I'm getting very mixed messages today. On the one hand, the Athereion Max from
Awol Vision is very easy to set up with only a 9-minute installation video. On
the other hand, here's everything that came with it. They sponsored this video,
sending us over a complete package with the projector itself, their Vanish
cabinet, a 130in screen that rises from
the floor, presumably out of the Vanish cabinet, and also the Thunderbeat, a 4.2
2.2 sound system that works with the speaker and the projector for 5.2.2. A
major focus for AWOL Vision in the design of the Athereion Max was
apparently what they're calling pixel level clarity. Kicking off with some
speeds and feeds. This thing supports pretty much everything. [music] Dolby
Vision, HDR Plus, 110% coverage of the
Rec 2020 color space along with gaming features like variable refresh rate and
auto low latency mode. Of course, ah,
the entire other side is dedicated to this tagline. Precision in every pixel.
Apparently, clarity was a major focus during the design of this product. Pun
intended. [music] This thing is absolutely packed with clarity enhancing features like
highindex sapphire glass with what they're calling a rare earth coating
which supposedly will reduce reflections, a titanium thermal mesh
that's supposed to reduce focus drift and anti- rainbow effect technology
which I will be very interested to see because I do have a bit of sensitivity
to the rainbow effect. Like the way everything's laid out in here. You got
your power cable, you've got your HDMI C. This is a USBC cable.
>> [music] >> What an interesting selection. USB microB
composite and a remote, but no HDMI. Pretty
standard remote. Nice prominent voice control button. Free TV. And of course,
it has an AI button because what wouldn't these days? Now, let's take a
look at the projector itself. Bold design. We've got an IR sensor on the
front. And then moving around to Hey, look. Cooler Master fans.
fun. It makes sense, you know, masters
of cooling. They can cool a projector just as well as they can cool a PC. Uh,
what else we got out the back here? Got our power in, three HDMI inputs with one
of them supporting EER, a type-C input
that, huh, they want you to use for a
computer. So, I guess that's DisplayPort, USB port for connecting a media
device. There's that composite. uh RS232 for if you have like a home automation
system or something like that, as well as wired Ethernet and optical audio,
which I do still like to see even though it's kind of an older standard. Oh,
look, I missed something. [music] There's a USB 3 port over on the right
along with the power button. And then on the bottom, you've got your various mounting options. Either your adjustable
feet if you want to just sit it down or if you want a ceiling mount, you've got
your bolt pattern right there. The Max boasts a maximum of 3,300 lumens output,
which they claim is good for up to a 200 inch screen. I would say that's probably
getting close to the limit, unless you have a perfectly [music] light controlled room. And it'll do up
to a 6,000 to1 native contrast ratio with some black enhancement that will
hopefully boost it beyond that. Now, it's time to hook it up to all this
other stuff, which hopefully is not too
hard to figure out. This is cool. Well, the middle unit of the media console has
a built-in power hub as well as some fun stuff in here. Remote control, power
adapter. So, that's presumably for that barrel jack before. And then we've got a
really fun USBA to dual USBA female port
thing. And then an A to C cable along with a baggie of drywall screws and a
cute little screwdriver. So, stubby. Oh,
another built-in power bar. [music] There's a fan grill here, but I think
that's just meant to be a passive intake for [music] the active exhaust that's
over here. Oh, this is also metal on the
top. That explains why the whole thing is so faking heavy. There's a third
power bar. How much stuff do they expect you to be
hooking up to your projector? Okay, so
we have ultra short throw light rejecting screen.
Oh, an extra year of warranty. Look at that. Please keep. They may be needed
for the future use of your screen. Okay, inside this box is some
interesting stuff. We have a third remote, which apparently I don't need
cuz it should automatically lift and lower the screen when the projector
turns on and off. So, I guess we'll see. As well as this power cord. Oh, sticker.
Put that wherever I want. Also, I may have gotten the order of operations
confused again because these all have to go together before I can put the
projector screen on them. Derp. I think the feet just kind of slide on.
Am I missing anything?
I don't know. Sure. Right. Like, do I
just Yeah. Yeah.
Oh, that's kind of cool. See, I thought the sliding feet was a bug, but it turns
out it's a feature. It allows you to very easily adjust it and get at this
power plug over here. Okay. Oh, hey, there's a 3 and 12 mil ox
jack in the side of the projector. I didn't notice that before. I'm going to
plug this into here. Oh, it said uh
don't try to open it before removing the protective film. So, I'm on it. I'm on
it, boys. It's easy to lose track of the scale of this product a little bit
because it's in front of a 150in screen.
This is a giant giant screen. Wow, those
cooling fans rip. I would probably want
to put that on a speed controller myself. Does it have one? No. But it's
just standard mounting holes, so nothing would prevent you from putting a Noctua or something in there. In fact, it would
match the color scheme. Built-in cable management holes are nice. You'd love to
see it. We figured out what the USB splitter is for. This guy goes right
here. Okay, that handles the screen. And
then this guy, that USB A to C goes into
this USBC port down here in the base
what that one does. Not sure yet. With that all connected, theoretically,
it's opening the thing. It's firing my laser. Oh, it's a laser projector. Did I
mention that? Damn. Now,
all right. Heck yeah. Okay. It needs to be aligned.
This is This is normal.
Wow. It's dark back here.
Oh, this is cool. Yeah. It has like acoustically transparent material here
so that you can put speakers right below the screen at the bottom. We haven't
even set up the speakers yet. That is a lot of speaker built into the projector.
They really intend for you to use this as a center channel. Like obviously all
I'm hearing are interface dootes so far, but it's really loud. Okay, auto
keystone correction. Let's see how this goes. Ensure the projected image is a
rectangle. Okay, I think I was playing with them when I was unboxing it and
getting the B-roll, so they're just super not even right now. Okay, we tried
uploading our picture of the screen. It did not work.
We need to get it so that the edge of our screen is inside the border area.
>> Liner stops liners. [laughter] I'm not going to do it again. I'm not
going to touch it now. Long story short, some hours of micro adjustments to the
feet as well as playing around with the
height of the screen when it reaches its maximum and we got this far. Bottom
line, it did need some keystone. We do still have about an inch of blank space
at the bottom that it looks like from all the other videos we've seen of this
product are pretty normal. And there is some winess at the edge that seems to be
a function of this extending and retracting projector screen. You
wouldn't get that if you had a fixed screen. There's also other downsides of
this style of screen.
>> [laughter] >> That's not cuz I was running really fast. But
can your setup do this? Hey, [screaming]
definitely cool. Now we turn it on.
I'm going to try and figure out the motor for this guy now. Uh the plug
might have come deplugged. Brief update.
We're trying to get the whole thing to, you know,
you do the thing. And it turns out CEC is too good. And this remote is now
controlling the NVIDIA Shield that we plugged in. And so when we power it off,
it doesn't power off the projector. Quick update. We have solved the drawer
retraction detraction. Traction. [music]
We've solved the drawer issue. All right, boys. We're there.
It always comes down to cables, doesn't it? That's why you should get your
cables at ltstore.com
in a couple months when we have stock. >> Let's go.
>> There we go. Get these remotes out of
here. Who needs them until I'm troubleshooting? >> What did you do?
>> I didn't do anything. >> What do you mean? This has never happened before. >> I didn't do anything.
>> Oh my god. It's in thermal protection mode. It could take 10 minutes before.
It's in thermal protection mode cuz we were lifting it and retracting it so
much. You know what? I have an LMG review. I will go do that and then I
will return. Okay, we waited for the thermal protection. A boom.
It took a lot more than 9 minutes, but we finally got there. Finally, time
to check out some content. We haven't played around with image settings pretty
much at all yet, but right out of the gate, HDR is looking really nice in a
light controlled environment. And AWOL points out that their Noircene system 2
combined with their strong native and dynamic contrast really helps to make
HDR content pop. You can't have highs
without contrasting lows. AI contrast.
Whoa. Huh. Wow. You can tune this to be really
poppy if you really want to. High might be a little bit much for me, but it's
definitely doing something. Do you know what?
[sighs] This is the first device that I've been like, "Okay, yeah, vivid.
Fine. The skin tones are a little off.
They're a little red and vivid." The darkest image setting and highest
contrast. Okay, I'm I'm down for some high contrast. Definitely a unique value
proposition. the high. I mean, it's huge. And I gotta
say, with the content on the screen, when's the last time you thought about the ripple at the edges? Like, could it
be kind of irritating? Yeah. But it's in your peripheral vision for the vast
majority of what you're going to look at on a screen this size, right? Like, it's, you know, we shouldn't make
excuses for, you know, poor tensioning,
right? But it's going to be a limitation of this style of screen. And you're not
married to this style of screen. You can use a different style of screen if you want. Oh, right. That's right. They have
150 in as well. That would be I think that would be towards the limit of what
I would want to do with this level of brightness. Should we fire up a game?
Switching over to games. Filmmaker mode.
Not going to work for that. Definitely too much latency. But game mode. Well,
that's much better. Actually, actually really good. High
refresh rate mode. Hold on a second here. But it totally does it. It totally
does it. It even supports Fresync Premium Pro.
Definitely still has some rainbow effect, which I especially notice with
like a mouse cursor moving around like that. Image quality, yeah, not quite on
par with what we saw in filmmaker mode or, you know, fine-tuning the image in
some of the other modes, but if that's the cost of having latency this low,
this is extremely usable and obviously a
gigantic screen, so the immersion is undeniable. Sponsored or no? before they
actually ship this Kickstarter. There's definitely some rough edges that they
need to file off a little, especially with the uh ease of alignment and the
deployment and and undeployment. But in terms of cool factor,
I mean, it's kind of undeniable. It's
just a matter of whether the cool factor is worth the price. We'll have their
Kickstarter links down below. If you guys enjoyed this video, hey, subscribe to ShortCircuit.