What is REL 3D Home Theater? I’ll be honest, nine months ago, I was asking myself the same thing after we received a call from a customer asking if we could do a REL 3D set up in his house.

After some research on my part and speaking with the REL technician, I quickly understood the concept. Basically you are adding a REL sub to each pair of speakers in the home theater set up. This makes every speaker pair in your theater a full range set up speakers, which is what the original Dolby Digital called for.

I remembered my days going to the CEDIA trade shows and the two best home theater demonstrations that I have ever heard, consisted of 7.1 surround systems will all channels being supplied by full range large floor standing speakers. Both of these set ups sounded so incredible and dynamic, that I still remember them today. As good as those demo rooms were, the reality is most folks simply can’t fit seven full range tower speakers in their theater or media room. Until now!

The cool thing about REL 3D is now you can get that same experience of having seven full range tower speakers with much smaller speakers or even with in-wall or in-ceiling speakers!

REL 3D Home Theater Experience

Our first REL 3D system went into a modest sized room, only18’ x 18’ with one open wall to the right. We added 7 subwoofers in total to this system (2 for LFE, a pair for the front speakers, and a single sub for the height, surround and rear speakers) We dialed each subwoofer with its associated pair of speakers using the same technique REL recommends for adding a single sub to a pair of speakers. To do this, in the receiver setup menu, we set every speaker to large and defeated all of the room correction software before we added the new subs. After a little set up time, we had every sub/speaker combo dialed in. Then we were able to set levels and distances and the results were stunning.

It was a huge improvement and dynamics were off the chart! The system was smoother sounding and less fatiguing as well. In addition to smoothing out the bass for the whole room, I believe some of the improvement came from being able to bypass the room correction software.

In fact when we ran a room correction and applied the results, it didn’t sound as good as the self calibration we did with a SPL meter and a tape measure. I would suspect that for many rooms, you would be able to defeat the room correction software and get better results.

I know this set up probably sounds a little intimidating, but it wasn’t that hard to do. If you find yourself wanting to up the performance of your home theater, we are happy to discuss the pros and cons of the REL 3D systems.

Reach out to us, we are happy to help!