Audio Advice Live returns to the Sheraton in Raleigh, North Carolina from August 7 to 9, and this year's headline attraction is a full 9.7.4-channel home cinema built by ASCENDO Immersive Audio, Trinnov Audio, and projector-maker Christie. The demo lives in the show's Magnolia II room and pairs an ASCENDO immersive speaker array with dedicated infrasonic subwoofers, Trinnov processing, and Christie projection.
The part worth paying attention to isn't the channel count — it's what's doing the tuning. The system leans on Trinnov's room correction and its Cylindrical WaveForming bass technique, which uses a cluster of subwoofers (the demo runs six of ASCENDO's the18 drivers) working together to shape low-frequency energy across the whole room rather than at a single seat. Trinnov also has a smaller 2.1-channel setup in the upstairs lobby with ASCENDO's flagship BLACK SWAN speakers and an Altitude processor, which is an easier place to actually hear what the correction is doing.
Why it matters for tuning: multi-sub bass management and automated room correction are the two tools that make the biggest measurable difference in a real room, and shows like this are a rare chance to hear them applied properly in a space that was set up for it. Most of us are working with one or two subs and a phone-and-mic app, but the underlying idea is the same — measure the room, let the processor flatten the seat-to-seat variation, and stop chasing a smooth curve by ear alone.
If you're going, treat the big Magnolia II room as the spectacle and the 2.1 lobby system as the teaching demo. Ask the Trinnov staff to show you a before-and-after correction curve if they have one on a laptop; seeing the target curve next to the raw in-room response is the fastest way to understand what these systems are actually changing.
Audio Advice Live is free to attend and runs across roughly ten Dolby Atmos theaters plus two-channel and headphone rooms, so there's plenty to hear beyond the flagship demo. We'll fold any measured takeaways into our room-correction guides once the show wraps.
