2018: Awareness of the issue of room acoustics. It is difficult to transform the living room of one’s house or flat into a cinema or an ideal listening place since the required acoustic treatments are too cumbersome and intrusive for an individual to consider such work.
An other way must be availabe for an audio product which goes beyond the acoustics of the room. Nearfield listening or using headphones are the only alternatives, but headphones provide a « perceived » sound that is too artificial because they are placed on the ears. It is even worse when they are in-ear models. Indeed, our brain listens to sounds and music through its full transfer functions: our head, our ears… Our brain analyzes and defines the nature of sounds thanks to frequency and temporal comparisons between the right and left ears, through the acoustic shadow created by our head and face.
Nearfield listening is the alternative, but it lacks realism because it lacks the natural reverberation of the room. This leads to the idea of trying studio reverberation processors, but other tests highlighted that psychoacoustic consideration of integration time by adapting attenuation and reverberation delay to frequency, offers a much better listening experience at fixed delays. Then, the idea of V.R.F.S (Virtual Reverberated Field Sound) was born.
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2019 – 2020 : The first prototypes of audio armchairs based on V.R.F.S were manufactured and tested because of various trials to virtualize by reverberated sounds reconstruction from nearfield listening.
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2021 : The launch of Xilica Solaro audio processors on the market allows real-time processing of the full V.R.F.S treatment application + speakers mapping in C.T.C – R.a.c.e + phase alignment and filtering through six speakers in the armchair.
In 2021, the audio chair prototypes looked like this:
2022 : Jean-Marc Siou, founder of ReelPhase.com, is incubated by Emergys Bretagne to support the R&D of his audio armchair and the associated patents.
The launch of Samsung Onyx screens in cinemas and the future widespread use of 4K UHD in homes made the need for an audio chair that enables the holographic perception of the center channel obvious.
As a matter of fact, these giant TVs cannot integrate the center channel in or behind the screen. The speaker located at the bottom of the screen is no longer in phase with the actor’s dialogue seen at the center of the screen. The sound/image distance becomes too great if one would like to get closer to the ideal distance for these giant screens which, like in a cinema, is only 1.2 times the diagonal of the image.
For Onyx screens in cinemas, tests were carried out with a speaker above and another one below the screen, resulting in a comb filtering effect and disastrous sound localization, perceived as too wide and constantly moving up and down the screen.
Other trials were carried out by projecting indirect sound waves in opposite phase on the screen. The screen reflects the sound wich comes back to the audience. But this sound is diffuse and distorted whereas the center should be a perfect point source. This solution was then abandoned.
These phase issues between sound and image are the main reason why cinemas reject giant screen panels, despite the incredible image quality offered. They maintain their historical setups of central speakers behind a transonic screen and a projected video image.
Thanks to its central hologram, the ReelPhase audio armchair reproduces the center audio in phase with the centre of the image on any giant screen and becomes the universal solution for both cinemas and home use.
Thanks to the audio armchair, it is possible to recreate a movie theater with limited financial resources because there is no acoustic treatment to schedule.
This same cinematic quality can be obtained in a living room at home in front of a 98 or 115-inch screen… These dimensions allow to get 5 audio armchairs in two rows, with none of these seats being sound compromised. Additionally, for all of them, a center sound is perfectly positioned at the center of the screen.
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2023 – 2024 :
Discussions with partners and audio market stakeholders, a more affordable version of the armchair is launch to make it more accessible to people, with a mass production planned (coming soon).
