Home Theaters are basically a combination of audio and visual systems designed to recreate the experience of watching a movie in a movie theater at the ease of one’s home. One of the major differences between a television and a home theater is the sound experience that breathes into your movie experience. Designing a home theater is relatively a new concept in regard to the cinema and is as costly as a utopian dream for a major part of the world’s population. On the other hand, the person putting in a lot of money should get the right barter for the money he has invested to get a home theater.
To make the barter balanced, a few things might add up to this experience of watching movies—by following a few tips while designing and installing a home theater.
1. Ask Yourself Why Do You Need A Home Theater | Designing a Home Theater
The first and foremost thing you need to ask yourself is, “Why do I need a Home Theater?” The answer to this question will make your way a lot easier as you would not want to be a person investing a lot of money in home theater and barely using it.
Also, this will provide an answer to a lot of design queries and will provide a clear understanding of choosing what kind of audio and video systems should be used.
2. Placement of Home Theater
Placement of the home theater in your house would be one of the very important factors that need most of your attention. First of all, idealize the audience. Depending upon the type of audience, its location will be finalized. The formal audience need not break into your personal space, so in that case, the home theater will be placed closer to the public areas without having the audience break into your personal space.
Whereas for a casual and very close audience, the home theater needs to act as a personal space, hence, marking its location on the interior part of the house away from the public spaces. Another aspect of it is to place the home theater away from the heavy traffic areas of the house, so that the disturbance on each side is minimized.
3. Colour Theme of the Room
The Colour theme that will add to your experience of home theater has to be the dark theme. A Dark theme will contribute for good to the ambiance. A monochrome of black will be the best-suited colour theme as it will limit the light reflected from the surface, also a little bit of light penetration into the home theater won’t affect the occupants much.
Dual chrome of black and its substituent colour is one of the most sought colour themes for home theaters and other such rooms. In any scenario, not more than 3 colours should be used. The colour theme has to be simple and it should let the audio and video systems take charge of drawing attention.
4. Plan for Proper Seating and Viewing
You may install the best audio-video systems available in the market but if there’s a flawed design that does not provide the best seating and view to the occupant then you may lose the vibe of it.
First of all, you need to decide on how many people at max will be occupying the room and design the layout and seating accordingly. Make sure you don’t compromise on any seating, if you do then this will highly impact the viewer in a very negative way.
A flexible seating that allows more postures must be preferred over a very rigid kind of seating to allow the people to have a very casual and joyful atmosphere.
5. Limit Reflecting Objects | Designing a Home Theater
While having the experience of a movie theater at the comfort of your house, you need everything to be as good as the movie theater and any hindrance to that will cost you your attention what is even a movie experience if you don’t pay attention to every single part of it.
To make your movie-watching session a wonderful one, you need to eliminate every major and small distraction. One of them is the reflected light, to block it one of the best remedies is to use non-reflective surfaces at the wall and any other exposed surface
6. Control The Ambient Lighting of the Space
To make the most out of your movie-watching experience, one thing you can add to your accessories list for home theater is the ambient lights. Different genres of movies trigger different emotions and so does the lighting.
If you do not want to stick to a monotonous movie genre, you will be needing a multicolour ambient light that can be controlled by you. This will assist your mood in accordance with the movie you are watching. Choose a light in which you can alter the intensity of the light according to your need otherwise the harsh light intensity will ruin your experience.
7. Sound and Acoustic Properties
There has to be an acoustic border between the exterior, and interior of the home theater. There are two reasons for it. First, you won’t like the external sounds to disturb or ruin your movie, and second, the people outside of the home theater would not want to listen to your movie sound.
To make a balance between the two, you need to install or use the materials that would absorb the sound within the home theater. There are various materials available in the market and at a not so very costly price.
8. Ventilation and Daylighting
Ventilation and Daylighting may seem like a must-have parameter for the spaces in your house but home theater needs a little different care. Any provision for natural ventilation may invite a lot of sound disturbance.
Daylighting is not the sought-after quality you would look for in a home theater as it will divide your visual attention. Therefore, mechanical ventilation systems have to be installed and any exterior light source should be avoided. Do not shy away from using a good HVAC (heat ventilation and air-conditioning) system.
9. Selection of Audio/Video Systems
A very important step to ensure the maximum output from your home theater is the selection of audio and video systems that will be installed. It is one of the most difficult decisions to make and at the same time very crucial as well.
To make a fair decision, prioritize the movie genres you’re really into, and what possible genres you are going to watch in the home theater once you are done then comes the process where you look into the market for the system that will suit your requirement.
10. Keep It Simple | Designing a Home Theater
People often want their home theaters to be very flashy and funky and to be honest it is a very common notion of people to show-off rather than to have better comfort and that’s the problem.
A funky design would divide your attention from the movie and eventually your movie experience will go downhill. To combat this issue, lookout for a simple and minimalistic design approach at least for your home theaters—as it won’t divide your attention and will help you enjoy the movie.
