SMJ Solutions

Inexpensive Home Theater: Planning

April 13th, 2007

The key component to any successful home theater installation is spending enough time during the planning phase. A good plan will save much time and heartache when it comes time to install components, and will also yield a much better home theater experience when you finally are able to sit down and enjoy your first movie.

The best time to plan is while you still have an unfinished room to work with. That way, you can plan your finished room already having the home theater plans in mind. Retrofitting a room to work as a home theater is hard work — it’s much easier to plan the home theater, plan the finished room, finish the room according to those plans, and then install the home theater components.

While planning your home theater, it’s crucial to be flexible. The plans for finishing the room may force changes or compromises in your home theater plan. You’ll need to be flexible.

One of the first things you should consider is the dimensions and special characteristics of your room. While planning your inexpensive home theater you should answer the following questions:

• Are there any windows or other light sources to interfere and compete with your projector?
• What are the measurements of your room?
• Where is the screen going to be?
• What size of screen do you want?
• Where are you going to mount the projector?
• What about the seating arrangements?
• Where are your components going to be placed?
• Will you need any infrared distribution?
• Where are your speakers going to be?
• How many speakers, what type of speakers?
• What flavor of surround sound are you going after?
• What about sound leakage?
• Are there any bordering rooms which will be annoyed by the thumping bass of your subwoofer?
• Where are you going to put the subwoofer?
• Where are the nearest light switches or are you planning on automating those?

Write down the answers to all of these questions, and be prepared with several alternate ideas when you are forced to make changes.

My Inexpensive Home Theater

Much of the work in getting my home theater system installed happened right after the room was framed in. Having the plans finished and a general idea of what to do at this stage saved many hours of frustrating work later.

Room Characteristics
The basement plans we decided on planned for an open downstairs family room. The room does not have any windows and the proposed theater area was only about 180 sq. ft.

The west wall is shared with a room that we had set apart for cold storage. Since one of the weaknesses of a front projection system is usually the fan noise from the overhead mounted projector, I thought it would be a good idea to put the projector in the cold storage room and cut a hole in the wall instead of mounting the projector overhead. This was a revolutionary idea, because it totally eliminated the fan noise and also cut the risk of the projector being bumped and possible damaged by a barrage of balls, dolls, and other kid-propelled flying objects.

Speakers were an easy decision. I decided to purchase in-wall speakers because I wanted the room to be multi-functional and because of the kid-friendly factor.

In the south wall, we chose to install a gas fireplace in a recessed area of the foundation. We were initially looking at that space to put in an AV closet to house the components, but decided on the fireplace because the basement gets awfully chilly during our Utah winters.

Adding the fireplace meant my wife needed to add some sconce lighting for décor on that same wall. I decided to use the sconces as part of the theater room and planned for dimmer switches so those could be used as a controlled light source when using the home theater.

The location of the components was the cause of much concern. I didn’t want everything to be out and cluttering up the room, but I didn’t want to put them so far away that it would be a pain to switch DVDs or to access the components. We had two feet of dead space in the storage room along the west wall. We decided to put in a custom-made cabinet to house all of the components. This was actually one of the last pieces of the puzzle to be installed, but we had to plan the framing and wiring around this critical part of our home theater setup.

Running Cables
Once the framing was done, and while I was doing all of the electrical work I decided to run all of my cables. The first to run was the speaker cable. I ran cables to the front center, front left, and front right speakers. It took about 100’ of speaker cable, and I chose high quality, 10 gauge cables.

The speaker cables originated in the unfinished storage room and traveled along the floor joists above what would be the ceiling of the room. Then I dropped them down to the approximate location of the speakers, leaving several feet of spare cable just in case I needed to move them from the anticipated location down the road. The speaker locations had to be between two wall studs, so I found the center of the room and planned a spot for my center channel and then found the front left and front right speaker locations equidistant from the center where I still had room between studs.

I didn’t need to run speaker cable for the rear speakers at this point because those speakers would be in an unfinished storage room. I could run those cables when I installed my speakers and receiver.

One big question remained, “If all of my components are tucked away neatly in a closet, how are my remote controls going to work? Will I have to get up and open the closet to use my remote control?”

Fortunately, I found out the answer to those questions. Gadgets called IR connecting blocks (also called IR Repeater Hubs) address this specific issue. The IR connecting blocks consist of 3 main parts: a receiver, a connecting block, and flashers. The receiver can be mounted on a wall, inside a speaker, or somewhere else inconspicuous. It receives the IR signals from the remote, so you’ll want to place it somewhere you’d naturally point the remote. The connecting block should be mounted near all of the components (in my case, the cabinet), the flashers plug into the connecting block, and then get glued onto the front of the components where the component would receive the IR signal. All you have to do is get the signal from the receiver to the connecting block, which is done with a simple Cat-5 cable.

So to prepare for the IR system, I ran a Cat-5 cable along with my center channel speaker wire cable. Now that the cabling was complete, I could turn my attention to the home theater projector.

Previous articles:

• Inexpensive Home Theater: Introduction
• Inexpensive Home Theater: Technology Primer

Next articles:

• Inexpensive Home Theater: Projectors
• Inexpensive Home Theater: AV Receiver
• Inexpensive Home Theater: Speakers and subs
• Inexpensive Home Theater: Crucial Components

Entry Filed under: Home Theater

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