I have known Joaquin Rivera for twenty years. Twenty years of him telling me, with complete confidence and zero doubt, that you could have a legitimate movie theater in your own home. Twenty years of me nodding politely and thinking, sure, buddy.
I finally believe him.
This week I flew out to Gardena for a training at the ByDesign Vision and Sound Marketing showroom, and I left a convert. Joaquin has built something genuinely impressive out there: four LED walls, a full experience center, an award wall that takes a minute to read in full (Barco Residential Rep of the Year, multiple times, plus a Stewart Filmscreen GOAT Award, which, yes, is exactly what it sounds like), and a team that matches the room. If you have never been to the ByDesign showroom and you work anywhere nearby, fix that immediately.
A Brief and Humbling Trip Down Memory Lane
It is 2005. I am 24 years old and it is my very first business trip. I am headed to a training that Joaquin is hosting at Stewart Filmscreen. I am very excited. I have prepared. I have dressed like someone who definitely knows what they are doing. Spoiler, I did not. But you don’t know what you don’t know, and the best way we learn is by doing.
I had the brilliant idea of bringing a video from that trip to share. A little nostalgia, a little “look how far we have come.” The only problem? Joaquin’s showroom is fully digital and has no way to play a DVD. Which is how I ended up being rescued by Joel Youngberg from DSI, who I met at the event, and who graciously digitized the whole thing so we could watch our younger selves and laugh accordingly.
I will be sharing a screenshot of 24-year-old Kat as proof. You are not ready.
What Barco Is Doing Right Now
The training was led by Chris Deutsch, Business Development Manager for Barco Residential West Region, Jeff Marks, Business Development Manager for the East Region and Canada, and Yoshi Koike, Product Manager for Barco Residential, and it was the kind of session that makes you want to rethink everything you thought you knew about home cinema.
A few things that stuck with me:
By the presenters’ numbers, Barco holds 65-70% of the US commercial cinema projector market. They also closed their acquisition of Focal and Naim this spring, picking up parent company VerVent Audio and folding both brands into their entertainment business. And they are building out a residential line that borrows directly from what they have spent decades perfecting in commercial theaters, starting with the fact that they design projectors for scope aspect ratios, which they say 70% of high-end home theater clients prefer. They are not retrofitting commercial gear for residential use. They are building for it.
The Heimdall series runs an RGB laser up to 6,000 lumens, and we were told it is quiet enough to put in the room with you without a hush box. The new Freya SST pairs new high-contrast DLP chips with an updated server design running solid state drives. And then there is the Runar CS, a DCI-HDR-certified cinematic LED display for residential use and the first of its kind. Not a TV. Not a commercial display awkwardly repurposed. A residential LED display with full DCI-HDR certification, a 0.9mm pixel pitch, full DCI-P3 color coverage, and, per the presentation, 4K at 120Hz and a level of contrast that you have to see to believe. It sits above the TruePix walls in the residential lineup, the Bifrost series and its siblings, which is where most dealers will start before a client asks for DCI certification on the wall in their basement.
I saw it. I believe it.
There was also a presentation from Marc Billings, CEO of Blackdove, which is essentially a Spotify for digital art: curated, moving art installations designed to run on large LED displays and give dealers a new recurring revenue stream. Individual pieces on the platform have reportedly sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars. The conversation it opened up about how to position these walls as art, not just technology, was one of the most interesting things I heard all day.
Chris, Jeff, and Yoshi know their products inside and out, and more importantly they know how to talk about them in a way that makes the room want to go sell them. That is not a given. It is a skill. We ended the evening at a steakhouse, which is never a bad way to close out a day.
A Word on Travel Choices
The day was so good I did not want it to end. The redeye, however, was a different story.
Midnight out of LA, layover in Chicago, back in Columbus by 10 a.m. Contacts in for 36 hours straight, full workday waiting, and the man next to me snoring with the commitment of someone who had absolutely nowhere to be.
Worth every minute of it. But maybe next time I book the morning flight.
Go See Barco at CEDIA
If anything in that training summary made you curious, and it should have, Barco Residential will be at CEDIA Expo in Denver, September 1 through 4. Go see the Runar. Go see the Heimdall. Stand in front of a TruePix wall and see how close you can get before you see a pixel. Go find Chris, Jeff, and Yoshi and ask them to walk you through it, because they are excellent at it.
And if you are in Southern California, schedule a visit to the ByDesign Experience Center in Gardena. Joaquin and his team will take care of you, and you will leave believing things about home cinema that you did not believe when you walked in.
