Excellent. I will look forward to reading those room details!
My recommended approach to planning a home theatre is to work "big to small". Start with the components of the system that are the largest and have the greatest impact on the final performance. Those components will then inform your needs for all of the other components that must work with those largest components.
The biggest component of all is the room itself. The dimensions and layout of the room will inform you as to where your seat and display will be placed. If you have options, then you will want to place the primary seat away from close proximity to walls, but avoid the very centre of a perfectly rectangular room. The seating position will then inform you as to the distance from eyes to screen. That distance will tell you what screen size you should purchase. For example, if you follow the SMPTE recommendations (which I happen to agree with), if you sit 10 feet from eyes to screen, the ideal screen size would be 73.8 inches. You can use the
Viewing Distance Calculator to figure out screen sizes and distances.
Next, the lighting in your room will tell you what kind of screen surface your TV should have, or if front projection is a good option. If the room is sunlit, you'll want a matte screen, otherwise you will get lots of glare and reflections, and a washed out image. If the room has "normal" overhead lighting, then a good screen filter and/or anti-glare coating will be sufficient. And if you have a dim or dark room, you can use almost any screen surface you like, but a glossy or glass screen will offer the highest perceived contrast and deepest black levels. A dark or pitch black room is necessary for front projection to look its best, but a high gain, retro-reflective, or "black" screen can allow you to use front projection in a merely dim room so long as your chosen projector has enough light output and you don't mind the sacrifice in black levels.
Next, we come to a more philosophical choice: do you want to use your room's acoustics "as is", or would you prefer to try to make the room a better or optimal acoustic environment?
I like to take a practical approach. First, sit in the primary seat and make a loud, single clap with your hands. If you can hear an echo, a reverberation or a sort of "sting" or "buzz" after that loud clap, then I would highly recommend spending some money on a few basic acoustic treatments, or at least using things like rugs, pillows, wall hangings, bookshelves, plants, and plush furniture to try and decrease that "slap echo". What you should also do is have a friend stand at the front of the room (where your TV will be) while you sit in the primary seat, and just try to have a conversation with that distance between you. You should be able to talk very quietly and still hear each other easily and clearly. If you find that you have to speak up in order to understand one another, or there is any difficulty what-so-ever in hearing each other clearly and easily at those positions, then you should definitely address your room's acoustics, IMO.
In a very broad sense, there are two "camps" when it comes to audio reproduction. Some people far prefer to "bring the musicians into the room". To get that sense of having a live, private concert being performed right in front of you in your room. Other people far prefer the idea of "being transported" to wherever the recording was made. To get the sense that you are NOT in your room anymore, but instead, you are in the concert hall, or the church, or the studio, or wherever the recording was made.
We use ambient sound cues to get a sense of our surroundings. We do it subconsciously, but we are constantly assessing our surroundings. If we are in a very small room, there are a ton of reflected sound waves. We all instinctively understand that sounds get quieter the farther away we are from their origin. We also understand that sounds bounce back off of hard, flat surfaces. So if we are in a small room, sounds do not have to travel very far at all before they hit a hard, flat surface and bounce back into the room again. So small rooms have lots and lots of sound reflections, while much bigger rooms have fewer, and weaker reflections. In a much bigger room, sounds must travel farther before they hit a hard, flat surface and bounce back into the room. So they get weaker as they travel those longer distances. But distance is not the only way to make sounds quieter. We can also absorb sound waves, or we can scatter them. And that's what acoustic treatments do. They either absorb or scatter the sounds.
What creates a bad acoustic environment is when you have a lot of sound waves bouncing around, and they interfere with one another, causing cancellations, double ups, and other types of wave interference. If you imaging dropping pebbles into a still pond, you can picture how the more pebbles you drop, the more erratic and choppy the waves in that pond will look. You can also picture how if you used your bathtub instead of a pond, you'd see the waves reach the walls of your tub, and then reflect back towards the middle of the tub, creating even more interference and choppiness in the waves. The same thing happens with sound waves. They're bouncing around the room, and interfering with each other, creating choppy, difficult to understand sound if there are too many points of interference all at once.
So there are a couple of things to think about here:
1) if we reduce the number and strength of the reflections, then we get fewer points of interference, less "choppiness" in the sound waves throughout the room, and easier-to-understand, clearer sound, and
2) If there are ambient sound cues included in the recording - such as those used in a movie to give us a sense of being in the same location as what is being shown on screen, or the sound cues included in a recording of a live concert that tell us we are in a concert hall or wherever the recording was made - now those recorded sound cues do not have to interfere and compete with the sound cues that are coming from the room itself. In other words, we are sort of taking your actual room "out of the equation", and letting the recording tell us the size and shape of the room instead, effectively "transporting us" to where the recording was made, or to the location we are being shown on our screen during a TV show or movie.
So that is my preference. Which brings up the question, how do we reduce the number and strength of the reflection in the room? Two ways:
a) we can use acoustic treatments or other "natural" items - like the plush furniture, rugs, bookshelves, etc. - to absorb and/or scatter the sound waves, or
b) we can choose speakers that create fewer and weaker reflections in the first place by having narrow dispersion...more of a "beam" of sound, rather than a wide, even hemisphere of sound.
But there is a trade off. It is all about the balance between direct sound that goes straight from the speakers to your ears vs. reflected sound that bounces off of at least one wall, ceiling or floor (and often several bounces) before reaching your ears. The more reflected sound we hear, the more we get a sense of the size and shape of the actual room itself, but it also makes it harder to hear the direct sound. But if the direct sound is a narrow "beam", rather than a wide, even hemisphere, then only one or two seats will be within that "beam". In other words, you will have a very small "sweet spot" where the sound is good if you use narrow dispersion, but you won't have to worry as much about reflections. On the other hand, if you use speakers with wide, even dispersion, lots of seats can enjoy good sound, but there will also be lots of reflections unless you decrease them with acoustic treatments (or simply have a gigantic room
)
Speakers with wide, even dispersion are the most "transparent", in the sense that they recreate the sounds in a recording "as they are", with virtually no alteration. They "tell it like it is". If you opt for these types of speakers, the speakers themselves are essentially "not to blame" if you don't like the way things sound. They're just playing back the signals that are being fed into them. But they are also completely at the mercy of your room's acoustics. So, in a good acoustic environment, it will be just like having the original performance right there in your room. You can go sit in any seat, and it will be just the same as it would have been during the original performance. The speakers themselves aren't changing anything. But they're completely at the mercy of your room's acoustics. If it would have been hard to understand what was being said or played in your room with live performers, these wide, even dispersion speakers will recreate that. Which means they won't sound very good! But it's not their "fault". They're just "telling it like it is". The live performance would have sounded the same way. It's just your room's acoustics. And now you can choose to improve your acoustics with treatments, and you'll have an accurate recreation from those speakers.
On the other hand, speakers with narrow, controlled dispersion will - to some degree - "take the room out of the equation". So long as you are sitting within the "beam" of these speakers' sound, you will be hearing much more direct sound vs. reflected sound. It's a little bit like wearing headphones. So the room's acoustics have much less of an effect on these types of speakers. And thus, you can take these types of speakers into any room, and get very much the same experience, regardless. BUT, you have to be sitting within their "beam" of sound, and they won't provide as much of a sense of your actual surroundings.
There's no "right" or "wrong" here. If you're building a dedicated theatre, with a fairly large number of seats, and attention paid to the room's acoustics, it makes more sense to choose wide, even dispersion speakers so that every seat gets more or less the same sound, and you get the most transparent and accurate reproduction of what is on the recordings. On the other hand, if you want to be able to move your speakers from room to room, and you won't be able to address the acoustics in each room with treatments, it makes more sense to choose narrow dispersion speakers that create fewer and weaker reflections in the first place, BUT with the understanding that you must sit within the "beam" of these speakers, and they won't sound good or accurate outside of that "beam".
Of course, there are speakers that sort of fall in between the two extremes. And those are your "jack of all trades" speakers. These have more of a "cone" of sound, rather than a "beam" or a hemisphere. So you get a little bit more of the room's reflections than the "beam" speakers - they'll sound different if you take them from room to room - but they're not quite as "at the mercy" of the room's acoustics as the very wide, even "hemisphere" speakers - but at the same time, they're not quite as truly transparent and accurate as those hemisphere speakers, either.
So it's all a balancing act. And it all depends on the room! So, once again, we come back to the room as our starting point
