Hello and welcome, biglaw22!
You're already on the right path by wanting to educate yourself and plan, plan, plan! More than any piece of gear or any tweak in setup, planning is what makes or breaks a great theater!
The most important thing that you can know going in is that the room determines everything else! You room will tell you where you seat should go. That will tell you where your screen should go and what size it should be. The room will tell you how loud your speakers and subwoofers need to be able to play without distorting, which will tell you what kind of amplifier power you need. It's really ALL about the room.
So...is your theater going in an existing room, or are you building a room from scratch? If it's an existing room, are you planning/willing to renovate?
In some ways, an existing room is a bit easier because it sets the primary variable and then you work from there. If you are building from scratch or willing to completely renovate, then everything is WIDE open!
It's important to know that there isn't really any such thing as a "perfect" room. But there are certain things about a room that can make it either easier or harder to work with in terms of getting the best audio and video quality and experience.
So basically, if you'd like to start, please just tell us as much as you can about your room! If you're building from scratch or renovating, then we can really go whole hog! You can get into planning your HVAC runs to minimize sound transfer in and out of your room and to make sure that your heating and air conditioning is silent within the theater. You can get into planning your wire and electrical runs in detail so that everything is run inside the walls, out of sight, and you can use slick-looking wall plates for all of your necessary wire and cable connections. The major thing with any brand new room or renovation is sound proofing. You can do some amazing stuff with newer products like QuietRock if you have the money. And if it's more of a DIY renovation and funds are bit tighter, you can still do some amazing soundproofing with products like QuietGlue or GreenGlue as well as more traditional sound proofing products like mass loaded vinyl and resilient channels. Even if this is an exisiting room and you don't want to poke a single hole into the existing walls, you can seal the room's borders up tight with acoustic caulk. Or you can simply add a second layer of drywall over the existing walls and ceiling. You can do that with QuietRock for an extremely effective and simple sound proofing upgrade (although QuietRock ain't cheap!), or you can use one of the sound proofing glue products with standard drywall to make yourself a pretty effective upgrade as well at a much lower cost.
And if this is a brand new room, you can go whole hog with a full "room within a room" design for maximum sound proofing.
So we'll need to know where you are starting when it comes to the room. The two other major factors are whether this is going to be a self-contained, sealed room (where you'll be closing the door every time you watch/listen), or if the room will have openings to other rooms of the house; and the other major factor is going to be the room's dimensions, which will determine all of the internal sound reflections and create your room's acoustics!
Knowledge of your room's acoustics will determine where your seat should go. It will also inform us as to what acoustic treatments you should use on your room's walls, floor and ceiling. It will also determine where your subwoofers should go - and that's also going to depend on whether you only care about a lone "sweet spot" seat, or if you want even, uniform bass across many seats in your theater.
On the video side, we'll need to know if this will be a light controlled room or not. Will it be pitch black - creating the ideal environment for a front projector? Will it be dim, but not pitch black, where a plasma would thrive? Or will it be lit, sunlit, or bright, where a matte screen LCD is your best choice?
As you can see, you gear selections all depend on that room of yours! So let's start there and really start to plan things out in order to get you the very best theater experience possible
Should be fun!
