Home Theater for Hearing Impaired

Every once in awhile a project falls into our lap that we simply love. A recent nightclub client approached us to design an outdoor theater for his family. There was a catch; His wife was hard of hearing in certain frequencies. We jumped at the chance to provide a weather resistant outdoor system, with some ideas on how we could utilize sophisticated measuring technologies to identify and improve speech recognition for our clients wife.

Not having a professional diagnoses of our clients hearing, we had to start from scratch. Using technology borrowed from a speech therapy research project, we were able to create a frequency map of the persons hearing. With a little fine tuning, time alignment, and adding a EQ map specifically for the hearing impairment  – we were able to increase the clients ability to understand dialog in their home theater system.

DAS arco speakers provided us with a weather resistant form, and fit the bill nicely for outdoor surround sound.  A manual screen and DLP projector were also installed. The result is a gorgeous outdoor home theater system this client will be able to enjoy for years and years!