A Great Home Cinema design has a number of key things that come together for a sublime result:
- The Room
- The Room Layout & Treatment
- The Equipment & Setup
- The Seating
- The Aesthetics
A Great Home Cinema Room
If you were designing a Home cinema from scratch, you would not want to go for a square box – parallel walls tend to bounce sound back and forth, and multiple parallel walls set up standing waves meaning the room can be “boomy” where particular notes are amplified by the room itself. Look at a public auditorium or great commercial cinemas they are all sorts of interesting shapes… some form of trapezoid works well, but seldom do we get the luxury to design a room from scratch.
The Home cinema in the image below is a wedge shaped room, wider at the back than the front, also the front wall is not parallel to the back wall – this was a fortuitous result of the shape of the house curving around the hill side it was built on. It’s a great sounding cinema room and features in our Multi-Room Av and Dedicated Cinema Room case study from an install we did in 2015.
Room Treatment and Layout
OK, in reality most Home Cinema rooms are created from an existing room in the house, and are basically rectangular. There is a lot you can do however to turn it into a Great Home Cinema Room. Careful consideration of the layout makes a difference – usually it is fairly obvious where the screen should be and where to put the seating etc. Generally you want the best seats to be positioned so your eyes are somewhere between 1.5 and 2 times the width of the screen away from the screen, and facing directly to it. 1.5 x the width of the screen works well for Cinemascope screens (2.35:1 aspect ratio). This makes the action easy to take in without the screen being too small in your field of vision or too close. It’s also important for all seats to have a clear view of the screen, and building a platform to lift a second row of seats higher than the front row, means a clear sight line to the bottom of the screen.
Acoustic treatment can go a long way to reduce room resonance nodes and improve the acoustics for relatively little outlay. There are a number of software tools to model a room, but a rough approximation can have a great effect if you don’t want to spend a lot. We can offer some great advice here, and you can go from a couple of simple panels and bass traps, to a full room acoustic treatment. A carpet (rather than a hard floor) will solve the majority of acoustic problems as it absorbs resonances over quite a wide bandwidth of sounds.
The image below shows a rectangular room with spacious tiered seating. Everyone gets a great view of the screen. Wall panelling provides some degree of room treatment, and bass traps at the front of the room go a long way to reduce the primary room resonances.
This room is featured in our Bolt-on 4K home Cinema Room from 2019.
Great Home Cinema Room Equipment and Setup.
There’s no getting away from the fact that if you want a great result, then you need to use good equipment. We’ve seen too many rooms that look fantastic, and have had a great amount of work put into their aesthetics, but are let down when you turn the system on. Mediocre picture and sound do not make for a Great Home Cinema room!
Our general policy is to go for fewer high quality speakers than many channels of inferior sound. A really great system set up as 4.1 channels is going to be far more satisfying than a 9.1.4 channel system using inferior speakers and amplifiers.
Most AV receivers and Processors these days have some form of room correction available – this still needs to be used with caution as it can either make the sound very clinical, or uninteresting, removing all character from the system. We always like to switch the room correction on and off to test this if possible. We are big fans of the Anthem series of AV receivers and processors, and highly rate their ARC system, if used carefully. Also we’ve recently been using the Lyngdorf processors with RoomPerfect(tm), which we’ve been impressed with. Both of these can be heard in our Showroom.
Projector technology has improved immensely over the last few years, and most reasonable quality projectors have a laser light source providing a wide colour gamut, great brightness and contrast too. We favour 3-chip machines where the Red Green and Blue light elements are created simultaneously. Lower priced projectors have a single light source with the Red Green and Blue light elements created sequentially via a colour wheel. These projectors will frequently create a rainbow effect for any white object moving across the image, which will be particularly noticeable for people whose eyes are sensitive to flicker.
image above shows a particularly nice sounding system, with an Anthem AV Processor Anthem multi-channel Power amp, Sony Laser projector, and a Naim Stereo system driving the front main left and right channels with Bowers and Wilkins Speakers. You can read about this system in our HiFi and Home Cinema Integration case study from 2016.
Great Home Cinema Seating
If you are to settle into a film, you may well be sitting there for a couple of hours or more. Poor quality or uncomfortable seating will have you fidgeting and your attention brought out of the film to attend to your comfort. a Great Home Cinema will have you transported away, involved in the film all the way to the end.
