Definitive Audio Seattle: seeing is believing with the Barco Heimdall+

Walk into "Burbank," the new projection lab at Definitive Audio in Seattle, and you'll find four different projectors on hand, each callable on demand to the same 14-foot masking screen and each dialed in with its own madVR video processor profile for different screen sizes and aspect ratios. That setup means a client can watch the same scene, on the same screen, projector after projector, and see the differences for themselves rather than take anyone's word for it.

Among the four is the Barco Residential Heimdall+ Cinemascope, and it's the one that tends to stop people in their tracks. Definitive calls it the "goldilocks combination of top-tier video performance and high light output," and the specs back that up: 6,000 lumens of RGB laser brightness, a native 4K DMD chip, Barco's high-resolution optics, and HDMI 2.1 connectivity. For a home theater projector, that's a genuinely different league of performance.

None of that would matter much without sound to match, so Burbank backs it up with a Dolby Atmos system running an 11.2.6 speaker layout, plus calculated viewing angles from every seating position in the room. The result is a space where video and audio are evaluated together, the way they'll actually be experienced at home.

Scott Wallace, who's been with Definitive since 2001, has walked plenty of clients through that first Heimdall+ demo. He says the reaction almost always follows the same arc. "There's laughter at first – laughter at the idea that the difference might not be noticeable, laughter at the 'diminishing returns' argument. And then there's a different kind of laughter, the delighted kind, once someone realizes they can actually have this in their own home."

Burbank also solves a problem that trips up a lot of home theater buyers before they ever get to picking a projector: screen size. Wallace walks clients through it using degree markers mounted on the wall. "Sit where your ideal view would be, then look to the side and note what the marker says. We take your preferred field of view and your seating distance, and calculate the screen size that hits that field of view in your actual room. We've got a calculator that solves for any one of three variables – screen size, seating distance, or field of view – once you give us the other two. So if you think you want a 150-inch screen and you know your seating distance is 12 feet, we can show you exactly what field of view that gives you. Come sit at that degree marker in Burbank. Is that really what you pictured? If not, better to find out now than after you've committed to something you'll be living with for years."

That process is exactly what led one of Wallace's clients to the Heimdall+. "Fast forward to today, and he's enjoying reference-level video in his own home, with the Heimdall lighting up a screen that's nearly wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling," Wallace says. "We're in a new golden age of video performance, and all of us at Definitive are glad to share it. Come see for yourself what's possible."

Learn more about Definitive Audio and the Burbank projector lab at definitive.com/pages/custom-home-theater.