Collaboration, teamwork, partnership: These are the core values on which Cortex VIP Cinemas builds its home theater business. Ever striving to foster relationships with manufacturers, integrators, distributors and industry peers, the company aims to position itself as the premiere provider of luxury home theater audio and video solutions. Leveraging Cortex’s unique approach to the home theater marketplace and its relationship with Dolby Laboratories is company co-founder Steve Evanitsky. With a broad and diverse background in the entertainment industry, he shares some of the history behind the creation of Cortex VIP Cinemas, how it’s differentiating itself, and its mission going forward.
It a nutshell, what value does Cortex VIP Cinemas bring to the home theater marketplace?
Rather than sell separate pieces to make up a home theater audio-video system, Cortex offers a system tailored to the room. This includes surge suppression, power isolation, battery backup, HDMI matrix, and up to 64 channels of Dolby Audio processing. Each component has been engineered by Cortex and its manufacturer partners to work flawlessly together. To the end-user, the benefit is a superior sounding system, with all of the energy and emotion intended by the original artist regardless of the medium. The home technology integrator benefits from no longer shopping for and piecing together a system. Our solution runs as one finely tuned engine customized for a specific environment, and versatile to be able to be deployed in home cinemas, media rooms, semi-private public spaces, yachts, and even airplanes.
In addition to offering a personalized audio-video system, what else differentiates Cortex VIP Cinemas from other providers of home theater solutions?
Our biggest claim to fame: Most manufacturers have best practices that they recommend to dealers; at Cortex we include all of our recommendations into every system, so the dealers don’t have to worry about meeting our standards. Secondly, we base all of our room designs on Dolby’s Commercial Theater specifications, slightly modified by us because of varying room sizes.
Dolby Laboratories produced a unique audio processor exclusively for the luxury home market that’s built around the same software and hardware utilized by every movie theater, Hollywood studio, and Academy screening room that showcases the Dolby Atmos logo. This puts us in a league all our own, as we are able to provide integrators and end-users with an audio experience that is better than the best commercial cinemas. Other audio processors utilize consumer versions of the Dolby Atmos codex; built-into our audio processor is a commercial-grade codex to deliver an uncompressed, unmanipulated Dolby Atmos experience. We like to say that Cortex VIP Cinemas brings Hollywood home.
What makes Cortex VIP Cinemas an asset to home technology integrators?
Most integrators don’t design and install enough home theaters to get really proficient at it. At Cortex, designing and calibrating theaters is all we do. We are able to look at the attributes of a room, design a system that’s engineered to work perfectly in the space, hand-deliver it to wherever the dealer wants it, and after installation calibrate it to perfection. This “concierge-style” service eliminates much of the legwork for the integrator, as they no longer need to figure out if and how each component of a system fits together. Cortex VIP Cinemas does it for the integrator, while giving them the flexibility to use any speaker, control system, and display required for the room.
What methods are you using to tell the Cortex VIP Cinemas story and demonstrate your commercial-grade Dolby Atmos audio solution?
Integrators can experience the system at the Pro Audio Technology Sound Room #6 on the CEDIA Expo show floor. We are also in the process of completing a full-functioning showroom in California featuring a complete Cortex VIP Cinema, as well as other home theater components. The showroom will function as a training facility for dealers and an experience center for their clientele. More will, of course, follow.