One of the first things to get clear is this: what exactly is a home theater?
Here’s my simple rule: if you take a stranger to your room and they say, “Wow, this is exactly like a movie theater!,” then you have a home theater.
Everything else is not.
Yes, you can have an excellent TV, sound system, and comfy chairs, but your family room isn’t a theater. It’s a family room where you watch movies. Your bedroom isn’t a theater, either. And yes, you might have a big flat-screen TV on your office wall, but it’s not a home theater.
A theater is a very specific space. It’s a dedicated space and it has one purpose: watching movies & TV. Not everybody needs or wants a full theater, but if you want one, it needs to be a space where there are no other distractions. For example, a Sports Bar is a great place to watch a football game with friends, but it’s an awful place to watch a movie (conversely, theaters aren’t great places to watch sports with friends—theaters are too confining). If you want a room where you and your family can do lots of different things, including watching movies, you will have to make compromises and sacrifices that will dampen your movie experience. That’s not a theater.
You can incorporate many aspects of movie theaters into almost any room and improve your movie watching experience. That’s really what most people want. But if you want the ideal, immersive, movie going experience, you’ll need a theater. I’ve seen great little theaters in rooms the size of walk-in closets, built into garages, bedrooms, and attics. Each one fit my definition because when I walked into them because I instantly could recognize that “this is a theater and nothing else.”
Your first step in building a home theater is to decide if you really want or need a home theater. It’s possible, likely even, that you just need to improve how you watch movies in a particular room. But if you do want a true home theater and you have the right space for one, you have a remarkable opportunity AND a new hobby. I’ve had great fun with the hobby. My friends and family, many of who called me crazy when I talked about building a theater, now call me a genius. They can’t wait to come over for a movie.
The What Is A Home Theater (And What Is Not) by Randy Murray, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.