Customize Your Theater for Your Lifestyle

A home theater is one of the best investments you can make in home entertainment. It will be the best place in the house to enjoy any media that involves audio and video—from movies to sports to gaming—elevating all your entertainment to immersive experiences that are simply more fun. 

What’s the best home theater design for your Salt Lake City, UT, home? It’s complicated. It all depends on how you live, how you like to enjoy your entertainment, and how much space you have. Regardless of those factors, there's a design that will work for you. Here are four ideas to make your home cinema the ultimate entertainment space. 

SEE ALSO: Bringing Your Home Theater to Life

Surround Sound

It might go without saying that you need great surround sound in a home theater, but there are many options, from mild to wild, and we encourage you not to skimp in this area. The best soundtracks complement the superb visuals you get from today's movies, shows, and video games. Even when watching sports, an immersive sound system encourages a "you are there" experience. 

At a minimum, you want a full multichannel Dolby Atmos surround sound system with separate speakers, either freestanding or architectural. You'll want to power the speakers with the latest generation of surround processing and quality, like components from Marantz. And you may need acoustic treatment to optimize your theater's audio performance for every seat. 

Big Screens in Smaller Spaces

What if you want to designate an unused room for a home theater, but it doesn’t have the space for a huge 200-inch screen and ceiling-mounted projector? No worries—a cinematic experience is still possible. Today’s ultra-short-throw projectors offer a 120-inch screen with a small footprint that sits beneath the projected image. You can enjoy the same sharp 4K images, HDR contrast and color, and most of the performance of larger projector setups. Don’t let a smaller room limit you!

Custom Lighting

Today's LED lighting provides a plethora of options for customizing your theater. Want a starry night effect overhead? LED lights can do it efficiently. Linear lighting can also add decorative flair to your theater, outlining a ceiling and providing under-seat navigation lights. To control it all with a touch of a button and integrate it with your theater, home automation lighting control can give you a single interface to manage every aspect of your theater, from AV to lighting, temperature, and more. 

Acoustic Treatment

No matter how good the audio equipment, most home theaters need help to achieve the best sound quality. Depending on the size, layout, and furnishings in your home cinema, the room may need a little or a significant amount of acoustic treatment to optimize the sound. Multichannel surround sound systems bounce and reflect sounds all over the room, which creates opportunities for unwanted reflections, sibilance, uneven bass, and other audio imperfections. 

Acoustic treatment can cure these ills along with professional calibration of the audio system. A wide array of sound absorbers, diffusers, and traps are available to help balance the sound performance of your space. Plus, these solutions can be completely hidden in walls and ceilings or applied topically in decorative forms so they won’t mar the aesthetics of your home theater. 

 

Want expert home theater design and installation help for your dream home cinema? Get started by contacting Show & Tell AV Solutions today! We would love to work with you.