Design and Build Your Own Home Theater

Here's how to get started

By Charlie White

(6/27/05) Do you have a basement or spare room in your house that you'd like to turn into a home theater? Are you building a new house and would like to design a home theater from scratch? Well, I recently built a new house and designed a home theater into it, and I'll tell you how I did it. It was a process that was only moderately difficult, and in the end turned out to be well worth it.

Since my project involved new construction, I could start from scratch and design my theater in any place, shape, or form that I had in mind. For me, the best location for the theater is in the basement of the house, because it offered the best opportunities for a room without windows, and could be more easily soundproofed. You could also use a spare bedroom for your home theater, or even turn your living room into one, but your results may not be as good since you must deal with the light streaming in from windows and you won't have the kind of isolation that you get with a dedicated room that's on the lower level, away from all the other rooms.

An important consideration was the design of the theater room itself. For this, I resorted to knowledge gained in an acoustics class I took in college, which taught me that parallel surfaces were bad for audio. When one surface is parallel to another, audio tends to bounce back and forth between those two walls, creating echo. So, for the shape of my home theater I opted for a pentagonal shape, where none of the walls were parallel to each other. To design this room, I used a consumer-grade architectural design package called Punch! Home Design Architectural Series 3000, which served my purposes well. With this software, you can draw the room, and include furniture, equipment, ceilings, walls, and floors, and then you can do 3D walk-throughs to see how it looks. Using this software was crucial in designing this theater, because after I made changes I could immediately see what it felt like to be in the room.

Here's the plan I designed in the Punch Home Design Architectural Series 3000 software. It's possible to do the electrical design with this software, too. An architect approved the plan before construction began.

Since I have a small family, I determined that all we needed was room for three home theater seats, and then room for a couch in the back of the theater in case we had more than three people watching. For your purposes, you may want many more seats in your theater, so you'll need to design accordingly. In its pentagon shape, I placed the door at the top of the pentagon, and the screen at the flat base of the pentagon. Twelve feet from the screen, I placed the projector, hanging from the ceiling. Another key consideration in this job was sound isolation from the rest of the house. A way to completely isolate the sound of your home theater from the rest of the house is to literally build a theater inside of a room, where there are double walls, doubled ceiling and floor, resulting in a floating room that is completely sealed off from the rest of the house. In between each of these walls are copious amounts of insulation. Short of that, the best idea is to heavily insulate the ceiling, a technique which works quite well and makes it so that only the loudest parts of movies can be heard in other rooms of the house. 

Another consideration I had to make was, would I use a projector, a rear-projection freestanding TV, an LCD monitor, or a plasma display? An LCD monitor was a good choice, but the cost of a large-enough LCD was prohibitive. A 45-inch display costs upwards of $5,000 at this writing, and that was way over budget for the size of display I had in mind. Plasma displays are available in even larger sizes, but also were quite expensive. In fact, none of the choices (except one) offered me the screen size I was looking for. And, after all, I was building a home theater, not just a room in which I could watch television. For me, that's an important distinction -- the word ?theater? meant a darkened room with a projector. There's just something about sitting in the dark, watching an image projected from behind you that reminds you of sitting in a commercial movie theater. This was the atmosphere I was looking for. So, I decided to use a projector.

At the time, about two years ago, NEC had released a successor to its HT-1000 home theater projector, a native 1024x768 model that used DLP technology. Because it wasn't the newest model, I was able to get the HT-1000 at a good price. It couldn't deliver true HD, but given its price of approximately $3500, it was precisely at the price range I was looking for and allowed me to use a screen that ended up being 84 inches diagonal. At a distance of 12 feet from the screen, it results in a picture that looks apparently just as big as when I sit in the best seat at the local multiplex.

For audio, I already had a Dolby 5.1 stereo system, using Cambridge SoundWorks Ensemble 1 satellite speakers, a set which also includes two subwoofers. I also added a Cambridge SoundWorks Center Channel speaker to the mix, and powered the speakers with my existing Sony receiver -- nothing special, but it's plenty powerful. The receiver is modern enough to have SPDIF optical as well as coaxial audio inputs. The result is audio that sounds much better than the theaters I frequent, and since I already owned this equipment, it represented no out-of-pocket cost.

For video, I used the Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8000 HD personal video recorder provided by Time Warner Cable, fed to the projector via component cables. This unit unfortunately leaves a lot to be desired, but still has the capacity to record and store an unusually large number of high-definition programs. Aside from the occasional dropped frame, its quality is surprisingly good. Also providing video is a run-of-the-mill Panasonic progressive-scan DVD player, whose signal is also fed via component cables to the projector, and a 2.5GHz Dell computer, which plugs into the projector via DVI cable. To control the computer, I'm using a Bluetooth desktop from Microsoft, consisting of a keyboard and mouse capable of transmitting their signals through a wall. This way, I can place the noisy computer outside the theater, and since it's hooked up to my home network, I can access movies, videos, and audio files from any other computer in the house.