Harry Williams
Member
I still have a couple of the old show discs in a drawer, the ones you would come home with after a dealer visit and immediately annoy the household with. NextLevel Acoustics is trying to bring that back at CEDIA with Beyond the Room, except it is a download rather than a disc. Ninety seconds, produced by Nick Matzke of Bayview Audio, available from September 2, and a longer 1 minute 47 second branded cut opens the Paragons demo in Sound Room 7 before they hand over to movie clips off a Kaleidescape.
The pitch is that it is purpose-built rather than the usual recycled movie scenes - movement around and above you, big low-frequency moments, hard-placed effects, all engineered so the room disappears. Which is exactly why I am half sceptical. Content written to flatter a surround system will flatter almost any surround system that is roughly working. It tells you the speakers are wired in phase and the sub is not sulking. It does not tell you whether dialogue holds together at 45 on the dial, or whether your surrounds pull attention every time something crosses behind you.
Where I think it genuinely earns its place is calibration. A short clip you can loop, that you know cold, beats scrubbing through a movie hunting for the one scene with the helicopter in it. Repeatability is worth a lot when you are moving a sub around the room.
What are people here actually using as a reference now? I have a couple of chapters I have heard so many times I know when something is off within about five seconds, and I trust that more than any purpose-made demo.
The pitch is that it is purpose-built rather than the usual recycled movie scenes - movement around and above you, big low-frequency moments, hard-placed effects, all engineered so the room disappears. Which is exactly why I am half sceptical. Content written to flatter a surround system will flatter almost any surround system that is roughly working. It tells you the speakers are wired in phase and the sub is not sulking. It does not tell you whether dialogue holds together at 45 on the dial, or whether your surrounds pull attention every time something crosses behind you.
Where I think it genuinely earns its place is calibration. A short clip you can loop, that you know cold, beats scrubbing through a movie hunting for the one scene with the helicopter in it. Repeatability is worth a lot when you are moving a sub around the room.
What are people here actually using as a reference now? I have a couple of chapters I have heard so many times I know when something is off within about five seconds, and I trust that more than any purpose-made demo.
