We arranged a visit to Habitech, one of the UK’s leading distributors for Home Cinema, Home Automation (Smart Home) and Custom Installation products. We were very keen to see what they had created at their facility in Basingstoke to get a feel for what we can in turn offer our clients to compliment our home cinema and installation offering.
Above, and below – A display of James Loudspeakers, custom in its truest form. They can make any speaker enclosure to fit your space (or TV) and any finish to seamlessly integrate in both residential or commercial environments.
Above and below is a just a sample of the custom options you can have on any of the Sonance custom install speakers with different grill options, paint options and obviously many shapes and sizes.
Invisible speakers (plaster over) have become far more popular in recent years, an “Architects dream” as someone recently described them. Above photo shows the installation process, in case you were wondering the wall is deliberately unfinished!
Lutron lighting and blind control.
Lutron have a phenomenal range of smart lighting options available, controllable via their highly recognisable keypads or other smart home controllers (RTI, Control4 etc). Habitech had an excellent display of these options along with sensor options and examples of the blind control. Lutron help make a house a home, mood lighting can transform a space with the click of a button.
Home Cinema demonstrations
The above demonstration suite showcased Habitech’s entry level systems, displayed in a very typical living room environment. The perfect platform to show how you can build a system from scratch when all you have is a TV. This room had Sonos’ integrated systems as well as Miller and Kreisels (M+K) starting range in a 5.1 configuration with a Yamaha AV Receiver. An interesting solution at sub £10,000.
We then moved onto the first “invisible cinema” featuring a 5.2.2 Atmos system, a very impressive example of what can be achieved with a unique finish and design. Not a speaker in sight, this style of “media room” can be a great use of space.
Things then got a little more serious when we upped the ante, this time moving into a more dedicated cinema space although retaining some character and a splash of colour to bring warmth to the room. As you can see lighting is again pivotal to setting the scene in this room which featured a 7.4.2 Atmos system with M&K speakers throughout.
Wisdom Audio
The final two rooms we explored featured Wisdom Audio, a brand I’ve heard mentioned many times over the years but don’t think I’ve really listened to. We were blown away by a pair of 6” in-ceiling speakers, I have to admit I didn’t expect to be excited by these but they made a serious impression. We then added a couple of subwoofers to make it a truly memorable experience, by far the best in-ceiling system I’ve heard. Wisdom Audio use Planar Magentic Drivers (PMD) which we’ve mainly heard in the headphone market, it was great to hear something unique in the high-end loudspeaker market.
In the same room we were treated to multiple demonstrations of in-wall and on-wall set ups from Wisdom Audio which all stood out as excellent value with a performance that seemed unrivalled in this arena, a real eye opener.
You’d have noticed the not so discrete speakers in the room, the LS4 Reference speakers from Wisdom were something to behold. We had a brief listen but were running out of time to get into the Wisdom Cinema, the flagship room at Habitech HQ.
We were shown the range by Barry (below) who is the Wisdom representative for the UK, fortunately he was at Habitech for the day. Do not be fooled into thinking Barry is vertically challenged, the LS4’s are 2.2m high!!!
The M25 hurried us along and with a slight fear of traffic we had to swiftly move from the LS4’s to the Wisdom Cinema. Habitech are very proud of this room and it’s not hard to see why, the MAD VR Video Processor partnered with Christie projector produced one of the most incredible images with phenomenal sharpness, natural colours and the best movement I’ve witnessed to date. The new Top Gun looked sensational, I think even the phone camera picture looks impressive.
Sound was as expected sublime, with the cost upwards of £350k we did have high expectations and the room didn’t disappoint. If anyone has the chance to experience something like this we recommend you do, if you have the means to explore it as an option for your home please do get in touch.
