Honolulu Tower

Project

To build a family entertainment area in the living room for enjoying movies and listening to music.

Challenges

The irregular shape of the living room and the full glass doors at the front stage wall leading to the outdoor Japanese garden posed a major challenge for the installation. The client’s requirement was to have an unobstructed view of the garden while in the room listening to music. Using a conventional fix mounted speaker at the centre of the glass door would not be possible as this would block part of the garden view. We customised a center motorised lift to lift the centre speaker when listening to music and lower it when watching movies with a Stewart motorised acoustic transparent screen. All the controls could be done remotely on the iPad.

Finding a suitable space for subwoofers was our next challenge. The customised solution was a 2 x Line source woofers (total 12 x 10″ woofers) which fitted nicely at both extreme corners of the living room. The subwoofers were out of view as they were hidden behind curtains. The only speakers in full view were the beautiful Steinway Model C speakers. The rest of the surround speakers were Steinway in-ceiling speakers.

Overall this is a very powerful system that sounds fantastic. Setting up was quite straight forward except we had to carry the long Line source woofers all the way up to the 13th floor. But it was well worth all the hard work when the client was totally satisfied with the garden view and the natural sound.

*A similar integration of systems with comparable setup complexity: USD$230K – USD$270K.