Home Theater Room Design


Your home theater's interior is the most overlooked contribution to your system's sound and video quality, but it's also one of the most important.

An old Zen adage says that what is there gives a thing substance, but what is not there is the measure of its true value. While your speakers determine the quality of sound, it is the space into which they play that allows us to hear their true potential. The speakers you choose should be matched to the room, too large or small for the home theater room and you compromise imaging or dynamic range.
Try to keep the room as open as possible and not cluttered with too much furniture, there are many specialty home theater furniture options today such as drink tables that will leave a small sonic footprint in your home theater room.

Try to strike a balance between acoustic reflection and dampening in your home theater room. A room lined with too many reflective surfaces like wood paneling or concrete walls, wooden floors or reflective furniture will cause sound to bounce around inside the room. Excessive reflection will contribute to an overly bright sounding system (emphasis on middle highs) and worse can cause cancellations of certain frequencies robbing your system of its true dynamic range. You can control reflections by including acoustic paneling into your Home Theater design; a wide variety of attractive panels are available today to fit any design.

There are other lower budget alternatives to acoustic paneling, try what movie theaters have used for decades - curtains made from a thick, absorbent material. Acoustic panels can help soundproof the room from the outside as well as control reflections inside your home theater room.

As much as you want to control reflections, your home theater design shouldn't be aimed at completely dampening sound. A certain degree of reflection will bring your home theater audio to life. This is good news if the thought of buying acoustic paneling for every inch of wall in your home theater room is way over budget - it's just not necessary. An anechoic chamber is a room completely dampened of acoustic reflections. While often used by speaker designers for testing, it's not a desirable environment when listening for pleasure.

Just as open space and acoustic properties of your interior is an important consideration for sound, your home theater room's ability to control lighting is critical to video. A dark home theater room will allow the light source inside your display to show all its brilliant color, but too dark can fatigue your audience. A small amount of ambient lighting at about 65,000 degrees Kelvin (achieved by neutral fluorescent lights) will help reduce eyestrain and fatigue that sometimes puts an audience to sleep during a long feature. See Home Theater Lighting