I'm ready to start my home theater in the walkout basement under our new kitchen. The space is 22'x29' with a quadruple french door at the 22' foot end. I have some questions for you experts.

1. I have a heated concrete floor. Not sure how to handle this situation. Tile would be ideal for heating but you kind of need carpet for the sound. Would risers keep the heat from radiating to the room? Is there a carpet that works well with radiant heat? Has anyone ever done risers over a heated floor?

2. I also want to have room for a pool table in this space. Do you think a theater that is 22' wide and open in the back to a pool table area would work? There really isn't enought room to have seperate walled off areas.

3. I see that alot of people are using special fasteners to decouple the sheetrock from the walls and ceiling. I am planing on doing this to the ceiling. Do you think it is needed? The ceiling is trussed not 2x material or i-joists. I'm thinking the trusses sort of decouple by their design. Also, the walls are 1' thick iso forms. There will be about 2.5" of foam between the concrete and the drywall. I'm thinking this also would be enough without the special fasteners. Maybe I should just cover this foam with the fabric and skip the sheetrock and sound panels altogether? Do I need sheetrock to pass code?

4. Does anyone have examples of a larger theater that is open to another area in the back? How would this affect the overall sound?

I see that most people seem to put the speakers behind the screen. I already have great sounding speakers but they just would not sound their best behind the screen. They would have to be to either side of the screen and about 2' forward to sound their best. I know everyone here seems to just use their theater for movies but I would love to also use it for music. Can this be done? I have Martin Logan Spiers and a Cinema front that I want to use. I really don't want two seperate systems for music and movies. I would love to hear from you guys about these issues. I did a search for some of my answers, but my design issues are pretty unique as far as I can tell.

Craig

I can't answer all your questions, however if you look around you can probably find many theaters with the backs open for a bar or a pool table.
Regarding #3, people decouple walls for sound proofing reasons - so the sound won't get out and disrupt the rest of the household. I have a great website you can use (http://www.soundproofingcompany.com/library/articles/elements_of_room_construction/). If you follow the rules there you should get a better understanding of how sound proofing works. My recommendation would be green glue and double dry wall, but then again I don't know your situation.

Now, about the speakers behind the wall. It's a matter of personal preference. Some people like having a screen on their entire wall and hide the speakers like in a real cinema. However, not every screen can be used for this. Brands like SMX screens and some models of Steward are acoustically transparent to they minimally affect the sound of your set up.

1. I also have a water heated concrete floor in my basement/theater. I put carpet throughout the basement, except the bathroom, which is tile. The heat still penetrates through the carpet and pad. I used a fairly standard pad (8 lb?) and a short shag kind of carpet. The floor is nice and warm. If you somehow weren't getting enough heat radiating into the room after carpeting you could just open the mixing valve more to provide a higher water temperature to the slab. I would be very surprised if you needed to. I have a riser as well, it doesn't cause any issues.

I wouldn't put tile down, at least not in the living area. My bathroom floor is cool and if you had the heat high enough to get it to feel warm underfoot, the basement would be unbearably hot. Also tile would sound terrible (unless you were interested an acoustically treating your ceiling) and would reflect a lot of light around the room.

Questions 2 and 4; post a floor plan and it will be easier to understand what space you are working with and what might work best. With any luck Bigmouth will draw you out a plan based on your space!

3. Soundproofing questions are best left to someone else, I would think that trusses would still benefit from RISC clips and resilient channel. It's one of those things that would be really, really hard to add back in after the fact if you were not happy with your soundproofing results.

As for needing drywall, phone your local inspector and ask. My bet would be since foam insulation gives off very nasty chemicals when it burns, that if it is now in an inhabited place it would have to be covered. Also if you are planning to do soundproofing, again you will probably have to look at building the walls in a particular way. You may also want stud walls to run wires in.

5. Many people put speakers behind (acoustically transparent) screens. These should minimally affect the sound. Reasons for using an acoustically transparent screen include;
Having a clean look with no equipment visible (being a fellow Martin-Logan owner I know why you would rather not hide these away!)
Being able to place the speakers in the optimal position, without having to place the L and R outside the screen boundary
In a width limited room (this does not sound like a problem for you) you can put up a larger screen because you can go wall to wall. My theater is only 11 feet wide and I wanted to put up a 10 foot wide screen...
Being able to acoustically treat a larger area of the front wall, even if you don't place your speakers behind the screen, acoustical treatments may make you consider an acoustically transparent screen.

Note; many people have 2 or 3 feet behind their screen because most speakers (unless designed to be in-wall or on-wall) sound better with a couple of feet to the back wall. So you could still place your speakers behind the screen if you wanted to.

That said, many people have their speakers out in the room and it's mostly a matter of personal choice.

A question for you...

Have you thought about how you are going to control light in the space. A quadruple French door sounds like a nightmare. As I said above, if you could post a floor plan and maybe some pictures of the space as it is now, people can often make some very useful suggestions.

Greg