Near a field of Roman ruins in North Yorkshire sits an aircraft-hangar-sized factory where British-made projection screens get cut, sewn, and shipped to cinema installers across Europe.
Zebra Home Cinema visited the Surround Group facility — home of the Display Technologies (DT) cinema-screen manufacturing operation — for a walk-through with Neil Davidson. What emerged was a picture of a business that's roughly equal parts metalwork, fabric engineering, carbon-fibre 3D printing, and Zoom calls between business partners who work in the same building.
Inside the Surround Group Factory — Where British Cinema Screens Get Built
The tour starts in what Neil calls the "messy part of production" — metal processing, CNC machining, and the assembly of speaker cabinets.
"A lot of people have a fancy demo room — and I have a sewing machine."
That's the honest framing. Cinema screens, for all their specification sheets, are precision-fabricated fabric products. A large-format screen is a metal profile engineered to millimetre tolerances, a CNC-cut surface fabric, a tensioning mechanism that holds even stretch across ten square metres, and — in some cases — integrated speaker cabinets built into the frame. All of it is stitched, cut, wrapped, and packed by hand before it ships.
The Surround Group factory handles every step in-house: metal, electronics, fabric, 3D printing, assembly, and packaging. What emerges from the loading bay is a finished screen frame with speaker boxes, electronics mounts, porthole apertures, and cable quick-connects already integrated.
The Metal Shop — CNC, Profiles, and the Speaker Cabinet Workflow
The back of the main floor handles the dirtiest work. CNC cutting of the metal profiles used to build screen frames. Assembly of speaker cabinets — including cabinets designed to integrate with in-wall speakers, in-wall subwoofers, and in-ceiling subwoofers.
A detail from the tour worth noting: on the day of the visit, the team was assembling cabinets for in-ceiling subwoofers destined for a dedicated demonstration facility. These aren't off-the-shelf boxes. They're purpose-built enclosures matched to the specific driver, the room dimensions they're going into, and the acoustic brief of the demo space. This is the category of component most installers never see manufactured — it looks like a wooden box from outside, but the internal bracing, damping, and porting are all engineered to the driver.
Screen metal profiles on the shelves ranged from 6-metre to 7-metre to 8-metre widths. The 8-metre is a four-way frame — four-way masking, meaning top/bottom as well as left/right — and represents the largest screen the facility has built. Context: the average screen the facility now ships is over 4 metres wide.
"I guess we would never have imagined it, but actually our average screen now is over four metres."
That scale shift matters. It signals that reference-level home cinema specification, which was a niche product ten years ago, has normalised into a mainstream luxury category at sizes that would previously have required a commercial cinema specification.
The Markforged 3D Printer That Made It Possible
One of the first capital purchases the business made — when Neil and Simon founded the company — was a Markforged 3D printer using chopped carbon-fibre filaments. Ten years later, it's still running close to continuously.
"That's our 3D printer. It's a Markforged 3D printer which uses chopped carbon-fibre filaments. A lot of the parts on the screens are actually 3D printed. This unit was the first thing Simon and I ever bought as a piece of capital investment, and I think it's maybe had about 10 hours of not being used ever since. If it was a car, it would have 400,000 kilometres on it."
Why carbon-fibre 3D printing specifically? Two reasons. First, screen mechanisms — masking motors, tensioning clips, cable routing — contain dozens of bespoke components whose geometry doesn't match anything standard. Injection-moulded parts at those volumes would be economically absurd; machining them from aluminium would be expensive and slow. Chopped carbon-fibre prints combine mechanical strength suitable for moving parts with the flexibility of on-demand manufacture. Second, the team can iterate design changes inside a working day.
This is the hidden story of most modern cinema hardware: the small, bespoke, low-volume precision parts that make a 7-metre motorised screen work are now printable in-house rather than outsourced to a supplier with minimum order quantities.
The New Silicon-Edged Fabric System
The tour included a sneak preview of a new DT screen-fabric tensioning system.
Historically, DT screens — like most premium projection screens — have been finished in tuck fabric, the same method used to upholster acoustically-treated walls. The advantage of tuck fabric is that the stretch across the screen is very even, which preserves predictable acoustic transparency across the whole surface.
The traditional alternatives are lace-and-grommet systems. Their drawback, particularly on knitted acoustically-transparent screen fabrics, is that tension concentrates around each grommet. The result is visible pulls on the screen surface — more pronounced on knitted fabric than on woven — and inconsistent acoustic transparency across the screen.
DT's new system borrows from their fabric wall panel technology: a silicon bead is stitched onto the edge of the CNC-cut screen surface. That bead engages into a channel on the frame at a precisely-calibrated tension, delivering:
| Feature | Tuck fabric (old) | Lace & grommet | Silicon-edge (new) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Even tension across surface | Yes | No (pulls near grommets) | Yes |
| Tool-free install | No | No | Yes |
| Scales to large sizes | Yes | Yes | Yes (same install on 2.5m and 7m) |
| Install time | Long | Medium | Fast |
| Acoustic consistency | Consistent | Inconsistent | Consistent |
The headline benefit is speed. A 7-metre screen using the new system installs in the same pattern as a 2.5-metre screen — tuck the four corners in and release. This is a meaningful shift for integrators where on-site time is always a constraint.
Why Speaker Cabinets Should Float
A quieter technical point in the tour: the speaker cabinets Surround Group builds into their screens are designed to float — that is, to be mechanically isolated from the screen frame itself.
Why does that matter? Two reasons:
- 1.Efficiency. A speaker mounted rigidly to a large surface radiates some of its acoustic energy into the surface rather than into the air. When the surface vibrates, that energy is lost to the room. A fully-isolated speaker cabinet keeps more energy in the air where it belongs.
- 2.Half-space loading / 6 dB gain. A speaker mounted flush into a large planar surface (the screen frame in front of the speakers) is acoustically loaded into half-space rather than full-space. The result is approximately a 6 dB gain in forward output — a doubling of apparent loudness at the listener's position for the same amplifier power — with a directional character rather than an omnidirectional radiation pattern.
Combining these two effects — isolation from surface vibration and half-space loading — gives integrated screen-plus-speaker systems an efficiency and directionality advantage that freestanding in-room loudspeakers can't replicate without additional acoustic engineering.
Key Takeaways
- ▪Surround Group (the manufacturing arm behind Display Technologies' screen product line) produces British-made cinema screens and integrated speaker assemblies from a North Yorkshire factory, handling metal, fabric, electronics, and 3D-printed parts all in-house.
- ▪The facility's average screen output is now over 4 metres wide; its largest build is an 8-metre four-way masking frame. The normalisation of large-format home cinema has moved what was once a commercial spec into the residential luxury mainstream.
- ▪A Markforged carbon-fibre 3D printer handles the bespoke small parts inside the screen mechanisms. It's been running almost continuously since the business bought it as its first major capital investment.
- ▪The new silicon-edged fabric tensioning system — borrowed from DT's fabric wall-panel technology — delivers tuck-fabric-quality even stretch with a tool-less, fast install that scales identically across all screen sizes.
- ▪Integrated speaker cabinets are designed to float — mechanically isolated from the frame and flush with the screen surface — giving a roughly 6 dB efficiency gain via half-space loading and preventing vibration losses into the surrounding structure.
- ▪The manufacturing model is end-to-end: what leaves the loading bay is a finished, pre-integrated assembly ready for rapid on-site install, consistent with DT's broader cinema-in-a-box philosophy.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who manufactures Display Technologies cinema screens?
Display Technologies' cinema screens are manufactured by the Surround Group facility in North Yorkshire. The factory handles metal profile work, CNC cutting, screen-fabric cutting and stitching, integrated speaker cabinet assembly, carbon-fibre 3D printing of precision parts, and full assembly in-house.
How big can a DT screen actually be?
The largest screen currently manufactured at the facility is 8 metres wide with four-way masking (top, bottom, left, right). The facility's average residential screen order is now over 4 metres — a meaningful shift from what was standard luxury residential specification a decade ago.
What is the difference between tuck fabric, lace-and-grommet, and silicon-edge screens?
Tuck fabric delivers very even stretch but is labour-intensive to install. Lace and grommet installs faster but concentrates tension around each grommet, producing visible pulls and inconsistent acoustic transparency (particularly on knitted screens). DT's new silicon-edge system uses a stitched silicon bead on the cut fabric edge that engages into a frame channel at calibrated tension — combining even stretch with a fast, tool-less install that scales identically across all screen sizes.
Why are the speaker cabinets in a screen designed to float?
Two reasons. First, isolating the cabinet from the screen frame means the speaker's acoustic energy radiates into the room air rather than being absorbed into a vibrating frame surface — better efficiency and better imaging. Second, mounting a speaker flush into a large planar surface (the screen frame wall) loads it into half-space, producing roughly 6 dB of forward-directed gain for the same amplifier power, with a directional radiation pattern that a freestanding in-room speaker can't replicate.
What does the Markforged 3D printer do in the factory?
The Markforged printer, which uses chopped carbon-fibre filaments, prints small-volume precision parts for the screen mechanisms — tensioning clips, cable management components, bracket geometry, and custom hardware that would otherwise require outsourced tooling or expensive machining. Its capacity for on-demand, strong, dimensionally-accurate prints is what makes bespoke design iterations economically viable at the production volumes DT works at.
