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REL 3D Made Easier
AirShip II a Minor Miracle
Let’s say you’ve been following along with our blogs or videos, and you’ve decided to take your single REL (or stereo pair) and expand it into a REL 3D system to greatly enhance your theatre experience. First, you add the center channel REL connected High-Level then add the rear sub. This is where the wiring can become a little tricky. Things like sliding glass doors on the wall you wanted it to be placed next to can throw up roadblocks. AirShip II to the rescue!
Let’s back up one quick step -adding the center channel REL seems straightforward; just figure out how long your cable needs to be to allow for easy placement (somewhere in the middle half of the front wall). Connect the REL High-Level cable to the rear of your center channel speaker, and make sure you’re set to as wide open as the AVR will allow (usually no lower than 40 Hz is possible, with the subwoofer output set way up at 200 Hz) and then dial it all in. Right?
But wait…getting a signal fed to the rear channel REL, especially High-Level can be a challenge. And, if you want to hear the most performance possible, you’ll still need to run both a High-Level cable AND an LFE cable. So, what can you do that doesn’t involve the words “spiders” and “crawlspaces” in the same sentence?
Role of the Rear Channel Sub:
First, a quick refresher: the role of the rear channel sub, especially when using High-Level input, is to restore the scale and sense of spaciousness built into the original theatre release of a movie (or game). While the role of the front third of the theatre is fairly intuitive, the roles of the surround channel and rear sub(s) are less so. These are necessary to carry the rear 2/3 of your theatre’s 3-dimensional space (can be a nice living room, all the way up to a semi-pro purpose-built dedicated screening room) that’s responsible for placing you inside the scene. So, yes – these elements are important…very important.
The Solution:
This is where adding a simple, reasonably priced component like our Airship II, which permits ultra-fast, wide bandwidth, wireless connectivity can produce a minor miracle. Now you have the ability to send Full-Range sound wirelessly; that is, sending both the LFE and High-Level signals at the same time through a dedicated channel that supplies your rear channel REL sub (or subs). This opens up the ability to truly bring your theatre to life. Suddenly, it’s possible to ship both the huge special effects bass that the biggest scenes demand, and still have the almost constant rich fill of normal bass. Bass that does everything from rendering the human voice naturally, to supplying subtler effects like the tank treads in a war movie that can otherwise sound thin, and even annoying.
Airship II brings theatre alive in ways that REL has made famous in high-end theatre circles. Not just for the extreme output of .1 exuberance, but in ways that humanize sound and make movies more thoroughly enjoyable for the duration of the film.
RelTip: It’s important to examine the quality of your Wi-Fi setup. Wireless audio is quite different than normal computer usage; you’ll be streaming in real-time with no audio buffering or error correction. Because of this very high, constant data usage in music or theatre applications, it’s necessary to be working from a fast, contemporary Wi-Fi system. Many serious theatre hobbyists invest a few hundred dollars in a dedicated WiFi Wi-Fsystem just for their theatres.
So, Let’s review:
Both the rear sub-bass and the surround channels in a well-outfitted theatre, are responsible for delivering scale to the placement of yourself (the viewer) within a 3-dimensional aural reality for the duration of the film. Since running.
Using a REL Airship II to deliver an extremely fast, high quality, wireless signal capable of delivering both High-Level signals (the bass components of one’s surround speakers) as well as LFE/.1 is a highly cost-effective solution. One that enables both the use of these crucial channels and the deep bass that allows you to be transported into the film.
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