Theater
It has been a dream of mine to have a theater in my home since I was a kid. So, when I was finally at the point of purchasing my own home, I made sure that there was an unfinished portion of the house that would accommodate my dreams.
My new home had a 550 square feet unfinished basement and I set to designing my theater almost immediately. I’ll have to admit, however; that it may never had happened if my brother didn’t move in for about a year and a half. Majoring in Construction Management and with 5+ years of experience under his belt, I agreed to pay him a decent wage and he agreed to finish my basement. We looked at a lot of options and fine tuned the details:
Stadium seating with 3 levels with a 10 inches rise for each level filled with 8 Lay-z-boy recliners with cup holders in the arms. All the equipment is in a (semi) sound proof cabinet built into the wall. The walls are covered half way up by carpet and then a micro fiber cloth (the same that was used to make the curtain) and baby batting to help reduce sound reflections. All the walls that border other rooms in the house, including the ceiling have sheet rock over sound board attached to z-channel that is then connected to the studs in the walls. This makes for a fairly soundproof room. A pitcher truly is worth a thousand words, so I have several in my Theater photo album. Take a look.
The Screen
The screen is a 102” perforated Stewart AX100 Cinemascope (2.35:1) screen which is the same width as a 116” television. I chose the cinemascope format so that there will never be bars on the top and bottom of the screen. That way I am able to “mask” the sides of the screen with the curtain pair whenever a movie with a lower ratio is watched. This makes the smallest video size (1.33:1 – regular television) show at a size of a 69” television. Having the screen perforated (you cant tell unless you are just a couple of feet in front of it) allows me to have the main left, right, and center speakers directly behind the screen making the sound seem like it is really coming from the pitcher.
The Speaker System
I opted for in-wall M&S Titanium speakers with 8” woofers and 2” tweeters for all 7 channels. The sub woofers (2) are 12” 400 watt speakers placed in each corner in the front of the theater. All the speakers are connected to an Onkyo TXNR801 7.1 THX Surround sound receiver. The Pre-out sub woofer channel drives a NADY Audio XA900 Stereo Amplifier which is connected to all 8 tactile speakers that are mounted under each of the 8 Lay-z-boy recliners. All audio cables run through the walls, ceiling, and floor risers. The tactile speakers mounted to the chairs connect to plates in the risers either directly below or behind the chairs with two banana plugs to allow them to pull out easily if the chair is moved and the connections forgotten.
The Equipment
All of our DVDs are housed in the Sony Disk Explorer 400 which can hold 400 disks. A second DVD player by JVC (XVN410) is used for rentals and other disks that don’t stay in the changer. Both DVD players connect to the receiver with component video connections and fiber audio cables. An IR receiver attached to the curtain valence above the screen connects to a Russound 857 IR Block which repeats the commands on 8 IR blasters connected to the AV equipment. A Russound ACT-1 Switched outlet powered by a switched outlet on the receiver, powers the NADY amp only when the receiver is turned on. An X-10 Power House IR to X10 converter allows control of 6 can lights, 5 sconce lights and rope lighting around the risers and another can light above the microwave and fridge independently of each other.
The equipment closet in the theater isn’t dedicated to it. Two Russound Home Audio distribution systems (CA4.4i and CA6.4i) provide independent control of 4 different audio channels to 10 different locations throughout the house. A Dell PowerEdge 500SC server with 4 sound cards provides the audio streams for the distribution system as well as web hosting and database functions. A CyberPower 1500AVR Un-interruptible Power Supply provides conditioned and battery backup power to the server, Ethernet routers (Belkin Pre-N wireless and IOGear Boss router with 120 GB of network attached storage), and a D-Link 16+ Ethernet switch. This makes the Theater equipment closet the central "brain" for data and communications in my home.
All this equipment generates a lot of heat. Four thermostat (MicroTrends FC-4-1C) controlled fans blow air through two (one intake and one exhaust) wind tunnels to circulate the air through the room. The wind tunnels are designed to bounce any sound off of sound absorbing foam as much as possible so any noise made in the closet cannot be heard in the theater. It works pretty well, but the whole theater can get fairly warm after a long movie.
With a theater like this in my home, going to the cinema has lost its allure.
