On August 26th, UME Shanghai Xintiandi Cinema celebrated the grand opening of its first "projection-free" theater. This marks the seventh cinema in Shanghai equipped with a Samsung Onyx cinema, and notably, it is the first in Shanghai to feature a 14-meter-wide Samsung Onyx cinema.

Following the cinema's opening ceremony, guests and film enthusiasts gathered to watch the artful documentary "The Eight Hundred." The authentic combat sequences, real battle scenes, and the true stories of wartime heroes unfolded on the expansive 14-meter-wide Samsung Onyx screen. The 4K+HDR LED screen, combined with the powerful sound reproduction of QSC speakers, brought every nuance of the heroes' expressions to life and immersed the audience in the details of the war era.

Ensuring both ultra-clear and oversized screens, the theater placed stringent requirements on sound effects. To deliver an extraordinary viewing experience, the cinema chose 8 KW series speakers as the main speakers, complemented by 6 SB 218F subwoofers and 4 SR 1590 surround speakers. This setup created an Onyx theater with exceptional audio-visual performance, exceeding expectations as demonstrated on the opening day, affirming the outstanding results brought by PCI's comprehensive solution.

In this Onyx theater project, PCI engineers faced the challenge of using an LED movie screen, which is acoustically opaque, meaning speakers cannot synchronize sound with the movie positions through traditional means.

Addressing these challenges, QSC's matrix virtual sound image synthesis technology, based on the Q-SYS platform, provided a groundbreaking solution for LED screen projection applications. It ingeniously solved the issue of sound not originating from the picture's position. The technology synthesizes the sound images of three sets of main speakers installed below the LED screen into the traditional left, center, and right screen channels. These three channels are then "placed" in front of the LED screen. Through calibration methods, the left, center, and right channels can be moved on the screen plane to achieve the optimal alignment of sound and image.

Throughout this project, PCI made several improvements tailored for LED theaters, including using smaller-sized speakers and addressing sound drift issues.

Through continuous refinement and bold experimentation, PCI's LED theater solution has matured. With matured technology and experience, it significantly enhances the cinema viewing experience and opens up possibilities for multifunctional applications in cinema spaces.

PCI's LED theater solution has already been successfully implemented in Wuhan Wugao Moer International Cinema, Capital Cinema's Xidan Joy City branch, and the newly opened UME Shanghai Xintiandi Cinema.