Home Theater Design - 3 Essential Ingredients
"Home Theater Design - 3 Essential Ingredients" HTA Certified; Accessed July 6th 2021
Home Theater Design - 3 Essential Ingredients
"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".
#1-Sound. Real, accurate sound
"Ironically, sound is one of the most frequently given objections to properly designing a private theater. Many people have become intimidated by the idea that high quality sound is something that only audiophiles or other specially gifted people can appreciate. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, sound is arguably the stimulus we have been designed to be most sensitive to and impacted by. Sound affects us physically, emotionally, mentally and behaviorally. The hair-raising effect of a guttural growl in the dark or the nostalgic warmth felt after hearing that first love song of our youth exemplify this fact. The mistaken notion that not all of us can appreciate good sound is costing many a rich portion of what life should offer. In fact, music is more rooted in our fundamental brain structures, those connected with motivation and reward, than language. We were made to enjoy music, to live with sound. "
#2- A distraction-free environment
"Much like the quality of sound, this essential attribute is also spurned by many. Most likely because a distraction-free environment takes planning, expertise and skill to produce. Many home theater consultants will advise you that it is not necessary. Unfortunately, when you discover the folly of that advice, it is irreparable! This misguided advice is intended to save you money and effort, but in fact, steals the ability for your home theater to deliver the detail that is essential in soundtracks and recordings as well as visual details and nuance that pervade great cinematography. Imagine the disappointment if during the long-awaited viewing of the latest thriller, at the precise moment where suspense has built and in that anticipatory silence, you hear water running through your home’s pipes. Talk about a spoiler. Or because of poor lighting management you fail to notice the subtle change in the color of the sky as the sun sets on the heroine. A detail carefully orchestrated by the director in order to fulfill the emotional climax, to really tell the story. These are the details that make great films. You should not have to miss them, so do not allow someone to tell you “sound isolation” isn’t necessary when in truth a quiet room is; and that lighting design will not matter in a dark room when pinpoint control is actually a necessity. After all, it is your home theater, and you deserve the best!"
#3- Image matters
"It is in the area of video technology that one of home theater's great myths persists. This myth being it will be cheaper and better soon. While somewhat true in the world of basic consumer displays, for a private home theater imaging system, this can be a disastrous perspective. The precise balance of viewing positions, sight lines, video projector positioning, picture resolution, screen material and more make the correct engineering and specification essential. We have seen instances where a client has been convinced a typical consumer product will be good enough, only to subsequently experience a truly high resolution image and then be terribly disappointed in the performance of their own home theater."
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