Home cinema at its finest....

 I recognise some of them. 

Loverly juberly.

How did they get hold of my - best home cinema over 100k picture ? i only gave the fitting company a copy for there portfolio !

What a rack! Puts my BDI unit to shame!

Thanks for that - now knee-deep in drool

Thanks for that Clare, god do I feel inadequate now.....

Nice to see how some others seek to emulate my setup

Ahhhh well, back to the drawing board, sigh......

These are what dreams are made of.......one day!

A few odd ones in there...check out the "Best Integrated Home under £30,000" (Cyprus) - do Cypriots have heads at right angles to the rest of their bodies ? Mrs C would never have let me cut into the ceiling for that setup.

There's actually another seating area opposite the projector screen in that picture... Lots more integratation going on in that place, though.

When we were judging the Awards, we saw a lot more pictures of each set-up - sadly I only have one each of the winners to use in the blog.

There do seem to be a few that whilst very nicely installed don't actually seem to be that great for viewing purposes.

On a related note, where are the speakers in the third picture (Best Media Room under £15,000)? A recessed TV is hardly the stuff of legend, so I assume there's more to that than meets the eye?

IIRC, it's a combination of in-wall and in-ceiling speakers in that room, with a hidden subwoofer. There's also a ton of kit in the cupboard to the left of the screen- including Sky box, Blu-ray player, games consoles etc - which is nicely fitted/ventilated/racked, but you'd never know it was there...

What you've got to remember with the CEDIA Awards is that they're about delivering on what a customer wants - and that's often a compromise between performance and convenience/looks. It's how well the installer minimises that compromise that's key.

It's also why the categories are divided into media room, integrated home and home cinema.

The latter are the Awards most judged for their technical merit - it's the category where we had most discussions about screen sizes, seat placement, speaker/projector suitability etc - but the others are more about how effecitively technology was integrated into a home set-up.

Even in those integration categories, however, we had lots of discussions about suitability of tech (eg use of plasmas in brightly lit rooms; speaker positioning etc) that did rule some installs in/out of the Awards.

And of course you're prepared to accept slightly more compromise at the lower price points than you are at the higher ones.

But when you dig into the detail behind these installs - including the time/design pressure the installers are often under - they're incredibly impressive. The entries even had loving diagrams of all the cabling, so we could assess if they'd chosen well there, too

 What amazes me when i see setups like these, is that i am often seriously unimpressed with their blu ray players and amps. 

That's where having a trio of tech judges came in - we dismissed several installations submitted for the 2011 Awards for using outdated or poorer-quality products.

Anyhow, i'm now slowly updating the blog with more details of the winning installs... will let you all know when i'm finished!