Most showrooms show you what they've decided to sell you. Burbank — our Projector Shootout Lab — was built for a different purpose entirely: to answer the questions you're actually asking.
Scott Wallace · Definitive Sales since 2001
Two years ago, Definitive faced a genuinely transformative set of choices. The owners of the building hosting our Seattle showroom made it known that our lease would not be renewed. Losing the veteran staff that had become a fixture of Roosevelt Way's "Stereo Row" was simply not an option. And so a decision was made to take advantage of what turned out to be a remarkable piece of timing: two adjacent spaces in the Bellevue showroom building had just become available.
With those spaces secured, the harder question emerged: what do you do with them? After considerable internal deliberation, a direction came into focus for one of the rooms — something the industry had never quite seen done this way before. Not simply a showroom. Not just a demonstration theater. A lab.
The Projector Shootout Lab was born. Since renamed "Burbank" — Hollywood being reserved for the main showroom's Reference Theater — it has become one of the most genuinely useful rooms we have ever built.
What Makes Burbank Different
The room houses four different projectors simultaneously. Any one of them can be called up instantly for display on our 14-foot wide masking screen. Each projector is individually optimized with its own custom madVR video processor profile, calibrated for different screen sizes and aspect ratios. The Dolby Atmos system runs an 11.2.6 speaker layout. And the room has been carefully set up with calculated viewing angles from multiple seating distances, with degree markers on the wall so clients can feel — not guess — what different fields of view mean in practice.
The idea is straightforward: the questions people have when designing a home theater are real and specific. Burbank is built to answer them with evidence instead of opinion.
Inside Burbank
The Questions It Answers
Every client comes in with a version of the same handful of questions. Burbank was designed to make those questions answerable through experience rather than speculation.
"Why this projector instead of that one?"
We put the projectors in contention in the same room on the same screen and switch between them, one right after the other. Each optimized identically. Same content. Same conditions. The differences — if they exist — reveal themselves immediately. The arguments about specifications stop mattering when the picture is in front of you.
"How do I know what size screen is right for my room?"
Sit in Burbank at the seating distance that matches yours. Look to your side — there's a degree marker on the wall. That number tells you the field of view you're experiencing at that screen size. We run a calculator that uses any two of three variables (screen size, seating distance, field of view) to determine the third. So if you believe you want a 150" screen and your seating distance is 12 feet, we can show you exactly what that field of view feels like before you've committed to anything. It's a good thing to know — before you've decided on a lot of things that will be a big part of your life for many years.
"Do I really need more than 5.1?"
"Need" is subjective. So instead of answering that with an opinion, we answer it with a demonstration. Take the prime seat. We call up fully calibrated presets from 5.1 all the way up through 11.2.6 — every format along the way, each one optimized. There's something worth noticing: you tend to hear the speakers less when there are more of them. The reason is that with more speakers and smaller gaps between them, your brain doesn't have to work as hard to bridge the distance — the soundfield simply feels coherent and natural rather than placed. Worth experiencing before you decide.
Why It Matters
"Regardless of where you are in your home theater journey, Definitive treats your investment seriously — while having some serious fun in the discovery."
The room really is a lab — and we use it as one. Not to sell a specific projector or a particular speaker count, but to help inform the decisions that a well-designed home theater requires before a single product is specified. Screen size. Projector selection. Speaker layout. Viewing geometry. These are the variables that determine whether a home theater is truly great or merely adequate — and they are almost never resolved by reading a spec sheet.
Whether you're at the beginning of your home theater journey or deep into designing what you hope will be a reference-level room, Burbank is a resource. Come with your questions. Leave with answers — the kind that come from actually sitting in the room and hearing it for yourself.
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