Home Theater Geeks 540 Transcript

Please be advised that this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word-for-word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-free version of the show.

Scott Wilkinson [00:00:00]:
In this episode of Home Theater Geeks, I chat with Richard Charshan, the president of acousticsmart, about the amazing home theaters that he has designed. So stay tuned. Podcasts you love from people you trust.

Richard Charscan [00:00:20]:
This is twit.

Scott Wilkinson [00:00:32]:
Hey there. Scott Wilkinson here, the home theater geek. In this episode, I am pleased to welcome as my guest Richard Charshan, the president of Acoustic Smart, a home theater designer and builder. From soup to nuts. I'm told we're going to get into that on this show and he has designed some amazing home theaters which we're going to take a look at. Hey, Richard, welcome to the show.

Richard Charscan [00:01:00]:
I'm happy to be here. I've heard a lot about your show and I've listened in myself and I'm a big fan. So it's great to be a part of this experience.

Scott Wilkinson [00:01:07]:
Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate that and I appreciate you being here because you've done some amazing work and we're going to get into some examples of that. You sent me so many pictures of so many theaters. We can't cover them all, I'm sorry to say.

Richard Charscan [00:01:24]:
That's okay.

Scott Wilkinson [00:01:24]:
But I did pick a few that, that are particularly interesting. But before we do, I wanted to get your thoughts on your basic approach to home theater design. What are your basic tenets of that process?

Richard Charscan [00:01:47]:
So we treat every room as if it's an instrument, you know? You know, we try to avoid a poorly designed environment. So the room is everything to us. So when we have a room, we're looking at, you know, are the walls straight? Are there jags in the walls? Is it a rectangular room? Is it a square room? What's going to give our clients the best bang for the buck and also make it sound acoustically viable. The whole idea is, you know, we're not a company that's all about selling product. Like, even though we make se and all these really cool things where the most important thing for us is to just get lost in the experience, when that movie comes on, you have an immersive experience, meaning that the room will basically just disappear. Even though we do incredible looking rooms, once those lights dim and you're ready to watch the movie, all you're concentrating on is what's on the screen and you're totally immersed. So we look for acoustics, we look for sight lines, we look to. We always ask the client questions, are you an audiophile or you're not an audiophile? Some people do it just for the kids, you know, how many people are you trying to accommodate? What do you Want the room to look like? What are the aesthetics? Do you want to match the rest of your house? What do you want it to be? I always call it the Willy Wonka effect.

Richard Charscan [00:03:15]:
You want to open up that door and almost be like you're walking into the chocolate factory. And you want to be so different from every other room in the house. So it's a surprise. So it's really based on whatever the client wants. I mean, we've had clients ask us for some pretty crazy things, and we have clients that just want a very simple screening room. And the cool thing about theaters is that, honestly, even though we do some amazing things, you know, you can really do a theater for any price point. It's just a matter of, of how smart you are and, and your knowledge of it and how you build it. So I always tell that to clients.

Richard Charscan [00:03:54]:
You know, all right, we're going to budget the room with all of your want list, like everything. But in the end, we're not going to get it right the first time. So we'll value engineer it and we'll figure out what are the important things to get to your price point. And that's how we start every theater.

Scott Wilkinson [00:04:09]:
Hmm. Well, that leads me to my next question, which is how do you get the most bang for the buck out of a limited budget? How do you, you know, so say a client comes at you with a, with quite a limited budget, how do you get the most out of it? What do you focus on there?

Richard Charscan [00:04:30]:
Okay, so let's say we have a client as an example. They love our star ceilings. They have a very tight budget, but they don't want to do the whole room and they want to do some seats. So we have seats for different price points. So we'll do less expensive seats and we'll just do the walls. So there's, there's two ways of doing it. All right? One thing I've done is for people, and if you can believe this, it makes a big difference. So let's say if they want to start ceiling, we'll just do the front wall as a baffle wall and do really good acoustics on the front wall.

Richard Charscan [00:05:05]:
Do a 2 inch thick system on the front wall, and then on the ceiling, we'll do acoustics in the star ceiling. So you're getting, you know, nice absorption in the ceiling. And then you have your front wall just doing that alone. And even if you paint the walls a dark color, you know, honestly, the room sounds really good. We've done that for people. It's not My favorite, but it's a solution. The other thing I would do is just do maybe acoustic treatment on the front wall and then do floating panels at a minimum, so you have the first point reflections within the room. And, you know, the back can be, you know, whatever you want it to be.

Richard Charscan [00:05:47]:
I like to put some diffuser panels. Some people don't like the way they look. So we can actually take a diffuser panel and make it look like artwork, you know, through something we call SmartArt. So if you give me an image of something, anything, even if the client purchases it, it could be some sort of digital art or could be a picture of the family. It could be a movie poster. We can scan it, print it onto breathable fabric, and then cover that over diffuser, and it'll look like hanging wall art in the back. So there's. There's things that we can do like that.

Richard Charscan [00:06:23]:
We've also done smart art rooms where we have a bunch of movie posters or what we did for somebody that was really cool. He owned all the rights to Andy Warhol's. The digital artwork for his. For his rock album covers, like the Billy Squire album, Stones album. There was a Thelonious Monk record or something like. Like there were a bunch of them that he did. Miles Davis, I believe. And we just printed them onto acoustic treatment and made it look like art hanging on the walls.

Richard Charscan [00:06:56]:
And we just painted the walls a nice contrasting color. And then we did the front wall with some treatment. Didn't go crazy. And that's a pretty reasonable way, you know, to do it and just do a platform. You have to. Have to really get the. To me, the way that you make a room sound great is by making a room, you know, you have to isolate it so that you don't get any noise, you don't have any distractions within the room. That's the ultimate.

Richard Charscan [00:07:25]:
Because the quieter the room, the better the dynamics of the room. And then with the theater itself, as long as you control the first point reflections do the front wall. That just doing that makes a huge, huge difference. You know, you can tweak that by putting different types of diffusers. Like every acquisition, Tony Grimani has his own secret ways of doing things. And we're good friends with him. We do a lot of work with him. And he does things different than other acousticians do.

Richard Charscan [00:07:54]:
So, you know, you learn the different traits of what some people like to do that that's interesting. And you see how the room responds to it. I mean, we have some dealers that, you know, we have we have AV dealers that they actually went to the room as done. And then they start messing with the acoustics and they start moving things around while they're tuning the room because they get so involved and they look at the room as if it's their lab until they get it perfectly. So that sweet spot is exactly dialed in. So they want to, they might want to move and absorb a little bit more to the right and more to the left. Put it, put a diffuser maybe a little bit, you know, to the left or right of where that surround sound speaker is. And they'll sit there and then we'll have to come back and refabric everything afterwards.

Richard Charscan [00:08:41]:
Yeah, there are, there are guys like that.

Scott Wilkinson [00:08:43]:
Sure.

Richard Charscan [00:08:43]:
It's pretty amazing.

Scott Wilkinson [00:08:44]:
They're known as home theater geeks, I think.

Richard Charscan [00:08:47]:
Yeah, yeah. I'm a geek myself, so.

Scott Wilkinson [00:08:51]:
Indeed. Speaking of acoustics, we have a graphic that's in your book that we're going to talk about a little later.

Richard Charscan [00:08:56]:
Yeah, sure.

Scott Wilkinson [00:08:57]:
But there's one graphic I want to show because it, it sort of illustrates what you were just talking about. Out, which is number one. There it is.

Richard Charscan [00:09:06]:
Yeah. So sound desk, you know, it'll basically be bouncing around the room. And I just got through with another interior designer and you know, and the optics, Interior designers still don't get it, but you know, they, they want to poster the room. They want to put Dacron on the walls. And you don't, you don't want to kill the room. You don't want to over deaden it. And you also don't want to paint the room walls because then what happens is the walls start fighting with one another and the sound is bouncing and it's, it's, it's crossing over and then you get distortion. And then what happens is very similar to when you're in a living room and somebody's off in the kitchen and they're cooking.

Richard Charscan [00:09:45]:
You know, you can't hear what they're saying. So you make the volume louder. And then an action scene comes. Then all of a sudden, oh my God, it's so loud. And then you make it lower again. When you treat the room, it gets rid of all that. So you can. I have clients when we're done with our rooms.

Richard Charscan [00:10:01]:
This is how important the acoustic treatment is. So I can't really stress it enough. That's why we call our company Acoustic Smart. I have clients that are 80% deaf in one ear. They come into my showroom, they don't have to read lips anymore. One of them was actually Crying because it was the first time his wife ever was able to watch something and not have to read lips and can hear exactly what was going on the screen.

Scott Wilkinson [00:10:25]:
Wow.

Richard Charscan [00:10:26]:
Because as you get older, first of all, men and women have totally different hearing. Women's hearing are much more sensitive than men's hearing, generally speaking. Yeah, totally different. So women never want to hear it cranked up, if you've noticed. You know, they want to just be comfortable. Men like to hear it, you know, they want to feel it. That's the one, you know? But as you get older, you're losing. Losing more and more hearing.

Richard Charscan [00:10:49]:
So the way that you tune that room is so important because then you can really listen to even baseball games. You can hear everything. It makes you feel like you're in the audience. A train's going from left to right. You can hear the train going from left to right. If there's a helicopter, like in the opening scene of Apocalypse now, you hear the complete 360 degree of the helicopter coming in and around and then coming onto the landing.

Scott Wilkinson [00:11:12]:
Right.

Richard Charscan [00:11:13]:
That's what you want, you know, and so in this.

Scott Wilkinson [00:11:15]:
In this picture, you're showing how with one speaker, the sound bounces around. With three speakers, the sound bunches. Bounces around a bunch. And then finally, you treat the sidewalls near the first reflection points.

Richard Charscan [00:11:30]:
Correct.

Scott Wilkinson [00:11:31]:
And that tames all that reflection, sending the sound really where it needs to go. Which is your listening spot.

Richard Charscan [00:11:40]:
Correct. And that's why, like, a lot of times, you'll see people, they'll get a. A video wall or a tv and they'll put like a, you know, a speaker one. The one speaker underneath the tv, and they're wondering why they're having such a hard time. And the. The floor is, you know, is wood and windows and. And, you know, and. And, you know, it's too much sound coming out all over the place and no control, you know?

Scott Wilkinson [00:12:04]:
Right. So. Right. So, you know, your emphasis is on acoustics, and rightly so, in my opinion.

Richard Charscan [00:12:12]:
Absolutely. You know, like, it's a game changer. Scott. When I. When I first started, if you can imagine, I was one of the first guys in the United States to do theaters with acoustic treatment.

Scott Wilkinson [00:12:24]:
Oh, really?

Richard Charscan [00:12:25]:
Yeah, I would. I started over 30 years ago when nobody was doing theaters, and there was something called the Ferrujo line doubler, if you're. I remember that well, and the three gun projectors.

Scott Wilkinson [00:12:36]:
But sure.

Richard Charscan [00:12:37]:
What happened was I started out because I knew an AV dealer in the AV industry, and he did amazing work. But the rooms didn't sound good. And I would say to him, like, haven't you ever heard of acoustic treatment? Like, this room is so cool. But you're really missing half of the experience. Because working in recording studios and being a musician, I realized what it could be. And what happened was, you know, it was very hard to sell because nobody really understood what the stuff was and how much would make, you know, a difference within the room. So we finally, you know, had an opportunity because there's a magazine at the time called Audio Video Interiors.

Scott Wilkinson [00:13:17]:
And I worked at that magazine, in fact.

Richard Charscan [00:13:20]:
Okay, so this client saw an article about somebody putting acoustic treatment. He says, I want want this. But he's like, well, I think I know somebody who's local who can do this. And I met with the guy, we did the job and was like, Martin Logan statements or something at the time. And back then was only laserdisc. They didn't have any DVDs back then. And. And all I can remember is us watching this James Taylor concert, and I knew would make a difference, but I didn't know it'd make that big of it.

Richard Charscan [00:13:50]:
You know, I wasn't expecting that big of a difference. Me and the client, our jaws dropped, and we were just like, I can just sit here all day and this is just the greatest thing ever. And it was hard to explain that experience to anybody else. But the bottom line is, when I got my final invoice and he paid me, he wrote me a letter and he said, nice people did the job, and I want to thank you so much. You made such a difference in my room. Here's $1,000 bonus. Bonus.

Scott Wilkinson [00:14:18]:
Whoa.

Richard Charscan [00:14:20]:
So I showed it to my father, and we were in the commercial, you know, custom building business. So we did, like, stuff commercially, and nobody really cared about the final product. So I've never been thanked for anything in my life because everybody just wanted you to get it done and to get over with. So I was shocked that someone actually liked what we did. And it was hard to sell acoustic treatment back then because, again, it's just like hocus pocus thing that nobody understands. Understands about. And we found out about Cedia, and we started calling up all the AV dealers. And the AV dealers were like, no, my room sounds great.

Richard Charscan [00:14:54]:
And I don't know who you are with this acoustic stuff, but how do you sell something that they can't experience?

Scott Wilkinson [00:15:00]:
Well, that was what I was going to say. I was going to mention the only way really to get people on board is to have them experience it.

Richard Charscan [00:15:09]:
You have to. You have to. You have to. Once you're in a room like this, it's like, to me it's like going into a sauna. It's like meditative. Like it's, it's relaxing and I'm drawn to it. After a long day, man, I go into my room sometimes. I'll just fall asleep and put on some tunes because I deserve it.

Richard Charscan [00:15:30]:
I'm just tired.

Scott Wilkinson [00:15:32]:
Damn straight.

Richard Charscan [00:15:33]:
I need to, I need to decompress. It's my way of releasing. It's my. It's my Superman cave. My fortress of solid.

Scott Wilkinson [00:15:40]:
Fortress of solitude. There you go. Well, I was going to ask you about whether or not you approach things differently or do you even install into existing rooms as opposed to building a room from scratch? If you build a room from scratch, you can do the acoustics, you can do the treatments, you can do the insulation, you can do everything exactly as it needs to be. But what if you're called upon to go into an existing room, a bedroom or a basement or something like that?

Richard Charscan [00:16:09]:
I do it all day long. It's one of the hardest things to do. But we do it a lot and we're actually really, really good at it. As an example, my theater, my own, you know, in my own home, which became my showroom, my first showroom. Now we have many, many around the country. It's in my garage. I had no choice. I lived by the beach.

Richard Charscan [00:16:32]:
I was looking for houses that had a basement. And thank God I didn't do that because the Hurricane Sandy, my theater would have been underwater.

Scott Wilkinson [00:16:39]:
Oh, we will mention that you're back east in the New York area.

Richard Charscan [00:16:44]:
Yeah, I'm back in New York. So we did it in my garage. And so now we have no garage. And we put as much as we could into the shed. But we had so talk about a retrofit. We actually had a three month article in Audio Video Interiors on the construction of it like maybe 18 years ago or something. But anyway, so when you have a garage, the first thing you have is you have a sloped floor. So you have to straighten out the floor.

Richard Charscan [00:17:14]:
The actual electrical box for the entire house was in the garage. So. So if we would have put a screen on the wall, the screen would put on top of the electrical box. So we had to move the entire electrical box. Oh, yeah, yeah. And not just that, but the cleanout valve, the drain for the entire house, for the plumbing is in my theater. Yeah, man, you couldn't really, you know, it can't be any more difficult. And then we had to Have a secret, you know, opening in the platform to get at that.

Richard Charscan [00:17:50]:
And we've had to use it, unfortunately, to get in there and do the cleanup. It wasn't really a big deal. And then the other thing that was really crazy was that we have. We had a pole supporting the entire second floor that was right in the center of my sightline that was supporting my second floor. So we had to get rid of that pole. Pole and put a flush header in so we wouldn't have a pole in the center of the theater.

Scott Wilkinson [00:18:17]:
Right.

Richard Charscan [00:18:17]:
That's scary. So we had to have that engineered. And so far, the roof hasn't fallen on yet.

Scott Wilkinson [00:18:27]:
Knock on wood. May it be. May it remain so.

Richard Charscan [00:18:30]:
But. But we were. Yeah, it was. It was. It was frightening and it was. It was exciting. And so now on the outside of my house, it looks like a garage, but then you come in. It looks like a 1930s RKO theater that worked for Theo Calamarakis.

Scott Wilkinson [00:18:47]:
You know, who I've had on the show as well.

Richard Charscan [00:18:49]:
Yeah, he's a dear friend of mine, and he. He pretty much almost. He also got us our start in the business. I was his fix it guy in the very beginning and helping him out with his, you know, with all his. His things. Then I started working on his bigger projects. But. But yeah, so, yeah, we've done that.

Scott Wilkinson [00:19:08]:
We've.

Richard Charscan [00:19:08]:
We've done, you know, that. That room that we talked about with the. With the guy driving his car into the garage. That's a retrofit.

Scott Wilkinson [00:19:18]:
Oh, we're gonna see that at the end of this show. That. Yeah, that's. That's an amazing accomplishment that you guys did so well. Good. I'm glad to know that that. That is certainly possible for people who can't or don't have the resources to actually build a room from scratch.

Richard Charscan [00:19:34]:
Yeah, I mean, we. We actually come in and take from the studs that will demo the room. Like, we had a room in Nashville that we did, and it was. We actually have it in our book so you can see the before and after. It was for a famous country singer. And the. The room he had was terrible. And he sold it to this really nice client we're doing our second room for.

Richard Charscan [00:19:58]:
And he had a very small screen, maybe like 110 inches. And he had all these seats. And I was saying myself, like, why would anybody come in here, see this small screen? And. And. And then it was in the. We felt like it was in the wrong direction. So we flipped the entire room 180 degrees, gave him a screen that was like, you know, 100 and, you know, 70 inches on the. That, you know, and he was, like, blown away.

Richard Charscan [00:20:25]:
And then we relayed everything out, had an area for the con, for the concession. We demoed the whole place, and now we're working on a second theater for a second house. Because he realized that we were thinking outside of the box. You know, we weren't just doing, you know. You know, anybody walking in would just say, well, you're walking this way, so the screen should go right there. But that's not. That's not really necessarily the best way for it. You just have to think, optimally, what's going to be the best for the room? How are you going to walk into the room? You know, I always hate walking into a room and walking into the seats.

Richard Charscan [00:20:59]:
I like walking in. And the screen is on your right. You know, if you have that kind of setup and then you walk up. And then you walk up to the seats. I don't like walking.

Scott Wilkinson [00:21:10]:
Commercial cinema.

Richard Charscan [00:21:11]:
Yeah. Well, when you. Yeah, and when you walk into. Some people think that when you walk into a commercial cinema. And I get this a lot. Oh, I want to come in from the back of the room. Like, we're in Radio City Music hall, and we're gonna go through the center. You know, the center of the theater,

Scott Wilkinson [00:21:28]:
there's an aisle down the middle.

Richard Charscan [00:21:30]:
Yeah. Like, there's an aisle down the middle. And anybody who's, you know, who knows anything about theaters is that that's your best seat in the house. So why would you ever want to do that?

Scott Wilkinson [00:21:39]:
Right.

Richard Charscan [00:21:40]:
And then if you ever walk into the back of the room, what happens is right away, because you're walking through the back of the room, what happens to your seating? Now you have to push that seating up a couple of feet because you need room to walk around the seating and to get down. So now you're pushing everybody closer to the front screen wall. You know, what I try to do is I try to bring everybody away from the screen wall as much as possible so we can get the biggest screen. And not to shove as many seats as possible, but to make every seat row optimal so that this way everybody has that immersive experience.

Scott Wilkinson [00:22:15]:
Well, on the other hand, you. I assume you don't put seats right up against the back wall because you need a little space.

Richard Charscan [00:22:23]:
Correct. Exactly. Yeah. Because you don't get the immersiveness.

Scott Wilkinson [00:22:27]:
Exactly.

Richard Charscan [00:22:28]:
Unless if you have to.

Scott Wilkinson [00:22:30]:
Well, sometimes maybe you have to. And I've seen, certainly, theaters like that. Yeah. You. You mentioned that there was a theater in your book. And I wanted to mention that you have published an honest to goodness coffee table book. Yeah. Called Home Theatreology.

Scott Wilkinson [00:22:48]:
And it's. It's really beautiful. I thank you for sending me a copy. It's. It's really something. I. I appreciate it and I congratulate you on a great achievement.

Richard Charscan [00:23:00]:
Thanks. It's four years of my life went into it, and actually Theo was working on a book and with the same person on me with this book. And unfortunately he passed away. This book took four years to make. And, you know, Theo basically, you know, is in the book also. He's got a page there. And the idea is for me to carry the torch. Because when he put out his books and I still have him and I love his books, it really inspired me.

Richard Charscan [00:23:31]:
Even though I didn't have clients that were doing theaters that were $1 million and up, you know, I loved looking through it, every minute of it. And I really, you know, he was like. He was like my sensei, you know, and I really, I really loved everything he did and wouldn't be here without him. So to me, this is my homage to keeping home theater live. And the reason why we did the book really was to cut the disconnect between the interior designers and the architects from the homeowners and to educate them and also to educate the homeowners who are going to do a theater. Because what happens is, I feel like every time we have a meeting with an architect and interior designer, we have to, like, start from scratch and tell everybody about all the basics, you know, that go into these rooms.

Scott Wilkinson [00:24:20]:
Right.

Richard Charscan [00:24:21]:
And it's just, you know, it's just a time sucker.

Scott Wilkinson [00:24:24]:
You know, I was going to ask you about the. Working with interior designers because. And architects, I guess, too, because they don't really know what's involved and what's required to make a good immersive home theater experience. Right.

Richard Charscan [00:24:38]:
Yeah. So that's. That's where the book came in. So the, the idea was that at least if they read the book or if the interior designer or architect is guiding them the wrong direction, they'll look at the book and say, hey, you know, that's not really. I don't want to make this into a living room. I really want to make this into a theater environment. I'm looking for a dedicated space because interior designers want to make every theater into a living room, which is. It's not a living room.

Richard Charscan [00:25:04]:
It's an immersive space for watching movies. You know, you have living rooms all over the house. And you have TVs all over the house. This is a place to sort of, of get lost and escape and to be in the middle of what you're watching, to be a part of it, not to be a spectator, you know, and it's hard to drill that to them. And they, they actually talk clients out of doing theaters. Why do you want to be in the dark? What do you want to sit in a dark room for? Don't you want to be in the living room cuddling up? So this has always been an argument and I just got tired of it. So I was talking to Theo and this other guy one day and I'm like, we should just do a book like what Theo did, because it inspired other people to do more theaters. And I really think it helped the whole industry.

Richard Charscan [00:25:49]:
So that was kind of why we did this, to sort of help. And I, it's, it's, I think it's helping a lot because we, with the money that we made from the book, it doesn't go to me. It goes to giving books to architects, interior designers around the country.

Scott Wilkinson [00:26:04]:
Oh, excellent, excellent.

Richard Charscan [00:26:06]:
We've given out like 400, 500 books.

Scott Wilkinson [00:26:09]:
That's great.

Richard Charscan [00:26:11]:
So, you know, you know, and I'm seeing, you know, I'm seeing it helping out someone. We have a client who's interested. Honestly, I just give them a book. I'm like, just, please just read this so that you kind of know what you're getting into. And, and you know, you have, you know, you have an idea of what the process should be. I mean, what put the writing on the wall for me was I had a client, really nice client, and he really was really excited about the room. And the interior designer. I don't want to bash interior designers on the show, but, you know, they wanted like three rows of seats and they talked him into like doing a TV, like 100 inch TV in a room with three rows of seats.

Richard Charscan [00:26:52]:
Like, I was like, really? Like, why are we, why would you even go in here? Don't you have T TVs all over the, all over the house? And I was like, I wish I had this book now because I'd show. Like, this is why you need to do all these things. And I, and I partnered with friends of mine in the industry, like John, you know, John is in there, John Bishop and Tony Grimani and all these guys, because they're all like me. They're all, you know, they're never satisfied. They're very passionate and they love home theater. And, you know, I Feel that education is power. So the more people know and they're aware of, you know, the better our world will be for people who. Who love home theater and appreciate what we do.

Scott Wilkinson [00:27:33]:
Yep, yep. Well, I want to. I want to show people a few examples of some of the theaters that you've done and some of which I guess maybe are in the book, but. But you've done so many.

Richard Charscan [00:27:47]:
Yeah, there were a couple that we couldn't get in time. I mean, we were lucky that we were able to get Barry Sonnenfeld and we got him to actually be the speaker at Cedia.

Scott Wilkinson [00:27:57]:
I remember that that year. That was you, eh?

Richard Charscan [00:28:00]:
Yeah, it was us. And I think we had less than 48 hours to get that into the book because he was away on vacation.

Scott Wilkinson [00:28:08]:
He wrote one of the forwards.

Richard Charscan [00:28:10]:
Exactly.

Scott Wilkinson [00:28:11]:
Yeah. And he's a passionate home theater guy himself.

Richard Charscan [00:28:14]:
So very passionate.

Scott Wilkinson [00:28:16]:
Totally appropriate.

Richard Charscan [00:28:18]:
And so is Matt Swinberg, so.

Scott Wilkinson [00:28:20]:
Yeah, exactly.

Richard Charscan [00:28:21]:
And he's, you know, he's lost a lot of his hearing from playing drums for Bruce Springsteen, so.

Scott Wilkinson [00:28:27]:
Right.

Richard Charscan [00:28:27]:
I helped him out with acoustics many times. Not just in his theater, which he ended up selling and it was his favorite room in the house to his. To another house that he purchased. And you know, he's always been a great, you know, friend. Friend of ours. I have to say that he's. He's been great.

Scott Wilkinson [00:28:45]:
Great. Well, let's take a look at. At some of these theaters. The first one is actually the simplest and. But it actually appeals greatly to me because what I like sitting in for watching a movie is a black box. Right. And here it is. It's a black box.

Richard Charscan [00:29:04]:
So that's one of our showrooms in la, believe it or not. So if you're. Oh, if you want to get in the appointment. That's why all the seats are different. Those are eight different styles that I

Scott Wilkinson [00:29:13]:
was wondering about that. Okay, so that makes a lot of sense.

Richard Charscan [00:29:17]:
So it's eight different styles for you to go into. And one of our audio integrators owns the showroom and we're very proud of it. But it's. Yeah, it's very simple. But it's got a great JBL synthesis system, digital projection for the, for the video. And. And it looks. It.

Richard Charscan [00:29:40]:
It sounds as good as it looks. Put it that way.

Scott Wilkinson [00:29:42]:
I'm sure it is. I think we have one more picture of it from the other direction. There we go.

Richard Charscan [00:29:47]:
It's a 2 inch thick acoustic system. So it's tuned really nice. Tony Grimani did the. Did the acoustical Analysis for me on this room.

Scott Wilkinson [00:29:56]:
Beautiful, beautiful. I would love to spend time in there. And if next time I'm in la, I'll try to make an appointment to go there.

Richard Charscan [00:30:04]:
Oh, yeah, let me know, man. I'll. I'll definitely hook you up. It's great.

Scott Wilkinson [00:30:07]:
Cool, man. Thanks. All right, looking at the next one, this is a beautiful design, too. I love the edge lighting around the ceiling panels and the wall panels.

Richard Charscan [00:30:19]:
That's all acoustic treatment. Yeah. So the big, the big thing now is LED lighting. Everybody's, you know, really hip on that. And then the other thing is the wood slatting, which the interior design wanted to put all over the place. But we had to be careful because you can't have that over speakers. Right, Right.

Scott Wilkinson [00:30:37]:
Obviously, yeah.

Richard Charscan [00:30:38]:
But they, they actually wanted it in those areas, so we had to be very, very smart in the placement of everything. And you also don't want anything because it's so close to the screen. That's reflective because with wood you can see the reflection.

Scott Wilkinson [00:30:52]:
Sure.

Richard Charscan [00:30:52]:
The image on the wood. So we had to get something very, very flat to work the interior designer, give them what they want, but also not take away from the image. And those floating ceiling clouds are just acoustic treatment that we lit a little, you know, that we illuminated with LED lighting.

Scott Wilkinson [00:31:10]:
It's beautiful.

Richard Charscan [00:31:11]:
Gigantic room. And the equipment in that room. I wanted the EV deal. The job is in Las Vegas. I really wanted him to, to enter it for, for Acedia, but we just, we couldn't make the deadline. But the room, sonically and everything, it's just. It's wow. And then in the back, you, you have a granite.

Richard Charscan [00:31:34]:
You know, you have that granite that's in the back of the room, which also helps for reflections.

Scott Wilkinson [00:31:40]:
Well, it would be very reflective, I would think.

Richard Charscan [00:31:42]:
Yeah. And it actually works so well because it just, it just gives you even that more, more the immersion that will. Looking for in there and the room sonically and the performance wise, I think it's a Barco and Yord or something like that for the projector because it's a gigantic room. I don't know if you can tell from the size of, you know, from, from the image, but this, this is a monster of a project. It took almost a year to build this room. This, this was, this was a heavy duty project, but it's gorgeous.

Scott Wilkinson [00:32:17]:
Now the next one I want to feature, I'm calling the Wave. It's just, just my name for it, because look at that ceiling. It's beautiful.

Richard Charscan [00:32:26]:
Yeah, yeah. So that was just that, believe it or not. That's a rendering.

Scott Wilkinson [00:32:32]:
Oh, that's not even a photograph. Sorry.

Richard Charscan [00:32:35]:
The room changed from that quite a bit. And we weren't even able to photograph that room. I mean, I have photos of it, but. Yeah, the. The room is. You know, we've done a couple of rooms like this where they're elliptical and having that ceiling with the wood. So many acoustical problems. That was.

Richard Charscan [00:33:01]:
That was hard. But at the end, the room actually sounded a lot better. We got rid of a lot of that wood on the front.

Scott Wilkinson [00:33:08]:
Oh, that's good.

Richard Charscan [00:33:10]:
I wanted a bigger screen. The screen was too small for me.

Scott Wilkinson [00:33:13]:
Yep, yep.

Richard Charscan [00:33:14]:
And we ended up using a woven screen. All the speakers are back in the screen and the cabinet underneath was a lot smaller. So that. That helped. And then the other.

Scott Wilkinson [00:33:24]:
The other picture, which I guess is a rendering too.

Richard Charscan [00:33:27]:
Yeah.

Scott Wilkinson [00:33:28]:
I just. I just love the waviness of it. But you're right. The fact that it's all wood is a problem.

Richard Charscan [00:33:35]:
Yeah. We ended up using the ceiling as a diffuser. And that's kind of how it worked within the room. And then we combated everything with a lot of absorption wherever we could use 2 inch absorption to absorb the high and low frequencies more evenly. And those are customers. It's not a bed, but like a custom lounger.

Scott Wilkinson [00:34:02]:
Yeah.

Richard Charscan [00:34:02]:
That we made with custom cup holders that the architect drew. And we custom built that in our. So with our factory. Like we can. I can build anything. Like we're a true custom shop. If you show me a picture of something on a napkin, I can make it come alive and render it. And built it from scratch.

Richard Charscan [00:34:25]:
That's kind of what they did here.

Scott Wilkinson [00:34:27]:
Yeah.

Richard Charscan [00:34:27]:
It came out super cool.

Scott Wilkinson [00:34:29]:
Very nice. Very nice. The next one, I don't know if this is a rendering either, but it's a certainly an unusual looking room that is real.

Richard Charscan [00:34:38]:
So that's another. So this is a job that we did for a famous interior designer. It was in the Hamptons, and the room was completely elliptical. The client wanted to be like a genie in a bottle feel. So this is the first time we ever did something like this. So acoustically we had to do special tracks which we had to create ourselves because if you do a normal acoustic track system, you can create a lot of wrinkles. And the client didn't want any wrinkles. The interior designer didn't want any wrinkles.

Richard Charscan [00:35:10]:
So we had to figure out a way to do all these curves and not have any of those wrinkles that we're talking about. About. And we did. We figured that out. And it came out really great. The other thing that's really interesting is if you look at the stairs when you walk in, you can't. It's impossible to bring furniture down there. Going down.

Richard Charscan [00:35:32]:
It's completely elliptical.

Scott Wilkinson [00:35:34]:
Yeah.

Richard Charscan [00:35:35]:
Banging into every wall. So they wanted this custom couch in the front and in the back. And it's a low couch, which I was against. I think it's very. It looks very cool to me. It's very uncomfortable.

Scott Wilkinson [00:35:47]:
Yeah.

Richard Charscan [00:35:48]:
We had to build these couches in the field because there was no way to bring them downstairs.

Scott Wilkinson [00:35:53]:
You had to build them in the room.

Richard Charscan [00:35:54]:
You had to build them in the room. There was no way. There was no way to bring these babies downstairs. So we had to actually make them on. On the job site. So that's about as. That's one of the crazier ones. Yeah, but it's a very simple room, but.

Richard Charscan [00:36:10]:
But very elegant, but also very complicated when you understand all the details.

Scott Wilkinson [00:36:15]:
All this curved walls would make it very complicated.

Richard Charscan [00:36:18]:
And look at how clean the lines are on the acoustic system on the. On the curved walls.

Scott Wilkinson [00:36:23]:
Yeah.

Richard Charscan [00:36:24]:
You know, that's, you know, it's. It looks. Oh, this is. Looks so simple. It's so hard to do. You have, you have. It's just crazy.

Scott Wilkinson [00:36:34]:
Yeah. Yeah. The next one I thought was pretty remarkable as well.

Richard Charscan [00:36:41]:
Yeah. So this is interesting too. We also made these custom seats so the client found something online, but they were like prefab. So we made gigantic custom versions of them that were a lot nicer and more higher end. And then do you see on the left a bit little looks like artwork.

Scott Wilkinson [00:37:00]:
Yeah.

Richard Charscan [00:37:02]:
So that's actual acoustic treatment that we laser engraved with. All those different shapes are. Are cut into our. Cut out of acoustic treatment to look like artwork. And then it's. It's layered three dimensionally. So you have different layers and then you have lighting in there so that it looks like you're looking at a piece of art on the walls. And you have that throughout the room.

Richard Charscan [00:37:29]:
And this, this came from the interior designer having a vision here. You can see the layers more and how detailed that was. All laser engraved. And each one of those different panels, they were all wrapped individually and then put in this, in this, in this LED framed piece to look like a piece of art. You know, it's very unusual, for sure.

Scott Wilkinson [00:37:54]:
You know, now these are all wonderful theaters, but you've also done quite a few that are themed on movies. Right. And so let's take a look a couple of those.

Richard Charscan [00:38:12]:
Okay. This is a James Bond themed room. And the cool thing about this room, if you notice, it's James Bond, but it's, it's not over the top. And so there's images, but it's not like all in your face. And there's some really interesting things about this room. First of all, the room is only 11ft wide. Okay. If you look at the room, there's three rows.

Richard Charscan [00:38:41]:
There's, there's, there's two, there's two rows of seats. Yeah, you'll, you'll. Yeah, you'll see it's tight. It's two, three seat sofas. But go back to the other image because I want to tell you some cool things about this. This room. Make it really fun and unusual. Do you see this image on the front screen wall of James Bonds? The very famous scene?

Scott Wilkinson [00:38:59]:
Yeah.

Richard Charscan [00:39:00]:
So this was during 2009 when the world was coming to an end and everybody thought that they were going out of business, including me. And we needed this job. And the client loved Pierce Brosnan. That's who he wanted on there. So he want us to take an image and we printed it onto a motorized shade. The idea is so that when every movie starts, you know, you walk into the room, it's completely finished room, and then the shade goes up. And then we have it programmed to a kaleidoscape onto a script. So when that shade goes up, you literally see the continuation.

Richard Charscan [00:39:36]:
And James Bond's walking onto the screen. He shoots the gun and the blood comes down. And then you see, you know, the opening of every James Bond movie.

Scott Wilkinson [00:39:44]:
Wow.

Richard Charscan [00:39:45]:
Looked at the image and he looked at his hand and we took it right off of the Blu ray. Back then, you know, we didn't have 4k. And his hand looked like a claw. And he says, Pierce Brosnan hand doesn't look like that. And we had a show like we froze it. This is what his hand looks like. And it was like, I'm not going to do the project until you can fix his hand. But I'm like, that is his hand in the actual opening of every movie.

Richard Charscan [00:40:15]:
That's what it looks like. So we wouldn't lose the job. I had, we took a picture of my architect's hand and we had him spread his fingers out and we superimposed it onto Pierce Brosnan in that picture. So seeing in that picture is my architect's hand on Pierce Brosnan. And that kept him staying with us and he closed the job. I can't make this stuff up. This is.

Scott Wilkinson [00:40:42]:
Oh, man.

Richard Charscan [00:40:44]:
So we, we go through some crazy stuff with clients and they're clearly demanding.

Scott Wilkinson [00:40:49]:
Clearly.

Richard Charscan [00:40:50]:
In the back of that room, there's another shade. All right.

Scott Wilkinson [00:40:54]:
Yep.

Richard Charscan [00:40:55]:
See it? And then when that goes up, you have the hidden martini bar. Of course, it's hidden to an audio request which they had in those days. And every time I went up, you'd hear the James Bond theme, of course. And all of these images on the side, they're all printed on acoustically breathable fabric. So this is all. This is all acoustic treatment. And then you can see where Daniel Craig is. That is the opening to his office.

Richard Charscan [00:41:26]:
Now, he was. He was pretty hammered one night, the client, and he was looking for his. His room. To get into his room, he had to do some work. He couldn't find the door, the job, and lining everything up. He couldn't find where that was. So that was a pretty funny story. But he loves the room.

Richard Charscan [00:41:45]:
Room and the clients. Dear friend of ours, it's two brothers who are very well known in the sports industry. And we did work for. For both of them. Yeah, they're really nice people.

Scott Wilkinson [00:41:56]:
Yeah.

Richard Charscan [00:41:57]:
Forever. But. Yeah, so that's that one.

Scott Wilkinson [00:42:00]:
But it's that one. The next one. Sorry, go ahead.

Richard Charscan [00:42:03]:
It's a challenging room because it was so tight. And then we put a bar counter in the back to create more seating. And then to the other side, there's a bathroom which also has James Bond motif on it. But, you know, you can't. You really can't see it from here.

Scott Wilkinson [00:42:17]:
It's.

Richard Charscan [00:42:18]:
It was a very hard room to photograph.

Scott Wilkinson [00:42:20]:
Yeah.

Richard Charscan [00:42:20]:
So. So small.

Scott Wilkinson [00:42:23]:
The next one, I'm. I'm a James Bond fan, I guess. Sure. But Tron I love. And yeah, here is a Tron themed theater, which is great.

Richard Charscan [00:42:33]:
So we haven't built this one yet. This is for.

Scott Wilkinson [00:42:35]:
Well, just another rendering.

Richard Charscan [00:42:37]:
Yeah, but our renderings look pretty good. They look almost identical or sometimes. Actually, the real theaters look better than the one they're installing because you can't get the textures. But, yeah, he was a huge fan of Tron. And you can see how we did the acoustic panels to the left and right for the first reflections. And again, not a huge room. So we did one row of seats, made it to a gigantic theater bed with one. A motorized headrest and a bar counter.

Richard Charscan [00:43:05]:
And then the back is. It looks like stone, but it's actually not real stone. That's printed, unbreathable fabric to look like stone. Like you're walking, like. Like the inside of a cave. And then you have all the LED lights that are RGB that change colors.

Scott Wilkinson [00:43:20]:
Right.

Richard Charscan [00:43:20]:
So it's super, super cool.

Scott Wilkinson [00:43:22]:
Yeah.

Richard Charscan [00:43:22]:
I mean, we're looking forward to building that hopefully next year.

Scott Wilkinson [00:43:25]:
Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah. The other one other picture of it.

Richard Charscan [00:43:28]:
Yeah, that really shows. And then it's got the special door. You know, you go up to the door where you press your thumb and it opens up automatically.

Scott Wilkinson [00:43:36]:
Huh. Very cool. Well, I look forward. I'm sure you look forward to that. I look forward to seeing the real pictures, too.

Richard Charscan [00:43:42]:
Yeah, we've. We've never done a Tron theater, so that should be really. I mean, people think of us as a theme theater company, but that's maybe like. Of the work that we do. Most of them, it's pretty. Pretty normal and just, you know, very well as.

Scott Wilkinson [00:44:00]:
As were the ones before, these particular themes.

Richard Charscan [00:44:03]:
Yeah.

Scott Wilkinson [00:44:04]:
The next one I wanted to show was the Lord of the Rings theme, which was really something.

Richard Charscan [00:44:09]:
So this is a retrofit. Okay.

Scott Wilkinson [00:44:12]:
Ah, there we go. Good.

Richard Charscan [00:44:13]:
This perfect example. I should show you the before and the after. You want to see something? The before was like a downstairs hangout, you know, look like it was never changed since the late 70s, you know, and we completely transformed the whole thing. What's cool about this room is you see those windows on the walls? All right, those aren't windows. Those are. There's. TVs hidden in there.

Scott Wilkinson [00:44:41]:
Ah.

Richard Charscan [00:44:43]:
So. And that's hooked up to a Kaleidoscape script also. So when the lights dim, it's hooked up to a script where dragons come and they attack the castle. You know, that was the idea. It only lasts for, like, 30 seconds. It's very quick. It was just something that the client wanted. And then you see all that stone on the walls.

Richard Charscan [00:45:00]:
Yeah, that's. That's actually printed on breathable fabric. And that's all acoustic treatment because the floor had to be stamped concrete to make you feel like you're in a real castle.

Scott Wilkinson [00:45:11]:
Sure.

Richard Charscan [00:45:11]:
And then the. In the back of all the headrest of all the chairs, that has. That's. That's his family and the family insignia, you know.

Scott Wilkinson [00:45:23]:
Oh, no kidding. Wow.

Richard Charscan [00:45:25]:
Yeah, he's. He's really into this. He had a Game of Thrones theater before this, and they had a terrible experience with the construction of it, and they got dirt all over the house. And the guy who did it, he took forever to build the room. And the guy's wife didn't want to do another theater because they didn't have great experience. But he finally went forward with us, and they said the experience was night and day. And I looked at the other theater. They didn't even put real acoustic treatment in there.

Richard Charscan [00:45:54]:
They had Ron and all this. So he never had a theater. He had a theater that looked cool, but it wasn't really done right, so didn't perform well. He never knew what could be done. And even before the room was calibrated, he was freaking out about how great the room sounded. And it's a challenging room when you look at it with the. With the stone floors and everything else, but the room sounds incredible.

Scott Wilkinson [00:46:19]:
And we have another couple pictures of this one.

Richard Charscan [00:46:22]:
Yeah.

Scott Wilkinson [00:46:23]:
Looking at it from the. From the bar at the back to the screen wall. And one thing I liked about this room was in the third picture, there's a whole collectible area.

Richard Charscan [00:46:34]:
Yeah, he had a huge. So we had a video that went on forever. I think we probably still have it on our website, acousticsmart.com but he had so many of the collectibles, he was running out of room. So we had to make the whole back area for his collectibles. And we have a video showing all the collectibles. I'm sure some of it's worth a fortune. And then he ended up getting, like, the. The actual swords from the movie.

Richard Charscan [00:47:03]:
And we have these really cool claws that we found that were holding the swords in place in the back. There's a. There's a knight that was made from a guy that does all the night costumes for all the movies or, you know, all the Game of Thrones movies. And so it's got a little bit of Game of Thrones Throne mixed in with the Lord of the Rings because he loves it so much.

Scott Wilkinson [00:47:25]:
But where is this one located?

Richard Charscan [00:47:28]:
That's in Nashville. And a really super, super nice guy. Him and his wife are the sweetest people. And he. This is his place. Man. Talk about somebody who loves the movie theaters that we built. This is a guy who.

Richard Charscan [00:47:45]:
It's his favorite room in the house. I mean, honestly, I. When this was done, after it was calibrated, he didn't. He didn't really understand how big of a difference the calibration would make. When he heard the final mix, even I was blown away. The speakers were Pro Audio. We had a Storm audio processor in there. And the projector, I think, was.

Richard Charscan [00:48:12]:
I think it was a wolf at the time. I think he's upgraded since, But. But anyway, yeah, just. I was hearing things on my. Like, on my shoulder. Like, he didn't have Dolby Atmos. He never experienced any of this stuff. And it was just a.

Richard Charscan [00:48:32]:
It was a wonderful, wonderful experience.

Scott Wilkinson [00:48:35]:
Let's take it. What One a look at the next one, which I think is one of your wildest. Yeah.

Richard Charscan [00:48:41]:
So this is also. Again, this is the first time we ever did. Did this. We did this with gramophone in Maryland. And the, the. The door is just the work that went into that. That's all custom molded. It's just.

Richard Charscan [00:49:00]:
That looks incredible.

Scott Wilkinson [00:49:02]:
Yeah, yeah.

Richard Charscan [00:49:03]:
Just you can see the detail of it.

Scott Wilkinson [00:49:05]:
Yeah.

Richard Charscan [00:49:06]:
And that also. That's not real. That stone looks so real. Again, it's all fabric. You have to go right up against it to realize that that's fabric and that it's not real stone. We, we worked on that for probably about a month and a half until we got the perfect dimension.

Scott Wilkinson [00:49:24]:
Yeah.

Richard Charscan [00:49:26]:
And we did everything in there and we, we worked with a. A movie set director to help us out with, you know, he wanted some very specific, specific things, you know, from Greek culture. So he. He. Greek culture?

Scott Wilkinson [00:49:42]:
Yeah, Egyptian.

Richard Charscan [00:49:44]:
Egyptian culture. So he created these really cool sconces for us that actually look like real glowing sconces, like there's fire in them, but it's. It's not. And then you have all the. The different Egyptian artifacts which he built in house for us, you know?

Scott Wilkinson [00:50:03]:
You know, I love the projector box

Richard Charscan [00:50:05]:
too, so that's a monster. So if you've ever designed the movie theater, one of the most important things, a lot of things. What's the thing that a lot of AV dealers don't know how to do? Well, is to vent the projector properly so that the projector doesn't overheat. We did a job in, in Texas, and the guy spent a fortune for his theater, and the person who designed his theater didn't invent the projector properly and the theater caught fire.

Scott Wilkinson [00:50:37]:
Oh, my God. Yeah.

Richard Charscan [00:50:39]:
This is a real story. And the guy couldn't use his theater for two years. And we met him at cd and he came by our booth, you know, with his beautiful wife, and he said, you're not going to believe this. I had this happen and whatever. And, you know, it's like, I really want to do this right, but I can't use the theater because I'm allergic to smoke and I can't go in there right now. We cleared everything out. It still smells like smoke. So I'm looking for somebody, you know, who's capable.

Richard Charscan [00:51:08]:
And he flew us on his. On his jet, I remember. And we went like about a week later and couldn't have been a nicer person. And we design a theater. It's a very big space. Not only will we probably less A lot less than the guys that he used who were local flying in. We were about $80,000 less than what this guy charged. But we were able to get the temperature of the projector right on the remote control with the AV dealer.

Richard Charscan [00:51:37]:
So he can sleep at night and always know what the temperature is now.

Scott Wilkinson [00:51:41]:
Yeah.

Richard Charscan [00:51:41]:
Never have this happen to him again.

Scott Wilkinson [00:51:44]:
Wow. And.

Richard Charscan [00:51:46]:
And again, it's just. It was. That was the first time that theater that we ever did a screen that was almost 200 inches because it was like being in a commercial settlement, somebody's house

Scott Wilkinson [00:51:59]:
in a big room. You can do that. Yeah.

Richard Charscan [00:52:01]:
This was close to 15 or 18 years ago when we did. When we did that particular room. Yeah, that's a nice size screen. But this one's not in Nashville. This is the one in Maryland. But the one I was talking about with the. With the theater corps fire that. That was in.

Richard Charscan [00:52:16]:
Outside of Dallas.

Scott Wilkinson [00:52:18]:
Oh, I see. You were talking about projector boxes in general, inventing. And that was not in this Egyptian theater that this.

Richard Charscan [00:52:25]:
No, the Egyptian theater. Everything went like clockwork because we know what we're doing and everything.

Scott Wilkinson [00:52:31]:
Got it. One last theater to look at. And. And this one is so cool. I did. I did want to show people the video from this one.

Richard Charscan [00:52:41]:
Oh, so that's the planning stages. So this was.

Scott Wilkinson [00:52:43]:
Yeah, this is a montage of several pictures within the planning stage of this particular theater. Which lets you drive your car into the theater.

Richard Charscan [00:52:53]:
Yeah. So this is interesting. So we were working with this guy again. This is 2009, when the world came to an end and our phones weren't ringing. We were probably working with this guy for close to six months, and he was torturing us like he couldn't make up his mind. And then at our last meeting, after we went through everything, he tells us he got a new car. And I don't know if I really want to do the theater because I need a place to park my car. And it's really a man cave.

Richard Charscan [00:53:23]:
It's not really a theater because I want to entertain in there and blah, blah, blah. So as I'm walking out of his house, you know, I got in my breath. I'm like, one. You just drive the car into the theater, you know, as a joke, you know, because I'm like, this is it. We just lost the project. And the guy stopped me in my tracks. He says he's like, oh, my God, tell me more. We can actually drive the car into the theater.

Richard Charscan [00:53:43]:
And me and my head architect Mark Soren, we looked at each other like this is going to be crazy. I can't believe he just. He's asked me about this. And the idea was to drive in like you're in the bat cave, you know, to come in.

Scott Wilkinson [00:53:56]:
Right.

Richard Charscan [00:53:56]:
We had a knock into the foundation of the wall. We had a knock. So this is a retrofit. We had a knock into the concrete. This is all done by my own crews. We did all. We built the wine cellar. We built everything you see in this room.

Richard Charscan [00:54:09]:
This. There was a secret door to go into the theater. There's a motorized sheet that comes down. So if you don't want to see the. The car, you don't have to. We got. Not only did we create a rendering, we create a virtual tour rendering. We got to make a model of his car, the color of his car.

Richard Charscan [00:54:27]:
We created an avatar of him driving into his own theater because we really wanted to do this job. It was, you know, it was. It was that time in our lives where we got to impress this guy because this is. This is the chance of a lifetime to do something really unique. And. And, you know, it's 2009. The world was dead. We needed to stay alive.

Richard Charscan [00:54:47]:
Right.

Scott Wilkinson [00:54:47]:
Yeah. The business and what a business it was. Let's take a look at the video. It's. It's really something.

Richard Charscan [00:54:54]:
So that's the finished product. And this is him driving it. Actually, this is one of my good friends, Robert Kaufman, from Audio Command Systems out of New York.

Scott Wilkinson [00:55:06]:
So this isn't the. The client driving car.

Richard Charscan [00:55:09]:
The client was with a bat, ready to kill me. And he didn't want anybody damaging his car. Very carefully.

Scott Wilkinson [00:55:20]:
One of my favorite cars, by the way, the Porsche Targa. Yeah.

Richard Charscan [00:55:24]:
So we speed that up to make it look cool.

Scott Wilkinson [00:55:26]:
Yeah, sure.

Richard Charscan [00:55:28]:
And then this is him walking in the secret door. And these had to go up against the wall because we don't, you know, we didn't have enough room there. But these are clearance. These are chairs that we make in house. Special mechanisms that we want to reward for where they don't take up any room. So the idea is they're acoustically great because they have a low back when you listen to two channels. And then the headrest pops up. When you want to watch a movie, this.

Richard Charscan [00:55:53]:
This is showing the LED lighting, you know, changing colors.

Scott Wilkinson [00:55:57]:
Right. And the wine cellar.

Richard Charscan [00:55:58]:
And the wine cellar that we built. And then showing that you can watch a movie from the car if you really wanted to. That city. That cityscape is acoustic treatment. And that's the special door where you press your hand and he Wanted a Star Trek door. To the right of that, there's actually a very, very tiny bathroom that is just enough to do your business and to leave.

Scott Wilkinson [00:56:21]:
Right.

Richard Charscan [00:56:22]:
We had to make a lot of use out of a very, very, very small and tight, and tight space there. It was, it was pretty wild.

Scott Wilkinson [00:56:31]:
Well, that's very wild. Absolutely. So, last question.

Richard Charscan [00:56:37]:
Yes.

Scott Wilkinson [00:56:37]:
Obviously these theaters don't come cheap. I mean, what, what are we talking about? Ballpark, if in the range of these theaters.

Richard Charscan [00:56:50]:
Not crazy for what we do. I mean, our average theaters between, you know, I mean, before tariffs and everything in the world changed a little bit. And we used to be in 150 to 250. Now we're probably between 200 and 300 on average. You know, for our normal rooms, we have some rooms that are 180, 185. And then we have rooms that are over half a million.

Scott Wilkinson [00:57:18]:
Sure. But I was thinking some of these could easily reach into a million or more.

Richard Charscan [00:57:22]:
No, we don't. You know, we're very reasonable, believe or not. I mean, with the audio, maybe. Yeah, absolutely. But.

Scott Wilkinson [00:57:29]:
Oh, you're not talking about the equipment.

Richard Charscan [00:57:31]:
No, I'm just talking about the interior.

Scott Wilkinson [00:57:32]:
Right. Okay.

Richard Charscan [00:57:33]:
Was a whole other level.

Scott Wilkinson [00:57:34]:
Sure. Yeah. If you want to go JBL Synthesis or Wisdom Audio or something really, really high end. Sure. You're going to push that price way up. A Trinov or a Storm audio processor. Yeah. Arco projector.

Richard Charscan [00:57:49]:
Yeah, I love, I love all that stuff. I love the barcos. I love, you know, jbl. The wisdom stuff is great. I mean, you know, we're, we're getting to work with a lot of new companies too, that are coming out, you know, so it's always interesting to, to, to see what's out there and how it's going to change the sonics of the room. You know, we've even done rooms with Denon receivers that actually I'm really good.

Scott Wilkinson [00:58:16]:
Oh, no kidding. Yeah. Yeah. All right.

Richard Charscan [00:58:18]:
It's all on how you tune the, you know, the secret sauce is, is how you tune the room. And if you do the acoustics right within the room, you're 80 there. I mean, obviously if you have a Storm Audio processor or something like that, we can really get into the guts of it and, and, and, and dial in all the bass and everything and hire Tony Grimati to come out and do the acoustical analysis, which we do quite often, and he calibrates the rooms for us. That takes you to another stratosphere. We had a client just recently who, you know, look, if you want the best guys. You know, they're expensive and the good calibrators are expensive, but is it better to spend money on somebody really knows what they're doing or just to buy another piece of equipment that won't give you that kind of a result? So it's, you know, these, these guys have years of experience. So I like to surround myself with people who make me look good and who have as much passion as I do about the work I do. And these guys just take our, our smart in the acoustics mark to a whole other level.

Richard Charscan [00:59:25]:
And I love that. And we have this client just recently who didn't want to do it. He says, oh, I had somebody come in and they had, they did the calibration and I knew it was very mediocre and he spent a lot of money and I felt bad for the guy. And we don't make any money on the calibrations. I just want them to have the best. So I said, look, you know, I said, honestly, just check, check it out. If it doesn't work out, I'll, I'll split it with you. But I'm going to be shocked if you're not impressed.

Richard Charscan [00:59:56]:
And I think it was a 12 hour calibration of the audio and even help the video. He was so blown away at the difference in the audio and what it's kind of like. He called me up the very next morning. He says, I can't believe you talked me into this. I'm so happy that you did, you know. Thank you so much. I didn't realize it because, you know, you know, when you believe in something, you know, you know, you have to go with the, go with your gut, you know, and you have somebody that spends that kind of money on a room, they should really have the room the way it should be. It shouldn't be a mediocre experience.

Richard Charscan [01:00:33]:
You want them to walk in there every single time and have goosebumps. Because then if they're having goosebumps, then they'll tell their friends to come in and that spreads the love of home theater to other people. And then they want to do a theater.

Scott Wilkinson [01:00:45]:
Yep. Yep. Well, Richard, thank you so much for being here. Tell people where they can find you online.

Richard Charscan [01:00:52]:
So you can find me everywhere these days. But Acousticsmart.com is my main, is my main website. And you'll see lots of cool stuff in there. You can go to Instagram. Our Instagram shows our work. Our acoustics on Instagram is updated literally three times a week. So you'll you'll see a lot more new projects there. Our home theology book can be purchased right from our website.

Richard Charscan [01:01:17]:
We can ship the book out international. I just sent two books out to Switzerland for somebody. But the freight is a lot more. You just have to contact me if you are out of the country. The program that we have won't ship out of the country unless we contact us. So I got to do that manually. We have shipped them to Australia. We've shipped them to every place in the world.

Richard Charscan [01:01:39]:
And it's a great book to have and it's a lot of fun. And then we also have home hometheorology.net where you can learn a little bit more and see some of the other podcasts that we've done. But and also if you have a question or if you just want to talk, you know, there's no egos in our company. We're always here to help homeowners, AV dealers especially. And, you know, we just want people to do home theater optimally around the country and to really do the best room that they can so they enjoy every moment out of it and it becomes a very special experience for them.

Scott Wilkinson [01:02:22]:
Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for being here and sharing your vast knowledge and, and great experience with building these amazing home theaters.

Richard Charscan [01:02:33]:
Thank you. Well, it's a pleasure and it's an honor to be here and you. Thank. Thank you.

Scott Wilkinson [01:02:36]:
Thank you. That's Richard Charshan, president of Acoustic Smart, and you can learn a lot more, as he said at his website, acousticsmart.com now, if you have a question for me, you can send it along to HTGWIT TV and I'll answer as many as I can right here on the show. And if you have a home theater you're proud of, even if it's not at the level of Acoustic Smart designed and built home theaters, I want to see. I want to see it. Send me some pics. Maybe we'll get you on the show. Until next time, geek out.