Home cinema in new house, help.

alan13015

Anyone out there able to help? i'm at the design stage of building my house and have included a tv room. want to put in decent home entertainment system and would like to tackle the project myself but i've never done it before. have about €10,000 to spend. any advice, please.

The_g-man

Wait for the screens that can output 1080p (1920x1080 progressive). Blu-ray discs should become available at the end of this year. After all, why spend that kind of money for a screen that cannot display the next generation of discs in their full glory. When prices become available for these screens, be they plasma,LCD or projector, then you could start pricing a good quality surround system.

SouperComputer

Personally I wouldnt get too carried away with 1080P yet. I sure as hell woudnt be paying a premium for limited content. Id let things settle on 1080p for about six months, then look into buying it. 720P gives very acceptable quality for the time being and costs buttons.

Projector wise, a panasonic AE900 gives good res & good colour at a great price. It supports 720p natively and gives excellent results.

Have you considered a HTPC for your home? You can banish all those nasty optical disks and rip them to the HD with no loss of quality. Also, you can use both types of next-gen drives too.

For the rest of the house, you can get extender devices which can access the content on the HTPC: live TV, recorded TV, music videos etc etc.

Cinemaworks

Firstly i would recommend you look at your room and how it is going to react with your chosen equipment. Sorting the acoustics in the room are just as important if not more important than the kit you put in.

It would be worth buying something like CARA room eq software as it would be a small investment for the budget your talking about. they offer a great training cd.

secondly allocate the largest part of the equipment budget to your projector and speakers. get those right and you cant go far wrong.

projector...

throw distance calculators are readily available on the web so choose a projector that will throw a good size picture within your room confinements.. look to place your projector at the back of the room and maybe even consider a false partition to hide the projector and equipment for that real cinema feel.

Speakers...

Low frequencies come out of a speaker in all directions, like ripples on a pond. The very lowest of these notes will pass straight through the walls of your room, while the higher frequencies will be reflected back into the room increasing the amount of that sound that you hear.

Just as with heating a room, when you double the size of a space you must double the amount of bass speaker, or heater that you need to fill it. With traditional hifi speakers there was no way on affecting a speakers bass output to fit the room, except by moving it to a location that may not be possible to live with.

True full range speakers that reproduce as low as 20 Hz are also huge and very expensive. The same result using separate sub woofer allows for much smaller, more affordable speakers that are much more cost effective.

Power, Loudness & Dynamics

Adding extra power to an audio system allows it to play louder and reproduce the dynamics of music and movie sound tracks more realistically. The added punch that a snare drum or a gunshot has on a more powerful system is something that anyone will recognise as more realistic.

The vast majority of the power required in music and movies is for the low frequency information. The use of a subwoofer with its own built in amplifier is the most cost effective and practical way of increasing the power of your audio system.

Components...

When looking at amplifiers dvd players, HTPC's consider what your most important factors are..
do you want an easy to use press the button and play dvd player? or are you a tech head and love those tweaking moments of a HTPC.

Audition, Audition, Audition. make the choice on equipment based on your eyes and ears... any good dealer will be able to demo the equpment they are offering. or if you are choosing an online retailer use the money back guarantee's (if possible:( )

interior design...

around the screen and the front part of the room, try as much as possible to black out that area. Bright rooms dont make great cinema's. you want no distractions or reflections from ceilings and walls while watching your favorite films..


Bets of luck

Calibos

Really recommend the OP start researching over at avforums.co.uk. While i never delved into room accoustics, I did research everything else over there years ago and the depth of knowledge of the users is fantastic.

alan13015

thanks guys, much appreciated.