Dedicated HT room or HT/Living Room combo?

[ErinH]

Just curious here...after talking with a couple co-workers about in-home entertainment.... one has a HT room and the other doesn't.

Let's say you're building/buying a new home and can easily manage to squeeze space for an HT room (or you're buying a home with a spare room that could be used in this fashion).

When thinking about the practicality of a dedicated HT room for a future house, would you spring to use the spare room as a true HT room for that whole 'movie atmosphere' or would you just buy a nice setup and put it in your living room?

I know there are a lot of variables here; namely how would you present the room? If the goal is to really capture the movie experience with lighting, raised seating, etc, it seems a dedicated room is really the only way to go. Are you going to use it that much, though? Do you need all these things that make it more like a movie theater or is a couch and a couple chairs fine? Do you need 105" screen or will a 65" badass TV fit the bill? Are you an upgrader, and if so, would you want to upgrade the video display regularly to keep up with new tech?
These are the 'practical' questions I wonder.

Seems to me that one could build a kickass living room setup for the cost of a dedicated HT room. But, then again, projectors are coming down in cost quite a bit and it seems now that TVs are just as expensive as a nice 1080p projector/screen combo. It seems the HT room idea is losing it's luster and more living room type setups are the go-to.


Just polling the group.

Personally, I'm on the fence. I could see having a real nice setup in a large living room such as a 65" flat screen, 5.1 setup that doubles as a nice stereo system, but at the same time the lure of having a dedicated HT room is appealing. But, why is it appealing, and is that title worth the dedication? Having a little girl, I think to myself how cool it will be when she's older to have 'movie night' and watch her favorite Disney, etc videos. At the same time, however, one can easily build a nice setup in a living room. I suppose the only real cons of living room setups would be that you can't decorate it and you have ambient light (in most situations) that detract from the 'escape'.

 

[templemaners]

If I had it my way, I'd have both. A small dedicated theater room (around 4 seats and under 3000 cuft) with the dark walls & carpet, projector, AT screen, 7+ high efficiency speakers & 4 subs and then a more modest 5.2 living room setup for TV and video games. If budget was a compromise, I'd scale the living room back to 3.2. I've always thought that living rooms are too much of a compromise to maximizing what a projector can do.

FWIW, I would characterize myself as not being an upgrader - I had the same HTIB set for 8+ years (before I knew any better) and I plan to use my new Denon 4311 until the wheels fall off, metaphorically speaking.

So, I'd vote dedicated HT room if I have to choose one.

 

[Cruise Missile]

My family recently moved which provides an interesting take on a couple of your queries.

The place we moved out of had our theater integrated in the living room. We had a blast using it for movies, games, football, etc.

Light control was easily one of the larger problems we had as we are using a projector. The second would have to be the shear volume of space we had to fill with sound.

The move to a new place afforded us with an oppurtunity to use a room for the theater.

I've only just recently finished the set up so my experiences are somewhat limited.

That said, the immersion level we're able to achieve in the dedicated space is awesome. We have total light control as well as extremely dark paint (back/dark green). This has improved the image dramaticly.

Also, the smaller space is much easier on the amps when watching a movie at reference level. There were times in the old place when the system would start to audibly strain (distort) during the louder movie scenes. We didn't really notice this until viewing some of those scenes in the new room. The smaller room made the system sound "quieter" at first listen so we checked the levels during a loud scene and it was hitting 110db+ peaks effortlessly.

Third improvement was getting a normal living room back. It's nice to have a well lit room for visiting in again. We were able to arrange the furniture in the living room to promote just that and not forced into focusing everything at a screen.

Well there's my input on this subject, hope it is of value to anyone considering the same choices. We loved both set-ups, but the nod goes to the dedicated space.