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Terry Paullin

Correspondent

After 25+ years as a Silicon Valley Executive, most recently as President and C.O.O. of Crosscheck, Mr. Paullin decided to follow his passion to the emerging Home Theatre industry. In 1994 he formed Front Row Cinema to design, build and calibrate Home Theaters for private residences. Nearly 600 theaters later, he remains engaged in the Industry in the following ways.

Builds dedicated (single purpose) Home Theaters and "Theatre Environments" (rooms used for other purposes as well).

Teaches Imaging Science and other courses for the Imaging Science Foundation. Mr. Paullin has taught CEDIA accredited classes to the installation community at both AVAD and ADI.

Consults to Industry on the topic of Imaging Science (Pioneer, Optima, In-Focus and several others under non-disclosure). Mr. Paullin has served on the Board of two companies and the Advisory committee of two others.

Has written articles/product reviews for major industry publications, including Widescreen Review, The Perfect Vision, The Ultimate Guide to A/V, WIRED magazine and CEPro and has maintained a monthly column (One Installer's Opinion) in Widescreen Review for the past eight years.

Mr. Paullin has a B.S.E.E. degree from Long Beach State University and performs ISF monitor calibrations for private individuals.

Mr. Paullin also maintains 3 theaters in his home for testing, comparison, performance verification, and reference viewing.

23 Columns1 ArticlesRSS

Articles by Terry Paullin

4K Ultra HDHome TheaterStandards

One Installer's Opinion: The Perfect Storm

The 4K display standard faces a fragmented rollout complicated by competing resolutions (3,840 vs. 4,096 horizontal lines), unresolved naming conventions, and a missed opportunity to advance beyond 8-bit color depth and Rec. 709 color space. Upgrading to 10- or 12-bit color with 4-4-2 or 4-4-4 chroma subsampling and a wider color gamut such as DCI or Adobe color space would deliver perceptibly greater image fidelity than resolution gains alone. For consumers and installers, rushing an incomplete standard risks repeating the format-war delays seen with HD-DVD vs. Blu-ray, potentially stalling hardware adoption once again.

Columns
Home Theater

One Installer's Opinion: Times, They are a Changin' - Part Deux

A veteran home theatre installer surveys the shifting A/V landscape, flagging the 4K-to-8K pixel race as a likely step backward for early adopters due to native-resolution remapping and first-generation compression artifacts. Multi-Dimensional Audio (MDA), already debuting in select high-end commercial theatres, is identified as the most significant true step-function advance in surround sound authoring and distribution in decades. For consumers, the practical takeaway is that specialized custom installation shops now offer more reliable long-term support than the big-box retailers that have largely disappeared.

Columns
Home TheaterHD Audio

One Installer's Opinion: What?! ... Better than Home Theater?

Dolby Atmos, introduced at the newly renamed Dolby Theater in Hollywood, is an object-based audio mastering platform supporting up to 128 inputs and 64 simultaneously active speakers, enabling sound mixers to position individual audio elements anywhere in three-dimensional space rather than routing to fixed speaker channels. The system requires only a single master that the software can remap to any venue's hardware configuration, eliminating the need for separate 5.1 and 7.1 mixes. For home theatre enthusiasts, the technology raises serious questions about whether a comparable spatial audio experience can be replicated in a living room, and the author concedes the commercial cinema has temporarily reclaimed the edge.

Columns
HD AudioHome Theater

One Installer's Opinion: Subtraction as a Means of Addition

Dolby TrueHD with advanced 96K upsampling addresses a longstanding audio artifact called preringing, caused by brickwall filters that roll off at 44.1kHz and 48kHz during digitization, by applying an apodizing filter originally developed by Meridian Audio for their $18,000 Signature Reference 808.2 CD player. The process temporally shifts preringing artifacts to the postringing side of the signal where they are masked and rendered inaudible, and is encoded directly into Blu-ray content so it passes transparently through any AV receiver or Blu-ray player. Listeners at a controlled demonstration unanimously detected improvement, reporting smoother high frequencies, crisper detail, and more natural reverb decay.

Columns
Home Theater4K Ultra HD

One Installer's Opinion: Searching for the Truth...

A veteran custom installer challenges 2013 home theatre predictions, arguing that 3D adoption is driven by feature bundling rather than genuine demand, and that plasma displays and projectors remain viable premium categories. The piece warns early 4K adopters about up-conversion artifacts, noting that a BD player fabricating 6 million pixels to meet an 8-million-pixel request creates a signal that a 1080p display must then discard, compounding errors across two devices. For enthusiasts, the practical takeaway is clear: matching source resolution to display resolution avoids the processing chain that degrades image quality.

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