If you are lucky enough to have an extra room or a basement you might want to consider putting in a home theater. My husband is an expert and has a web page dedicated to building home theaters. He does not sell them or anything he just loves movies and home theaters and writes a lot of advice about them. He calls himself “Cheap Dave’s Home Theater” and he really has good advice for those trying to put in a home theater without breaking the bank. I have taken some of his articles and combined them here and added some of my own thoughts.
What size room do you really need?
It should be at least 12 feet in one direction. A lot of houses have bedrooms that are not quite this big but you can also include the closet depth since you could use the closet space for components and put the projector on a shelf in the closet and cut a hole in the wall if you have to.
Projectors or flat screen?
Roughly how big of a picture do I want?
Can you control the light in this room?
Is the room dedicated to HT or will it be used for other things?
Do you want to really create a theater like experience or just good TV?
Projectors have really come a long way in the last 10 years. Previously high end Home Theaters used CRT based projectors. These were large, heavy expensive machines. They had to be installed in only one place to make a given screen size and required a professional to properly calibrate them. They had three CRT tubes, Red, Green and Blue. The tubes had a fixed life and when one burned out it was a major expense to replace it. Don't even get me started on line doublers that could cost twice as much as the projector.
The projectors currently being use in most home theaters owe more to the development of computer displays than the old CRTs. They have been driven by the computer industry and traveling business people. So as a result the quality has improved and the size of the projectors has gotten smaller and the best part, the prices have gotten more realistic.
Most of these projectors can produce an HDTV picture without any problem. And if you haven't seen HD on a really big screen you will be amazed.
There are a lot of big flat screen TV’s out there that have really come down in price but they really do not give a theater experience like a projector does.
What kind of screen to use?
If you have decided to use a projector you will soon have to consider what type of screen to use.
If you have a dedicated space I recommend starting with just the wall. If you are building from scratch make sure to not texture the wall. Some basic white paint is all you need to start to display the picture.
Once you have lived with this for a while you can see how you like it. Is the picture bright enough? If not you may want to get a screen with a gain higher than one. Also try varying the picture size. With an LCD or DLP projector this is easily done using the zoom lens. Most have at least a 1.2X lens and some have as high as 2.0X. That gives you a lot of screen size options.
The screen size will affect several factors such as brightness and resolution. If you have a lower resolution projector (800x600 or less) the pixels might become very noticeable at too large a size. You might try projecting a picture on freeze frame and then walk from the back of your room towards the front until you get to the point where you first really notice the pixels. Maybe have someone else do this with you as everybody’s vision is a little different. Change the screen picture size and see how this point moves. If you can keep this point a little bit forward of you seating position then you should be fine.
So now that you have had you projector up and running and watched several movies you can answer these questions. Is a white wall good enough? Can I improve it enough with paint or Screen Goo to stay with a white wall? What size is large enough but still maintains good picture quality and brightness?
If this is a dedicated room and you decide you need a screen, then I recommend a fixed screen. If you buy a roll-up screen most of the money you will spend will go into trying to flatten out the screen. So a fixed screen is already flat and nothing really has to be done to keep it flat.
What kind of receiver to buy?
The receiver is really the heart of your home theaters audio system. Of course it is a very important decision but that doesn't mean you have to spend a huge amount of money.
Over the last few years we have gone from stereo to Dolby Surround Sound to AC-3 (which became Dolby Digital 5.1) to DTS to 6.1 to 7.1.
If you bought an expensive receiver and upgraded every time a new format came out you would have spent a lot of money. In fact if you spent $2000 or more on a receiver or separates you might have really been strapped when it came time to upgrade.
Let me make one point clear about the "Cheap Dave's Home Theater" philosophy: Home Theater is not Audiophile. You need to be able to hear the dialog and when something on the screen blows up it needs to go BOOM!! You don't need the most expensive sound system on the block to do that in a convincing fashion.
So I like to buy receivers at about the $400 price point. This means waiting about a year after a new feature comes out until it is available at this price point. But don't worry sometimes the lag for source material that can take advantage of the new format lags even further behind. In fact I am not really sure there is much material available yet that can really drive my 7.1 system. But at this price I can afford to upgrade every few years and stay relatively current.
My current receiver is a Pioneer VSX-1015TX. It has more features than I have used to date. It easily drives my speakers to very loud volumes (beyond the wife limits). It is easy to set-up and I didn't break the bank.
When you do upgrade keep your old receiver. You can drive secondary systems, subwoofers or even Butt Kickers with them.
Aspect Ratio
Probably the most confusing issue in the home theater realm is how to address aspect ratio. Now that 16:9 TVs are becoming popular the general public is being forced to think about it for the first time in 50 years.
So here is a quick and simple primer on aspect ratio. So your standard TV is 4:3 aspect ratio. So if it were 40 inches wide it would be 30 inches high. This ratio goes back to the dawn of TV. In fact early movies were also this aspect ratio. So Wizard of Oz and the Original King Kong would be 4:3. Then when TV came out the movie biz thought they had better do something to give people a reason to come out to the movies so they started to mess around with the aspect ratio, Cinerama and Cinema Scope are two names that come to mind. This is the impetus for letterboxing on widescreen formatted DVDs. If you want to see the whole picture on your 4:3 TV you have to put up with letterboxing (dark bands at the top and bottom of the screen).
So with the advent of HDTV and DVD a compromise format was developed, 16:9. Now there are almost no movies made in 16:9 ( or 1.78) but it is a good step between 4:3 and 1.85:1 and 2.35:1.
Currently there are about 6000 movies on DVD in 1.85:1 so that is a tiny amount of letterboxing for a 16:9 projector, and there are about 2000 movies at 2.35:1.
I was relieved to find out that Ben Hur is the one and only movie at 2.77:1 so you can safely forget about that one.
So what does all this mean for the Cheap Dave when making decisions about home theater? Ok here is my advice in a nutshell. Design you HT for 16:9. If you can get a native 16:9 projector this will give you the most resolution on a wide screen movie and the least letterboxing. But also keep an eye on features like zoom. If you find a projector with at least 33% zoom and better yet powered zoom, then you can go from 1.77:1 to 2.35:1 one very easily. Now this will mean your screen will have to get wider. So a white wall with dark bands at the top and bottom to create a fixed height and then curtains to adjust the width will almost completely solve the problem.
Guess what, this is the same solution movie theaters use. Also look for features like stretch modes on the projector. On mine it is called "Wide Mode". It electronically changes the aspect ratio and can compensate for some minor aspect ratio issues. But the picture may look funny in some modes.
Aspect ratio isn't rocket science but it is something you should get familiar with as you design you home theater.
There is more to creating the "Home Theater Experience" than just picture and sound.
Of course it starts with the idea of creating the movie theater experience at home but is that really what you want to do? The crowds, the talking, the cell phones and even issues of picture quality. Have you ever really looked hard at the image at a movie theater. If you are watching a film based movie there are tons of flaws in the print even on opening weekend. If you had that amount of defects in your home picture you would not be happy about it. The sound is generally good but you can't turn it up or down. And the food is a tad on the expensive side.
So you don't really want to replicate the movie theater experience at home. Instead you want to take the best parts of that experience and add in the things that are unique to being in your own home.
For us that includes having places for our two dachshunds to curl up. It also means things like having four recliners but leaving the armrest out of the middle two so that it is like a love seat. That extra time to be close to each other is important to us. And a place to watch movies without distractions is a real treat.
But don't forget the best part of the movie theater, the big picture. The big picture envelops you and pulls you into the story and drama of a movie. And the big sound adds emotion and power. Personally I think the only way to get that is with a projector. Plasma and LCD TVs are nice but I have never seen one that I would call a theater experience. Particularly since there are projectors available that will match these sets in performance for half the money.
You know what doesn't add to the experience? Motorized screens, expensive racks full of expensive equipment connected with expensive wire. I will level with you I make kind of an average to above average salary. I could afford more expensive gear if I sacrificed elsewhere. But realistically I would have to make a lot more money before I would spend it frivolously just to impress people. Really when the lights go down all that other stuff is instantly forgotten.
So the main criteria is does it add to the experience? If it doesn't add anything in a tangible way be suspect, most of the home theater advice you will find encouraging you to buy very expensive equipment will come from somebody who in some way stands to profit from that advice.
So, if you have the space you might consider adding a home theater, we get so much enjoyment out of ours, in fact I smell popcorn! It must be movie time!
(August 2007) (
