A home theater should feel like a special destination in your house—the one place you can retreat for a couple of hours to escape from reality and be transported into another world. The place you like to visit frequently with friends and family to enjoy the latest blockbuster releases—but without walking out with a backache from sitting in a poorly constructed seat.
"Are you in the process of planning a home theater? Possibly you are well into the design or even already have some construction underway. Or, you may have only recently started to consider the possibility. In any case, you have likely been overwhelmed with copious, confusing and often misleading information on just exactly what creates a great home theater experience. To make sense of it all, it is a good idea to step back and consider what is possible, and what is essential to attain the results you desire. This article will consider three key ingredients of proper home theater design.
To be clear by what is meant by the term "home theater" in this article, we are referring to a room dedicated and optimized for movie, music, TV, and increasingly, video gaming. Other synonyms home technology professionals may use interchangeable for the term "home theater" are "home cinema" and private "screening room". What we are not referring to here are dual-purpose rooms that may double as the Living Room, Great Room, etc, that are open to other rooms in the home and that are not able to be optimized for high-performance audio and video. In home technology professional speak, these dual-purpose, more casual rooms are called "media rooms".
Invisible speakers delivers unbelievable sound quality that emanates from the wall or ceiling, without any visible signs of a speaker. The space is filled with breathtaking music that seemingly comes from nowhere. Invisible speakers are speakers that get installed in walls and ceilings, then are covered with sheetrock and painted or papered over, and yes, they can sound great.
See Also: Whole House Audio Systems
If you ask an interior decorator about loudspeakers, he or she will tell you they should be heard and not seen. Maybe some home theater enthusiasts and audiophiles would disagree, but a lot of people hold the opinion that speakers in a whole housse audio system should be as hidden as possible. Imagine if we could actually have invisible speakers?
Well we can show you the solution to this age old problem. Speakers can be invisible, at least in the strictest sense, meaning they’re in the room, you just don’t see them.
There are two main ways to make a speaker actually invisible, and both involve putting it behind something else. The first, and most ingenious way, is with a kind of in-wall speaker that actually sits completely flush against the drywall (or other wall material), and then gets plastered over and painted so the speaker becomes 100 percent a part of the wall—-no visible grill. The other way is to hide it behind something that is visible, such as a piece of art or behind a mirror.
Nomenclature is a challenge when it comes to home technology. We struggle with terms that resonate with homeowners. From the “AV guy" to system integrators to custom installers to technology designers to low-voltage contractors, the home technology industry seems to have an identity crisis, even though all those terms mean essentially the same thing to an insider. The same goes for the terms that we use to define rooms in the home, which brings us to the topic du jour: What is the difference between a media room and a home theater?
Most homeowners do not know or even care about the difference.
You will hear them referring to their dedicated home theater space as a media room and vice versa. For architects, interior designers, builders, lighting designers, and other contractors, however, these distinctions can be important in defining your vision and communicating with each other. In other words, it’s good to know the difference between the two.
With the rollout of a new generation of smart home tech, home audio and video has become more powerful and more accessible than ever before.
We recently worked with a client in Sandy Springs, GA who wanted a powerful home audio system without the unsightly wires and cobbled-together feel of even some of today’s most powerful audio tech.
Large speakers that give you the audio experience you crave can often take up far too much space and change the look and feel of the rooms of your home. When you’ve worked hard on your decor and the arrangement of each space, you want home audio and video solutions that integrate seamlessly with the rest of your home.
We were able to provide our client in Sandy Springs with a solution that allowed them to create beautiful soundscapes in their home without the tech dominating the space visually.
There are plenty of hidden tech options that allow you to integrate audio throughout the entirety of your home—here’s what we recommend.
If it's been a while since you last bought a TV, you might be surprised to learn that what's considered "big" has changed a lot. These days even 42 and 50 inches are barely considered "midsize." This is thanks to manufacturers being able to make larger screens more cheaply, and also 4K and 8K resolutions making huge TVs more usable. Ultraslim designs also mean that larger screens take up less space.
So if you're considering a new TV, it's understandable if you're thinking of getting the same size, give or take a few inches. But the reality is, you can probably go a lot bigger. How big? Maybe you don't need a TV the size of a wall or a TV that is a wall, but in most homes a 65- or 75-inch TV will fit just fine.
Overall our advice is simple: Get as big a TV as you can afford. The longer answer depends on your room, your seating distance and the acceptance factor of any cohabiting co-deciders. Here's how to figure out how big you can go.
Select someone locally. Find a professional home theater company within a 50-mile range of your home. You are more likely to have an installer come by and tweak your system, if need be, when you are within a reasonable distance.
Ask for a link to the home theater installation company's Web site or for some images of recently completed installations. Also, ask to visit the home theater installers' showroom to provide you with living examples of their workmanship. Check our our portfolio. Here at Atlanta Audio we have a 6,000 square foot showhouse that showcases home automation, home theater options, whole house audio, lighting control, media rooms, video surveillance, and much more. Call us today to set up an appointment or visit our website at www.atlantaaudio.com.
Ask for references on finished projects that are similar to what you have in mind for your home theater and are relatively within the same cost range. Ask the homeowner about how the installation company works and how satisfied they are with the finished results. Visit our customer testimonials to get an idea of what our customers say about Atlanta Audio.
Find out how an installer works. For example if you are a neat freak and your professional installer is very proficient in plasma and audio technologies but can seem a little scatterbrained or sloppy, your working styles may not connect.
With so many people still quarantined at home, May may not be quite the spring fling people were expecting -- or hoping for. But that doesn't mean that you can't have fun at home, and some cool new tech can go a long way to making the days go by faster while keeping you and your family entertained through the long hours of sheltering in place.
Whether it's what you listen to, what you watch stuff on, or HOW you watch and listen to stuff, Atlanta Audio & Automation put together a look at some of the coolest new technology that can help make your stay at home as enjoyable as possible.
2012 was so four years ago. Those London Games? Might as well have happened on a different planet. I guess the fact that Rio is half a world away basically means these 2016 Summer Olympics are happening on a different planet. But in all seriousness—technology has evolved so much in the last four years that those of us who will be watching the Games over the next few weeks will, in some instances, have completely different viewing experiences than our selves of four years ago.
Here’s a look at some of the technology that will be introduced to the watching world throughout the 2016 Summer Olympics down in Rio.
Olympics in Virtual Reality
In just the past few months, virtual reality has gone from a gamer’s paradise to a consumerized market thanks to the launch of products like Google Cardboard, Samsung’s Galaxy VR device, and the myriad other headgears available out there. As such, the Olympic Broadcasting Services—the IOC’s official body responsible for coordinating TV coverage of the Olympics—will have VR footage from different venues in Rio, enabling viewers to transport themselves from their living room to Rio. NBC and the BBC already said they will take advantage of the 360-degree footage being made available by the committee.
Drones Return to Rio
As big as the drone explosion has been in the consumer space, it’s been equally impressive among content providers. The spider cam at football games has essentially lost its tethering wires and can present all kinds of different angles—near and wide—for viewers to experience. In Rio, drones will be deployed to cover a lot of the open water events (rowing, for example), among other things. Drones were at the Sochi games in 2014, and made headlines when one nearly took out an alpine skier. Here’s hoping they avoid a similar fate in Rio.
Home theaters are becoming amazing popular with long-time homeowners. After all, who wouldn’t want to come home after a long and busy day and unwind with your favorite movie or television series? If you’re in the market for the perfect home theater complete with full surround sound audio, you can rely on Atlanta Audio and Automation to help you with everything from construction and design to wiring and full assembly. But what about the extras? Here are four things that every home theater should include for convenience and comfort.
Home Theater Seating
Comfortable seating is going to make the difference between an awesome time and a sore back. Fortunately, there are lots of options to choose from, including full theater-style reclining seats to cozy sofas and sectionals that can seat the whole family. You can even customize your seats with bass shaker systems that rumble whenever the bass of the movie begins to vibrate. It’s all about comfort and class when choosing our furnishings; make sure you love what you choose.
Universal Remote
Nothing will make your home theater setup more confusing than having to play with three or four different remotes. Instead of bothering with all that, take advantage of our Control4 user experience and control everything in your home theater (and your home) from one device! Change the channel, raise the volume, turn on steaming services, or listen to music. It’s all at your fingertips with our universal controls.
