I recently made some changes to my basement HT / Playroom and I can only say – “wow” when it comes to both the look and the resulting picture from my projector.

The “before” and “after” photos are attached.

What I did:

1. Added black velvet curtains on the entire wall surrounding my screen (Walmart – they were not long enough so I bought an extra curtain and my wife sewed “extensions” on them). These are less than $10 a panel and I spent about $80 on panels and $40 on curtain rods. They panels are very thin “velvet”, but work very well in front of a wall.

2. Moved my equipment rack off to the left of the room and only left the speakers and my two-channel amp for the front speakers under the screen. The total cost of this was around $200 for 100 feet of 12-gauge speaker wire, some new RG6, XLR and RCA interconnects for longer runs, and new 12-inch supports for my “new” center stand.

The total cost of around $320 may not sound cheap, but the impact to the room and the resulting projector brightness and contrast was cheaper than a calibration and had more impact.

In addition, my wife thinks it looks great (she was a little skeptical to start) and the cat loves to “hide” behind the curtains – luckily she (the cat) is not one to claw on the curtains.

I have not rerun my room correction system on the audio side to see what impact the equipment moves and curtains have on the audio, but it should be favorable. At least it seems to sound better, or course that could be because it looks better!

I can highly recommend this type of change to your system if you have a lighter color behind a projection screen.

I would like to also paint the ceiling tiles, but my wife is not willing to let me do that….yet! :D

Mike

Dramatic screen wall improvement especially with perceived contrast. I know because I did the same with my last HT. I placed acoustic foam behind filling the entire screen wass (glued with spray on 3M adhesive).

One thing I did that made the most substantial improvement in my last room was adding a single mask panel made with the same black velvet. 2.35:1 (which account for most films) looked fantastic.

What I did was make a velvet panel that was attached/wrapped to a long 1x2. I nailed it into the wall above the screen (behind the velvet wall panels). When not in use it was just rolled a bit and kept above the screen behind the panels. When in use, I just let it down and used two hooks on the sides of the screen to hold it straight. I then used the VW50's vertical shift to move the image down.