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View Full Version : Building a home theater room in a new house... Where to start?



alexm84
05-10-2014, 13:56
Hi everyone,

We will be building our new house in the not so distant future. Have the block already and just starting to look into house designs.

Just wondering if there are any good sites where i can look into what to do with the home theater? As far as size, insulation, shape, wiring, power etc.
I have pretty much a blank canvas to work with so can make sure i do it right as the house is designed.

The room will be used for home theater and music. I have the seas idunn 2 way kit. I will run these as rear speakers and build another for a centre. Then will build the troels gravesen jenzen 3 ways to run as fronts and get a sub of some sort too.

Any suggestions on where to look for answers would be great. I suppose the first thing i need to know, is what the best size will be for a setup like this.

Macca
05-10-2014, 14:10
Building your own cinema, eh? Exciting stuff.

This site has a lot of information:

http://www.cinemaquestinc.com/ive.htm

Brigadoon
16-05-2015, 08:28
Alex
I used to design and install home theatres for a living, and I was CEDIA (http://www.cedia.co.uk) certified. Building a home cinema is not a simple thing.

It is essential that you get things right from the beginning, otherwise you are going to waste a lot of money. Below is a list of things you need to consider in the design, but first, size:

This depends entirely on how much space you have, and how many people you want to accommodate - I've done home cinemas that seat four people, and I've done ones that seat twenty. So essentially, you need to decide on size. As a rule of thumb, a minimum workable size is a more or less equivalent to a single garage. More important than size is dimensions- you are at the planning stage, so you can eliminate 80% of home cinema problems before they materialise.

Right, the list:
These are all things to address before a single brick is laid, and this is just off the top of my head - not exhaustive by any means.

- DIMENSIONS. Avoid a cube like the plague. Have as many different sized walls as possible, and as few right angled corners as possible. This will minimise standing nodes and make for much better audio performance
- ACOUSTIC ANALYSIS Once you have your room designed, you will need to do a nodal analysis to establish standing waves and nul points. This will dictate where you put your subs. Do this as part of the room dimension design - you can plug your dims into the program and get a good idea of problem areas and how to mitigate them by playing with wall sizes/heights etc.
- FLOOR Either a sloping floor, or terraced to ensure optimal sight lines
- NB CABLE ROUTING . You need to plan where your main rack will be located, what type of system you will use (5.1. 7.1. 10.1) and plan cable routing accordingly. This also pertains to power and video for the projector.
- NB NB SPEAKER TYPE & PLACEMENT. NB NB This plays back to cable routing. What style are you going for? Discrete hidden speakers, or visible? If hidden, you will need to build back boxes into the wall. Also, if you want hidden then you will need to look at acoustically transparent screens.
-NB NB NB SUBWOOFERS NB NB NB Yes you will need at least two, and their placement is critical. Bad sub location is the single biggest culprit in messing up cinematic audio.
- LIGHTING

If you can afford it, I suggest paying a CEDIA certified designer to advise and work with you and your architect - it will be money well spent.

Take a look at the CEDIA (http://www.cedia.co.uk) site, there's a wealth of info there.



Regards
Barry