Building a home theater in your house can be a rewarding hobby and experience. Here are four simple guidelines that will help you get started:
- The space is more important than the equipment.
- The installation is as important as the equipment.
- Cables should never be seen.
- As little equipment as possible should be seen.
You can buy a bunch of equipment, take it out of the box in any room, hook everything up, and start watching movies. But will that be the best possible experience? Probably not. That’s what these four guidelines are about: to help you get started in the right direction so that you can enjoy watching movies more.
The Space You can spend a shocking amount of money on audio equipment and projectors and still have a crappy movie experience. I’ve seen it done and it’s a shame. I’ve also seen the complete opposite done where someone has taken great care in selecting the space and preparing it while spending very little on equipment to produce a terrific movie watching experience.
Why is the space important? Because the audio part of the audio/video experience is at least 50% of the package, perhaps more. When people visit my theater they first talk about how the room looks, how big and clear the picture is, but when they leave all that they typically talk about is how it sounds. Your ideal space will be rectangular with the shorter side of the rectangle being your screen wall. You’ll also need to avoid or correct reflective surfaces. Windows and untreated walls allow sound to bounce and create bad echoes. Modern movies are designed to create a specific audio experience. If your room disrupts what the movie’s sound editor slaved over, you won’t get the best experience.
All of my early theater planning was about the space. Don’t start your planning by shopping for equipment.
Installation How you build and install your theater matters. A lot of people worry about “sound proofing,” but this isn’t typically a real issue. Most worry about sound proofing because they believe that movie audio needs to be loud. It doesn’t. If you design your room well, you can get a great audio experience without rattling the neighbors’ windows. Home theater hobbyists like myself try to create spaces where the sound is great in the room and don’t worry much about what’s heard outside the room. Soundproofing just isn’t an issue.
The same goes for the image. A great movie experience comes from a BIG picture. The easiest, most movie-like way of doing that is to use a projector and screen, not a TV. While you can buy big TVs today, the experience is more movie-like with a projector (and it’s cheaper to project a really big image). I may be a snob, but I don’t consider anything under 8o inches to be a big enough image for a home theater. And equally important TV or a projector, if you can’t control the light in the room you’ll diminish the experience.
How you install the equipment in this room will make a big difference.
Hide The Cables It’s just sloppy and unsightly. It’s not that hard to snake cables through walls or to create channels along your baseboards. Do you see cables hanging from walls when you pay to see a movie at a commercial theater? Don’t let them spoil your home theater experience, either.
Hide The Equipment A lot of my fellow home theater geeks love their equipment and take pride in displaying all of it. Yes, I also love to see what you’ve got, but not while watching a movie. My goal for a great movie experience is to not see any technology. Just the picture. I don’t need to see your speakers, amplifiers, and other cool equipment.
It’s very easy to put your equipment at the back of the room, or even better, in another, separate room. That will make it easier for you to hook up and gets all of the unsightly cables and distracting lights and heat out of your theater. It’s very easy to use an IR (Infra Red) or RF (Radio Frequency) repeater to make it easy to control everything.
It all boils down to this: think first about the experience of watching a movie. Don’t start with equipment or gadgets. Think about how you want to experience movies and TV. Focus on that first and these guidelines can help you get started creating your own home theater.
The Four Simple Guidelines To Make Your Home Theater Experience Better by Randy Murray, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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There is nothing like have a home theater system with all the extensions that literally make you feel like you’re at the concert or in the movie theater