Somewhere in Heaven, Ray Dolby is Smiling Down on Us. REL 3D, How Theatre was Always SUPPOSED to Be

Hey there, John Hunter with REL here. Hey, let's just jump into some natural examples of combinations that would be used to make an HT 3D combination. For those of you who are not familiar with the nomenclature, HT refers to our HT series and 3D refers to a technique we've been using for, gosh, 20 plus years. We developed it back in the late nineties sort of with some help from Dolby. And the purpose of this is really very simple. What we're trying to do is return home theater back to the professional levels that Dolby advocates for. What they really want out of a home theater is to have full range going to every channel. So I want to say that again, your left rear surround should be able to do dead flat 20 hertz at an average level of 105 dba that is extremely loud and extremely low. We said, okay, 20 hertz, you start getting into multi thousand dollars subwoofers to pull that off. What if we get close? What if we could add on and we did a bunch of experiments. We came up with something called 3D cause there was a minimum of three RELs needed to do it. Hence the three. And the effect when you get it right is to actually immerse you in the sound field that you're seeing visually on screen. It's utterly addictive. So let's just talk about some really like everyday normal things, speakers that you see out there in real stores every day and explain how that would work. So let's say that you've got a five, I'm just going to deal with five one, you can just expand these out if you're doing seven, two, right on up to 11 plus atmos.
So let's talk about this. Bowers and Wilkins, of course is a very well-known brand, so I'll use them as an example. They have a speaker called the 702. The model 7 0 2 sells over, right on 5,000, might be 5,500 these days. It's a very nice sounding, very well produced two channel stereo pair, floor standing speaker about that tall and using that as your main speakers in your system. And they're matching 700 series center channel. The most natural way to do that would be if you're starting off with this as being just a theater, it would be natural enough for you to pair that with, for example, our HT 1205 MKII. Great piece. Isn't going to break the bank. I'd personally advocate for stereo pair them because no room is symmetrical acoustically. It's really important to understand that I've measured rooms or as far off as 11 12 dB louder on the right than the left or vice versa, and crossover points having to be wildly different. So the purpose is not to overwhelm you with more and more bass by having a pair of them. It's to get your room working the way the room should. You may wind up with the left channel set up seven, eight DB louder than the right. It may be crossed over 6, 8, 10 hertz lower than the one on the right is. So these are the kinds of things. By having stereo pairs right off the bat, you can smooth things out. So now you've got your 702 s, you've got one or a pair of HT 1205 MKII’s, system is sounding really good. Alright? And then you listen to the first bit of dialogue that comes out of whatever you're watching on Netflix or Blu-ray and the center channel sounds like Daffy Duck is speaking. Everything sounds really quacky and you're like, oh my God, what just happened? What is going on here? What's going on is it's not full range. And because everything else in the front is, you really notice the absence. And this is where you turn to our traditional products, the traditional RELs that use a speak on connection and high level connection, meaning they actually hook up to the outputs, the speaker outputs of your main power amplifier or your receiver. We're not drawing any power from it. We're deriving the signal. We're pre-conditioning our powered subwoofer to sound exactly like the rest of your system does. You have separate gain, meaning volume control, you have separate crossover for that. You dial that in and all of a sudden the entire front stage comes alive. We just got through doing this gosh, just a week ago down in southern California. Really, really good high-end dealer down there. Had a beautiful series of theaters, three theaters in a row. We were working the smallest, the biggest one is massive. And we went in and built what's affectionately called a six pack, three stacked HT 1510s, the biggest one that we make in the HT range currently. And we built that up. Sounded incredible. The center channel couldn't begin to keep up with what the left right mains was, there was just this incredible sound, super dynamic, really deep, full rich. And then there was the tiny sounding center channel and all we dropped in was one of our medium sort of T/9xs, not crazy expensive, dialed it in perfectly. Not only was their bass, but all of a sudden dialogue intelligibility on screen just popped when we got it exactly right, just exactly the right amount of crossover and gain.... Please email us for the full transcript if needed.