cinema Series HLS (center) and four SRS RTL subwoofers.
Sony and Wisdom Audio also used Always remember us this way by A star is born for his demo (it’s a popular home theater demo clip) and Lady Gaga’s voice sounded just as full, clear and lifelike as it did in the JBL Synthesis room. But the real star of this demo was a chase scene from Mad Max: Anger Roadwhich looked and sounded so overly intense that I found myself gripping the arms of my plush theater seat.
