Wow. So that’s what it feels like to fly an F18 Super Hornet. No, I haven’t just passed my training and gone for a quick spin around the block. I have actually just finished watching the training mission scene from Top Gun: Maverick.
Such was the impact of the action as it unfolded in front of me, it felt as though I was actually sitting on the lap of everyone’s favourite five foot seven inch fighter pilot, soaking it all up from the front seat.
I’ve got a ridiculously capable six-figure home cinema system to thank for that. Its location? The House of Sound, an incredible six-floor townhouse tucked away in New York’s Chelsea district.
I’ll bring you more of that experience in an upcoming feature, but first I thought I’d share something on the dedicated home theatre, which is located on the ground floor.
As I walk through the door, I’m greeted by a monstrous 204-inch projector screen which is displaying the menu system to a Kaleidescape movie player.
And when I say mega that’s exactly what I mean. The specifications are hugely impressive: 29 channels powered by 19 amplifiers capable of outputting 22,400W of power. The speakers and amplifiers cost $550,000 alone and that’s before you factor in the stunning $88,000 Sony GTZ380 projector and the other electronics used.
Out of those 29 channels, 16 (!) are Sonus Faber Arena S15 subwoofers – ten can be found under the screen with the remaining six at the back of the room. They each use four six-and-a-half-inch drivers arranged in two horizontally opposed pairs.
Sonos Faber claims that going down this route, instead of having just one, say, 15-inch driver in each box, allows it to move just as much air but better enables it to match the movements of the other drivers in the system. This makes for improved integration and more precise deployment of those low-frequency effects.
Now I’ve seen and heard Top Gun: Maverick on a wide variety of TVs, speaker systems and soundbars, but nothing quite prepared me for the adrenaline rush that I felt watching Mav fire up his afterburners and weave his way through a canyon against the clock.
Now I understand why Mark Weingarten, who was the actual production sound mixer for the movie, which also won an Oscar for best movie sound, found the experience particularly exhilarating when he attended an exclusive press screening at the venue.
Ricky Miranda, the Audio Experience Manager at House of Sound recalls, “he put his Oscar on the table and watched Maverick with the press and us, and I have not seen a bigger smile in this house since then. He told us that, outside of the mastering studio, this was the best place he’d watched his movie.”
Ricky has had an interesting route in to this industry himself. He’s worked in hi-fi for about a decade – but, ironically, started out as fighter jet mechanic. Having worked a few other roles, he got into hi-fi via Sennheiser, then Bang & Olufsen and has been with McIntosh for five years.
He sums up the listening space quite nicely, “This room is really special – I tend to refer to it more as a cinema than home theatre – it really is that next level of experience. It’s like a fine-dining meal; once you’ve experienced it, you can’t go back.”
It’s difficult not to agree. While you would expect it to go big and go loud, it’s the way the system communicates movement, combining an unbelievable level of detail and dynamics which impresses and syncs up perfectly with all the on-screen action.
As Maverick grabs the controls and weaves the plane through the canyon, you can almost feel each input, and how much effort he’s putting in to get the plane to do his bidding. The sense of drama that oozes out of the scene is almost tangible.
The rumbles coming through the system were enough to make my seat shake, but it’s not all about the amount of bass. It was also ridiculously tightly defined, with not an ounce of fat. Fitting, then, given the movie we were watching, that it was deployed with the precision of a laser-guided bomb.
What’s even more impressive is that I was sitting in the back corner of the room, next to all the McIntosh electronics. You wouldn’t expect this to be the sweet spot for all the action, but to its huge credit, the system still made me feel fully immersed in the action, which was a testament to how the guys had the speaker system configured.
It’s the kind of place you could lose yourself for not just a couple of hours but a whole evening and well into the early hours, which is exactly what one musical celebrity has done “Questlove, the drummer from the Roots, has rented us out twice for the SuperBowl and once for The Oscars,” says Ricky. Not a bad way to spend an evening, I think you’ll agree.
MORE:
Rotel Michi – behind the scenes of a “mad science project” and the rebirth of a hi-fi legend
Our pick of the best stereo amplifiers you can buy
And the best AV receivers we've tested
