My First Real HT Build, and it's not Mine!

[jmanlp]

I was asked to undertake the task of building a home theater good friends of mine. They are building this in a new addition above the new detached garage they are building. The room overall is 14' x 47' and is divided into two sections by the spiral staircase (not installed yet) which measure 26.5' x 14' where I will be building the HT and 16.5' x 14' where they will be building a full bar. This HT will have more of a focus on being a fun family place to hang out than a completely dedicated HT. Some things they wanted to have are...

• Front projector with really good picture and a large screen that will be motorized drop down (Since it will drop in front of the doors and windows that access one of the decks
• Audio that can play loud with great definition and subs that can shake their seats
• Mount an existing 50" Plasma they have in the bar area and tie it into the overall system and have good stereo sound for it for both watching TV and listening to music
• Have outdoor speakers on the decks that will come off on both sides of the building
• Integrate the equipment racks into the structures so they can access and see their gear but not the wires and whatnot

I've talked to friends who want to have cool setups in their homes but these people put their money where the mouth was and handed my $5k to get started with wiring and integrated stuff and said come get more when that ran out (budget of $10k+/- just for AV stuff). Here are some pics to get started, sorry for the quality I left my camera so they were taken on a cell phone. Looking forward to doing this build.


East wall where HT will go


West wall where Bar will be


Pic of framing


A very rough layout just off the top of my head, done in paint. I will be working on getting the layout into design software and tweaking it there in the next couple of days.

Questions, comments?

 

[westcott]

A lot of space. That is good but it is tough to provide the proper seating distance with the staircase right at the 2/3 mark (ideal seating distance for speakers and display). Sit much closer and you will be in the middle of the room (an audio null area). If you rotate the display, then you only have 14' and that would make it pretty tight. (You do not want to place seating against a rear wall).

I would suggest partitioning the space for optimal acoustics or forgoing the second display where the bar is.

Sorry i can not be of more help. It does not look like there is a simple solution.

There are several free acoustic room calculators on the net. I would suggest playing around with one of them with different possible room sizes you can partition to and see what works best. You want to have as few room mode overlaps as possible. If frequency overlap does occur, it is better to have them overlap at frequencies above 120Hz.

 

[jmanlp]

I appreciate the feedback, could you point me in the direction of your favorite calculator. Also some things have changed with the setup of the room. Now there will be a wall 6' back from the window and it will be a fixed screen instead of a drop down one. I will post more details as soon as I can including some preliminary designs.

 

[jostenmeat]

Nice, a false wall is the WTG. For total immersion, sea of black, no reflections off of speakers, sub, etc.

 

[westcott]

I appreciate the feedback, could you point me in the direction of your favorite calculator. Also some things have changed with the setup of the room. Now there will be a wall 6' back from the window and it will be a fixed screen instead of a drop down one. I will post more details as soon as I can including some preliminary designs.

This one is as good as any. Don't go off the deep end. There is no bottom at the other end of the pool!!!

Room Mode Calculator

I would also suggest taking a quick read of some of the white papers provided by Harman International. Once again, don't go off the deep end but it should give you a better understanding of what you are trying to accomplish from an audio stand point.

Harman International White Papers

I see many a system designed with asthetics in mind and that is good, but it should not be the only consideration or the first. There are ways to have your cake and eat it too with a little knowledge and a lot of planning. I would also avoid in wall speakers. For the best audio, use conventional cabinet speakers.

Hope my insight will help you avoid some of the errors frequently made and your friend appreciates the extra lengths you are going to to make his system the best it can be.

 

[jmanlp]

Here is the intial layout of just the HT, we are now going with a setback wall and a fixed frame screen requested by the owner.

I am leaning heavily toward a Panasonic PT-AE2000U for the projector and 1.4 gain Carada 96" Screen. A large portion of the wire will be ariving next week and hopefully the owner had a chance to get the wall up.

 

[Rogozhin]

That is a good looking plan.

 

[westcott]

Here is the intial layout of just the HT, we are now going with a setback wall and a fixed frame screen requested by the owner.

I am leaning heavily toward a Panasonic PT-AE2000U for the projector and 1.4 gain Carada 96" Screen. A large portion of the wire will be ariving next week and hopefully the owner had a chance to get the wall up.

It looks good. I did not run the numbers on 16' x 20' but that seems like a good ratio. I know this is only a rough drawing but leave room to move all the speakers away from the walls and you may want to consider having the subwoofers oppose each other. One on each side wall or one in the front, one in the back. Testing for the flattest frequency response is really the only way to know what configuration works best but these are the suggested starting points for subs based on the white papers I provided.

Good Luck and keep us posted on your progress.

As far as equipment, if I were to upgrade my projector, the 2000 is the one I would buy. It is versatile (2.0 throw distance), no screen door, and excellent color rendition. Plus, you do not have to worry about people who are sensitive to DLP side effects. And, you can not go wrong with the Carada screens. They are very well built for a fraction of the cost of the big name mfgs.

 

[jmanlp]

Thanks for all the input guys, It makes me feel better having other people ok what I am doing.

I am leaning toward putting a Yamaha RX-V1900 at the heart of the HT. I have not even begun to think of how I am going to do the bar setup. I think that I may end up keeping them fairly separate except to have an HDMI and/ or Component cable from the HT to the plasma at the bar so that they can display the same thing if there is like a football party or something going on. I will update the drawing when I have more info from the owner on how the bar layout will be and whatnot.

I talked to the owner the other night about doing wiring. There will be a 20 amp dedicated circuit to the equipment rack, and a 20 amp dedicated circuit to the two subs. He is installing all this himself since he is wiring the whole building.

 

[jostenmeat]

So, 10k for all the AV, and this includes flat panel, PJ, screen, dual subs, outdoor speakers?

* Front projector with really good picture and a large screen that will be motorized drop down (Since it will drop in front of the doors and windows that access one of the decks

As BMXTRIX taught us, electric screen does nothing for performance or longevity. Savings on a manual can be put towards better products, such as the PJ for example.

* Audio that can play loud with great definition and subs that can shake their seats

The great definition part will be tremendously dependent on both speaker/listener positioning, as well as taming room acoustics (read: budget for treatments).

* Mount an existing 50" Plasma they have in the bar area and tie it into the overall system and have good stereo sound for it for both watching TV and listening to music

OK.... I personally don't like the idea of this taking money away from PJ/screen, but it ain't my home. If I had to have a flat panel, Id think about a $800 panny 42" to allow more money for serious HT. JMO.


I know people love fancy rooms; everybody does. However, I prefer performance-oriented setups. A lot of people have put more money into their HT than I have, just to make it look "cooler", but are using lower grade equipment. Mine still looks good, not super fancy, but when you turn the lights off, all the viewers poop their pants. FWIW.

 

[jmanlp]

The TV and mount are both already owned by them, apparently they bought a wall mount when the bought the TV just never got around to using it (go figure). If you read my latest post, there will be no electric screen anymore, I talked to them a bit about the cost of a good high end electric screen and we came up with a new idea which they actually wanted to do to begin with and that is to separate the room and put in a fixed screen.

 

[jostenmeat]

The TV and mount are both already owned by them, apparently they bought a wall mount when the bought the TV just never got around to using it (go figure).

Nice, more money for better goodies!

If you read my latest post, there will be no electric screen anymore, I talked to them a bit about the cost of a good high end electric screen and we came up with a new idea which they actually wanted to do to begin with and that is to separate the room and put in a fixed screen.

My bad.

Hm. Please forgive me for not being so keen, up-to-date or meticulous with what you may or may not have typed already, but . . .

according to the last attachment:
It appears to me that you have plenty of space to do a "false wall" with GOM. Now, depending on the colors/curtains used, the improvement of immersion may be greatly or slightly improved. I think that a false wall as well as an AT screen would be the two greatest improvements to my own.

In this case, it seems feasible! You won't have light reflecting off the subs and speakers. By making the false wall AT, you will succeed in getting speakers further away from corners/boundaries which is almost always a good thing.

When I first read "separate the room", I was worried about lack of space (for acoustics primarily, but also wondering about HVAC), but it appears that is really quite the large space.

Re dual subs up front: The popular Harman paper that is talked about in recent times does have subs at opposing midwall points in a rectangular room. ok, westcott already covered it. OTOH, you do have the possibility of doing like mike c, and using shelving filters to boost midbass without fear of localization.

IMO, the midbass is the only place where a "decent" HT lacks compared to the theters. The HT, at least mine, exceeds the theater in every other regard. Even in immersion, even with lack of false wall and AT. Its just, why not, and go for the gold with the last two.

good luck man, big project.

 

[jmanlp]

Some progress was made, I have been waiting on the owner to do things like paint and get the electrical in. Things are starting to pick up, and today I got the screen in. Carpet should be coming next week. There is still a lot of work to do but it is getting there. We will now be doing a built in pull out rack shelf by Middle Atlantic into the side wall behind the screen (which is in that big box sitting there). Again sorry for the bad photo quality, I need to remember to take my camera down with me.



Carada screen


View from future bar


Good view of screen


Whole room