Month: September 2021

Before we ever buy the first piece of audio of video gear, we first need to understand what we want to get out of our theater. Are we focused solely on movies? Do we care about TV? What about music? How many people do we need to seat? How close are we to other rooms, like a master bedroom or a kid’s room? There is an infinite set of questions to ask, but we have to start somewhere. By asking some of these questions up front, we can begin to put together a home theater design that provides the features that are most important for our use of the theater.

Home Theater Design Ideas

As I mentioned in my very first blog post, the AVS Forums are always going to be the very first go-to for design ideas. I’ve learned more just reading build logs than I ever thought there was to know. Here’s a few links to important areas on the forums along with a subreddit that is a little more scattered but still has great content:

• Dedicated Theater Design & Construction
• Completed Theater Thread
• The Show Me Thread
• DIY Screen Forum
• /r/HomeTheater

I’m contemplating the idea of a completed gallery with tags for easy filtering and searching, but this is just an idea. If this seems like a decent idea, drop me a comment and let me know!

Home Theater Design Tools

So if we must start with design, what’s the best way to visualize this? There are a variety of great tools that are free out there. Personally, I find SketchUp to be an amazing visualization tool that doesn’t have a steep learning curve and really let’s you get a feel for what your theater can look like. It also has great measuring tools that let you easily determine angles for the main listening position (MLP). I’m a relative notice at home theaters, but I’ve been a fan of SketchUp for years to aid in many woodworking and design projects over the years. Here’s an example of what I hope to build:

Beyond SketchUp, there are a variety of floorplan toolsets out there:

• LucidCharts
• Visio
• Diagrams.net

I found LucidCharts to be by far the easiest for working with Floor Plans. Diagrams.net didn’t really understand how walls connect and while Visio did, for the price (not free), I would have expected better to be honest. Here’s a quick example in Lucid:

Not great…but for the price, it’s hard to argue. This took me literally 5 minutes to create compared to the hour I spent in Visio producing a less desirable outcome.

Budget

Now that we have some ideas in mind and some great tools to put together our design, let’s talk about next steps. First, we need a budget. This part will determine basically every decision you make going forward. From the size of your screen, the projector you select, the audio system you choose, the seating options, even the paint and carpet options. Establish a budget and then expect that you will almost certainly spend more than that budget. Place like AVSForums are excellent at spending your money! Things you should plan to budget for:

• Projector
• Projector Screen
• Audio Video Receiver and/or Amps
• Playback Device (Bluray, Console Game System, Roku, etc.)
• Speakers
• Subwoofer(s)
• Acoustic Treatments
• Lighting
• General other stuff like wiring (both speaker and electrical)

The AudioAdvice website actually has a great article that I read earlier this year when it finally looked certain that I would have a dedicated theater in our new house. I also highly recommend breaking out Microsoft Excel and documenting everything you want to do as a way to see how over budget you really do end up.

Conclusion

Now that we’ve covered some of the basics, I plan to get right into the specific build log of the various things I plan to do to my theater. Here’s where I plan to start:

• Screen Wall Blackout
• DIY Screen
• Remote Controller Screen Masking (to switch between 16:9 and 2.39:1)

Until next time!

Welcome to the inaugural blog post of the new Home Theater Blog! I’ve decided to launch this blog in an effort to consolidate knowledge from those far more experienced than myself in the area of home theaters. I actually searched around and noticed a profound lack of home theater blogs.

Where Are All The Blogs?

This is a question I’ve asked myself for a while. But I think the answer can be linked to the wealth of knowledge found at sites like AVSForum.com. And while I visit this site multiple times a day and constantly read build logs and learn more, I also find myself frustrated. I find that it is really hard to find specific items that I would like to understand without happening across old threads that are either out of date or worse…exactly what I’m looking for, but the pictures have long since been deleted.

So Why a Home Theater Blog?

Two mains reasons. First and foremost, I enjoy blogging. I enjoy documenting my experiences, good and bad, and hope that others may benefit from those experiences. If a blog post helps even one person accomplish something on their own home theater, the blog post was worth while! And even if it doesn’t, I still had the enjoyment of documenting my experience!

The second primary reason really comes down to trying to build a resource that can be referenced in a google search that won’t have dead pictures or missing parts of information. People post amazing builds, things I can’t hope to recreate. But often times the information is somewhat lacking as to how they got from the beginning to the end. My plan is to build blog posts that offer information that can be referenced with every single step of how I got there. That way if you want to do the same thing, there’s no question what you need to buy and what steps to take to get there.

What Will Your Home Theater Blog Be About?

I’m a relative notice at home theater builds. This may make me the worst person ever to blog about the topic. Or perhaps, a person like the rest of you with a similar level of experience. So maybe I can better convey my experience with that lack of prior experience. That’s not at all confusing right?

But, to provide a little more background about myself… I’ve always wanted a home theater. Over the years, in the houses we’ve owned, it just hasn’t happened…until now. I finally have a house with a dedicated home theater! But wait, what will you blog about? Well, that home theater isn’t exactly ready to go. It has a TV and some theater seating, but we have a long way to go until I would call it a true home theater.

What’s Next

I’m planning on starting off exactly where I started off…designing my theater. I searched around trying to figure out the best way to design it, sources for inspiration, and knowledge on how to do things. Much of that knowledge that I’ve found has come from the AVSForum, and I plan to reference various posts in the forum with the hope of streamlining some of the information that can often be buried deep in a thread with 100+ pages.

Once we get past the basics, I plan to start building out my home theater, right here on this blog. I will document everything I do with specific topics and share it with the home theater community in the hopes that someone finds it useful. I don’t plan to have any advertisements or make any money through links. So you can rest assured that if I post something here, it wasn’t because I was paid. I have a day job that takes care of that, and this is just a hobby that I plan to enjoy.

How About a Picture?

Before we move on to more entertaining topics than an introduction, I’ll post a few rough pictures of the starting point that I have to work with. Some of you may be starting with more or less, but this is where my journey begins: