Getting eager to transform one of your rooms a home theater and don’t know how to go about it? Let us guide you on the path of awesomeness that you deserve.
At one time, home theater systems used to be a luxurious possession, but with rapid advancements, these components have become common and affordable to own. One of the first steps of setting up a theater experience is deciding on a budget and accordingly hiring an expert who can guide you properly through the , hows, and whys. These knowledgeable experts have combined information from various sectors, including A/V, Seating, HVAC, Construction, Lighting, Interior Design, and Acoustics. These pieces are necessary for your desired room as any component, not installed properly, can ruin the entire experience.
Following this, here are a few other things that you need to take care of:
Evaluating your room for home theatre performance
Evaluating a room for creating your home theater plays an important role in retaining the best theater experience at your disposal. As home theaters are domestic listening rooms, and therefore room acoustics of small rooms have to be considered in order to explain the acoustics in such enclosures.
Here are some factors other than acoustics that are essential to be taken care of while installing a home theater system:
Lighting: A room with excess ambient lighting can have a significant impact on the overall theater experience. For setting up a home theater system, you require a dark room with the absence of light emitted from other rooms or . This will create the impact of the itself while watching a movie.
Dimensions: The dimensions of the room have proven to be a great factor in affecting the sound effects of a music system. Similarly, in the case of home theaters, there are certain specifications related to the audio, display, seating and other arrangements. For instance, the TV display should be placed along the short wall of a rectangular room. Whereas, for sound, a fully enclosed room is recommended.
Seating: Usually, people put their couches up against a wall, however, there should be enough space between the two so that the speakers’ sound can absolutely engulf them, in layman's words - they’ll be able to experience surround sound.
Addressing connectivity - wireless and wired cabling
Until everything is connected, you can't have a home theater system; if you buy simple link cables and speaker wire, or the very high-end stuff. The key things to consider are using the right form, correct length and connecting it correctly. Many ties are coded in color. Be sure the colors on the ends of the cable suit the connections on the components.
The length can be a consideration for speaker cable, depending on the distance from the amplifier or AV receiver the speakers come from. The best speaker wire is 16 or 14 gauge. The 18 gauge cable is very thin and does not recommend keeping quality drop over transmission in mind.
Picking the right equipment - audio, video, control, lighting
Audio - A space can be called a linear and time-invariant acoustic system. Hence, a time-domain impulse response, which decides the decay, gives you a complete description of space. Specific acoustic parameters are based on a impulse response and address the relative energy content at certain time intervals.
There are several parameters to measure the acoustics, including time criteria, energy criteria, spaciousness, index, perceptive effects, spatial effects, and acoustical interferences. After getting these parameters in place, you can move on to selecting the most relevant equipment. A typical home theater system consists of 5 speakers - a subwoofer, left and right speaker, a center speaker, and 2 rear left and right speakers.
Video - A beautiful picture is key to a great home theater, so it's better to have a bigger one than going for a smaller one and regretting later. Bottom line: We highly advocate going for a 4K HDR TV, and even better when you can afford OLED. (Our TV Buying Guide describes everything.) If you're dedicating a specific room to a home theater alone, this isn't just very exciting, it means you can go very wide with a projector and screen spanning 8 foot or more across for true theater-like imagery. The newest 4K projectors of today are razor-sharp and quiet whispers. The projector is usually mounted on the ceiling at the back of the house, and the projection stays stationary or is designed to disappear like a motorized shade of the sun. In rare cases, you can also opt for automated movie curtains.
Control - When you have arranged all the various elements of home theater, you'll probably want to invest in a universal remote to control all of them. A well-selected, well-programmed remote will make any audience in the house easier to live. If you have a small home theater setup, you can get away with a basic remote entry stage that only controls a few gadgets and has little to no flexibility to configure buttons to your personal needs.
Lighting - Nothing is more theater-like than a lighting device that dims automatically when you click the Watch Movie button on your screen. Creating a suitable entertainment space for a home theatre, natural lighting is the best solution to eliminate disturbances. Hanging or suspended fixtures and lamplights can reflect on the screen or cause the projected image to be illuminated unevenly. The lights should be dimmable and operated remotely.
The following are preferred options for lighting a home theatre:
- Wall sconces
- Recessed lighting
- LED or fiber optic lighting strips in the floor or baseboards
- Ambient lighting
- Task lamps next to the seating
All lighting choices are installed fixtures and can be dimmed and operated remotely. Table lamps should have opaque shades, and pull chains or switches easy to locate.
In a home theater lighting should be discreet to help create the theater's atmosphere — but it should also be able to completely illuminate the area for cleaning and other activities.
As for all electrical installations, a specialist can do so and comply with all building and safety regulations. In-floor lighting should always be LED and should not produce heat.
Conclusion
Let your system get up and running for 2 days. This will take day 1 to run all the wires, and day 2 to go through the manual of your creator, page by page, to configure the device for your specific components. In comparison to stereo receivers, home theater receivers have setup menus to direct you through all possible choices. The good news: Self-calibration of better home theater receivers today. (Self-calibration is the method in which the receiver uses the included microphone to A) measure the room acoustics and, B) set the level and distance of each speaker to your listening position — automatically).
What's important: Everything vibrates in the universe, including where you're going to put your home theatre. (Room acoustics is the first thing our experts are searching for and repairing while building a full-blown home theatre.)
Consider how loud your room is, or how quiet, before you even start. Seek to clap hands. The room is probably too loud if you hear a whisper of an echo as a result of rough walls, wood or tile floors, tons of window glass, etc. Conversely, if you don't hear the clap, your room could be too dead (lots of soft/cushy furniture, thick carpets, angled walls, tapestries, and everything else might disturb the sound). Ideally, your room will be as quiet as acoustically as possible. We suggest a few discreetly spaced acoustic panels and/or the introduction of sound-absorbing materials in the right places to get there. (This is our specialty, please contact us with questions).
