Home Cinema Installation — Manchester’s Highest Penthouse

Kaleidescape Media Room in the Beetham Tower

As part of the extensive audio video system we installed in the Beetham Tower Penthouse — the Crestron Integration Award-winning installation atop Europe’s highest residential living space at the time — we also installed a bespoke media room. A dedicated Kaleidescape 1080p player draws films and music from the whole-apartment server, feeding a Classe decoder and amplifier combination that drives Bowers & Wilkins Signature 8NT speakers built into a custom media wall. The result rivals the best floor-standing speaker systems available — with the aesthetics of a designed interior.

Custom Media Wall

The media wall was custom designed and built to accommodate every specific component precisely — including cabinets of the correct volume for the Signature 8NT speakers and subwoofer, all lined with acoustic material. Rear channels are built into the marble rear wall. A huge Bowers & Wilkins Custom Theatre subwoofer is concealed behind custom speaker fabric on a fitted frame. The Classe components have a special back plate encouraging airflow, ensuring reliable operation over extended listening sessions. All speakers were finished in the client’s chosen colour.

The joinery was engineered around the loudspeakers rather than the other way round, with bookshelves and the television recess arranged around fabric-covered speaker panels in a single timber unit that reads as library furniture. Nothing in the room announces that a reference surround system is present. That is exactly the brief a media room sets: outstanding AV performance in a space that still works as a beautiful living environment.

Media rooms have been part of our work alongside dedicated cinemas since 1998, and the same design, calibration and control standards apply whether the screen is a television in a living room or a projector in a basement. The room drew on each of these disciplines, from the design of the wall to the programming of the control system.

Bowers & Wilkins Signature 8NT

The Signature 8NT is Bowers & Wilkins’ reference in-wall loudspeaker, and it is a genuine three-way design rather than a flush-mounted compromise. Each speaker combines a 25mm Nautilus tube-loaded aluminium dome tweeter, a 130mm woven Kevlar FST midrange and two 180mm paper/Kevlar bass units, crossing over at 500Hz and 4kHz, with a quoted frequency response of 33Hz–22kHz (±3dB) and a sensitivity of 90dB. An in-wall speaker of this calibre depends on the enclosure it is given, which is why the media wall cabinets were built to the correct internal volume and lined with acoustic material.

Classe Amplification and Kaleidescape

Amplification and decoding are by Classe, housed within the media wall on back plates designed to encourage airflow so the electronics run reliably through long films and extended listening. The source is a dedicated Kaleidescape 1080p player in the room, drawing from the whole-apartment Kaleidescape server that stores the client’s film and music collection. Because the server feeds every zone of the penthouse, several different films or albums can be enjoyed simultaneously in different rooms. As with every cinema system we install, calibration is part of the handover rather than an optional extra: speaker levels, distances, crossover points and equalisation are measured and set in the finished room.

Crestron Control

The room benefits from a Crestron lighting control system with a remote touchpanel — picking a film from the apartment’s Kaleidescape library is as simple as switching on a standard TV. The panel also controls all room lighting, with mood scenes programmed for viewing, entertaining and standby recalled at a single button press. The media room sits within the same Crestron system that runs more than 60 lighting channels across the whole penthouse, and the client can adjust and save scenes from the touchpanels at any time.

Media Room at the Top of Manchester

The Beetham Tower is Manchester’s most iconic residential building. The penthouse media room is one of our most celebrated installations in the North of England. Its combination of in-wall Signature 8NT speakers, Classe amplification and Kaleidescape delivers a performance standard most dedicated cinema rooms cannot match — in a living room that looks as if it was born this way.

This room is one part of the wider whole-penthouse Crestron installation, which commands the entire top two floors of the 168.87m tower. That system distributes audio across eight zones and video across four, and controls underfloor heating, ventilation, swimming pool temperature and the irrigation of a 4,000 square foot rooftop olive grove. The installation won the Crestron Integration Award for Best High Rise Project in Europe in 2009 and became an official Crestron Digital Media Case Study.

Frequently Asked Questions — Beetham Tower Media Room

Can a media room match the performance of a dedicated cinema room?
Yes, in the right circumstances. This media room uses Bowers & Wilkins Signature 8NT speakers built into a custom acoustic media wall, driven by Classe amplification and fed by a Kaleidescape source — a combination capable of outperforming many dedicated cinema rooms, in a space that still functions as a living room.

Is this media room connected to the rest of the Beetham Tower penthouse system?
Yes. The Kaleidescape player in this room draws directly from the whole-apartment server that is part of the wider award-winning Crestron installation across the entire penthouse, which also manages lighting, climate, security and a rooftop olive grove.

How are speakers built into a media wall without compromising performance?
The media wall in this installation was custom designed around the precise internal volume each Bowers & Wilkins Signature 8NT cabinet requires, lined with acoustic material, with the subwoofer concealed behind acoustically transparent fabric — engineering the joinery to the speakers’ requirements rather than the reverse.

What is the Bowers & Wilkins Signature 8NT?
It is a three-way in-wall loudspeaker with a Nautilus tube-loaded aluminium dome tweeter, a Kevlar FST midrange and two 180mm bass units, rated from 33Hz to 22kHz (±3dB). Its rotating mid/treble sub-baffle keeps dispersion correct whichever way the speaker is mounted.

Beetham Tower Whole-Penthouse Installation → · Media Room Installation → · Kaleidescape → · Crestron → · Home Cinema Installation →

Project Gallery

The first image shows the media room itself: the timber media wall with the television at its centre and fabric-covered speaker panels set into the joinery. A Crestron handheld touchpanel sits on the coffee table in front of the seating. The second image shows a Crestron touchpanel on a dining table beside the penthouse’s floor-to-ceiling glazing, with the view across Manchester from the top of the tower.