Alright so over the next few days I'm going to make a series of Cortex posts about the home theater I'm in the process of building. This has been a dream of mine since I was a kid. Between the planning and the actual construction, there's a lot to cover. I'm not going to post everything at once because that would make it difficult to discuss the details in the comments. Hopefully I can find a way to link each new post to the previous one in the series.
I. Motivation
Part of my motivation for documenting this and sharing with other shackers is that this is a project that might seem out of reach for most folks, but it's actually not rocket science. I've never done much in the way of construction myself other than a bit of woodworking here and there, and I am only moderately handy. Hopefully someone following along can be inspired that if I can do it with no experience, they can do it too.
There's nothing that quite compares to watching movies on a projector. Over the past 10 years I've resorted to setting up front projection systems w/ ALR screens in my living rooms, but I'm lucky to have a spare room in this new house I can use as a dedicated theater. I originally got quotes from local installers on building out the room. I quickly realized that I would need to shell out $60-90K and give up a lot of control, neither of which I was prepared to do. I figured I would spend a fraction of that amount on tools and equipment, learn some new skills along the way, and enjoy the satisfaction of doing most of the work myself. I spent about six months last year researching and designing the room -- first on paper, then in software -- and started building it out in earnest this year. Progress is slow since I work full time and because my construction experience is limited, so I usually need to do extra planning/studying.
II. The Space
The room I have to work with is OK, not great, but it's what I have. It started out as an open loft. No concrete bunker here :) Dimensions are 15'4" x 14'5" with 9' ceilings. It's located on the second floor of our two story house, adjacent to my two kids' bedrooms, and next to a bathroom. This makes it nearly impossible to properly soundproof, so I'm not even going to attempt it. The kids don't sleep here very often, and when they are here we'll use the theater together. The rest of the time, it will mostly be my fiancée and I. Here are pictures of the room when we moved into our new house last year, as well as the floor plan:
On every wall in this room there's either a door, a doorway, or a very large window, which adds to the challenge when it comes to figuring out seating, or where the screen and speakers should go.
III. The Plan
You can see some quick 3D renders from my plans below. I made the screen and wall panels semi-transparent in the mockups so I could see what was behind them when I started the project. I realize this makes the renders a little confusing to look at, but it should still give you an idea of what I have planned for the room.
The theater layout is pretty simple. The screen goes on the wall with the large window, because it's the only one that doesn't have a door or doorway. Seating will be handled by a single row of four recliners, about 4'4" from the back wall, 11' from the screen. Most of the AV equipment will be housed in the adjacent bedroom, in a basic open air rack. The projector will be located in the bathroom and project through a port window. This way the noise, heat, and light from all the equipment will be kept out of the theater.
Because the house is brand new, I'm trying to keep the existing walls intact. The framing, drywall, electrical, and A/C will be mostly untouched. For light and sound control, the bare minimum needed is to plug the window and install a door in the doorway to the left. That doorway currently leads to a large, bright, open space and would prohibit using a projector in the daytime.
For sound, I am going with a 7.2.4 setup. That's 7 speakers at ear level (front left/right, center, side left/right, rear left/right), 2 subwoofers, and 4 ceiling speakers for Atmos. I decided to use in-wall speakers and maximize the available space. The large window and existing doorways make speaker placement challenging. For example, the center speaker need to be located a fair bit lower than the left and right channels. Hopefully by choosing speakers with a good off axis response, this issue can be mitigated.
I opted against building a stage to save some space. I will however be building a soffit around the entire room, mostly for aesthetic purposes. It will house LED downlights and fancy rope lighting. Speaking of lighting, I am also going to build six programmable LED light columns around the room. They will be flanked by floor-to-ceiling 2" thick fabric frames to mask any sound treatments.
Game/media/home automation server duties will be handled by a custom 4U server with AMD Ryzen 5950X, 128 GB RAM, 168 TB HDD, a GTX 3080 and a GTX 3060 Ti. These resources are also virtualized and shared on a 10Gig wired network so that my kids can play demanding PC games anywhere in the house from a dumb client running off a simple Raspberry Pi. I've posted about this setup a couple of times here in the past.
IV. The Equipment
As of this writing I think I've acquired everything except for the screen material, projector, and receiver. I'll decide on those when I get closer to completion.
Video
Projector: TBD when the time comes. In the meantime, I have a refurb Epson 5040UB as placeholder
Screen: ~140" 2.35:1 or 2.39:1 for CIH, Seymour AV Center Stage XD fabric
A/V Processor/amp
Receiver: TBD when the time comes. If I had to buy one today, Denon AVR-X4700H
Main Amp: Monoprice Monolith 7x200 Watt
Speakers
LCR: 3x KEF Ci3160RL-THX
Side/Rear: 4x KEF Ci4100QL-THX
Atmos: 4x KEF Ci200QR
Subwoofer: 2x KEF K92
Seating
Chairs: 4x Valencia Home Theater Oslo seats, center loveseat
Tactile/transducers: 4x Clark Synthesis TST429 Platinum transducers
Tactile/amplifier: Samson Servo 600 Power Amplifier
Lighting
Soffit: 4x Inovelli Red Series Smart LED Strip
Columns: 6x Inovelli Red Series Smart LED Strip
Downlights: 10x Lithonia Lighting WF4 LEDs
That is a lot of KEF speakers! Not all of these are going to the home theater. I wasn't super happy with the Origin Acoustics in-ceiling speakers that the home builder had installed, so I replaced them in five rooms.
That's it for this first post! Thanks for reading this far. We'll get into construction with the next post in the series. Please don't hesitate to ask any questions in the comments.
