Engineered acoustics, supplied to trade

Where the range came from

C-ATS began in the work rather than in a product plan. Years of specifying cinema alongside integrators kept arriving at the same difficulty: nothing available did several jobs at once. Treatment that performed had to be deep. Treatment that was shallow gave up on scattering to get there. And whatever solved those two still had to be something an integrator could specify, sell and install without an acoustician on site for the fitting.

The range was designed against those constraints together rather than one after another. That is why it is three panels and a design, each panel answering one of the three problems, rather than a catalogue to choose from.

The two things that make it different

The first is depth. Acoustic treatment normally costs a room 100 mm to 200 mm or more on every treated wall, and in a cinema or a listening room that floor area is worth more than the treatment. No panel here is deeper than 50 mm, and the Resonance Control Panel is 43 mm.

The second is that the design comes with the panels rather than after them. What C-ATS sells is a modelled room: a report and a treatment layout, with the panels that build it. The design, the margin and the client relationship stay with the integrator throughout.

Where the system applies, and where it does not

C-ATS is a specialist in small room acoustics. That is a technical domain rather than a statement about size: it describes the range of rooms in which resonance and reflection dominate what a listener hears, and it is the range the methods and the models were built against. It runs from a domestic listening room up to boutique commercial scale: home cinema and media rooms, music and listening rooms, and boutique commercial cinema. A boutique cinema is inside it. A full-size multiplex auditorium is not.

Outside that domain the work is not merely unusual, it is the wrong tool. Two of the three problems the system is built around barely arise in a large room, so neither the models nor the test data transfer. It is better to say so than to sell into it.

Inside it, two things carry almost equal weight: how the room performs, and how little of the room the treatment consumes. The range was designed against both at once.

The alternative, and why there is a middle

A critical listening room usually presents two options and nothing between them. A specialist acoustic design house takes the room, generally on its own terms and at considerable cost. Or the acoustics are worked out on the job, alongside everything else the integrator is carrying. The first takes the relationship and the margin with it. The second leaves the integrator alone with a specialist problem, on a job that already has enough of them.

C-ATS is the middle, and it is two routes rather than one. The reasoning is set out in full in the knowledge base, in public and without registration, so a room can be understood before anything is bought. And where the room itself is to be modelled, that is a defined step with a defined output rather than a takeover of the project. The other layers of a finished room, fabric walls and lighting among them, are available from the wider group if they are wanted, and never as a condition of the acoustics.

The evidence is public

The full BSRIA report and the per-panel absorption coefficient sheets are published on this site, without registration. Specifications are built on test data rather than description, which only works if the test data is where a specifier can reach it.