My wife and I have been wracking our brains to try to figure out how big of a screen and how much/where our seating will be for our theater.

We're in the beginning of our design phase and have a 16 x 20 x 9 room to work with. I want to do a 2:35:1 screen. We estimated the back row of seating to take up 54" (using just a couch), then we would like to do a curved row of 4 recliners which should be about 84" long. From this I calculated our viewing locations from the rear wall. Back row will be about 1 foot, front row of seating about 6 feet from the rear wall.

So I believe this will give me about 14' viewing distance to a screen mounted directly on the wall for my first row of seating and 19' for my second row. I'd like to use an AT screen, but that would eat up about 2.5' of my viewing distance to allow room for the speakers behind it, correct?

So I think if we go non AT I should be able to get about a 120" diagonal 2:35:1 screen, but if I go AT, I will have to shrink that down a bit, correct? Does anybody have any comments on these measurements? I think they seem about correct based on measuring our furniture and looking at some schematics of seating online.

Thanks for any help.

Bumping this.

Do these dimensions seam approximately correct? Did I not ask the right questions? I do plan on contracting a designer for actual plans, but he is swamped right now and I'd like to get a feel for the basic room layout now if possible.

Thanks.

Many people here will tell you viewing distance is a personal preference. Some will say go as big with the screen as you can, other go by the book. It depends on your projector also. Here is a spreadsheet that helps calculate viewing distances.

http://www.carltonbale.com/home-theater/home-theater-calculator/