Here I am ready to build my theater room and I thought why not start my own thread. I have for most of my life been interested in building and music. As a drummer in my 7th and 8th grade years I started building speaker cabinets for our young rock band. Even at that time I liked big speakers..I would build a cabinet 6 foot tall and put 1 twelve inch speaker in it from radio shack.ha ha. Although I am describing myself over 35 years ago not much has changed. To this day I still play drums, enjoy building projects, and love sound and music. Last year I sold our home of 20 years so we could build a new home..well, honestly I sold our home so I could build a theater room from the ground up and at the last minute decided to build a house around the theater..lol! Although not a licensed contractor I have had a lot of building experience. I have remodeled quite a few homes and did extensive work on our last home. I remodeled our kitchen and my theater room 3 times during these 20 years. I have spent the last two years designing the build of our new home and monster garagemy other passion is cars and I know I am on the wrong forum for cars but I figure cars, theater rooms, its all the same thing, right?. Don't ask me how I was able to pull this off but we built my garage first which also featured a guest apartment we could temporarily move in to. I mean heck, we needed storage for our stuff!! Right? The garage had to come first. As it turned out this was the perfect way we could build our house and live 60 feet away and watch the house as it was built. I am acting as general contractor/homeowner and it is really quite exciting. I was even able to set up a temporary theater in a portion of this garage.
As any home theater guy would do having the opportunity to build a new home, I managed to squeeze out what I feel is an adequate sized theater room of 19 x 25 and a 8 x 11 equipment room. My wife gets to have the rest of the house. The main theater room is comprised of two levels for the theater seating and my ceiling is 10' on main level and 11' 6 in the lower level. The room is construction is primarily concrete..concrete slab, concrete block walls, and the balance will be 2 x 6 walls. The AV equipment will be installed in the equipment room but visible from the main theater room. Both rooms will be climate controlled by a dedicated HAVC system.
In the overall design, I plan on installing large diameter PVC conduit to key audio/video areas in the home to future proof later developments in cable. I plan on distributing my video throughout the house via cat5e or cat6 cable. I will probably run some curtest RG6 coax in the house but not sure how much it will be used. The primary location we watch TV is our media room but I do plan on installing TV's throughout the house.
I do have most of the equipment for my theater room which I will list:
Lexicon MC-8 balanced processor
Lexicon RT-10 disk player
(2) Genelec 1034B Main Monitors
http://www.genelec.com/products/main-monitors/1034b/
(1) Genelec 1038BC Center Channel Monitor
(4) Genelec AIW26 Active In-Wall Loudspeakers for sides and rears.
http://www.genelec-ht.com/active-2-way/aiw26/
(2) Genelec HTS4B's (although dreaming about a Genelec HTS6)
http://www.genelecusa.com/ht/products/subwoofers/hts4b/
When I sold my house I also brought with me the 7 theater chairs from my old theater. It will definitely not be enough seating for the room so I will have to figure out a solution. I am considering adding a couch on the lower level but it is too soon for me to make this decision.
On the equipment front I will ask for help determining a projector, screen (size matters!), Blu-Ray player. I had been using a MX-3000 remote control by Universal but looking for options. Fiber optic ceiling and floor lighting.
For lighting control I have chosen Lutron. I have Lutron Homework's 8 Series Processor running the garage system until I move it to the main equipment room in the house. Yes, I got a little crazy with the garage and I have lighting control. We have fountains and lots of exterior lighting, landscape, sconces, soffit lights around building, etc and it is nice to have the capabilities to program scenes so the night time lighting gets turned on and off at the proper time. I have 2 inch conduit connecting the small equipment room in the garage to the main equipment room in the house and I will be able to share the Lutron processor between both buildings. Once the house is finished the processor will be moved to the house and will be connected to the garage to maintain function of the garage keypads. The Lutron system is pretty awesome and the iPhone app allowing me to control the lighting is pretty fun. The garage is pretty big so it saves a lot of steps. We have relays set up on the Lutron so I can open any garage door on the building, turn on and off lights, turn on relay to start compressor, etc, etc.
IP Camera system software is by Exacq Technologies. I have a combination of Acti and Vivotek camera's (6 cameras at the moment. We have almost 4 acres of property and I have installed over 3600 feet of conduit to feed cat5 cable and other wiring. I currently have cameras in multiple locations on the property.
In conclusion, I have a lot of work to do. The biggest issue I have to tackle is the room interior design. Yes, believe it or not I designed the house and garage elevations and floor plans but did not dive too far into the theater room. Our house is an Old World theme and I will carry this over to the theater room. I have some stone columns to build in the theater, plan on a fiber optic ceiling but otherwise I have a clean slate. Looking forward to sharing ideas.
As any home theater guy would do having the opportunity to build a new home, I managed to squeeze out what I feel is an adequate sized theater room of 19 x 25 and a 8 x 11 equipment room. My wife gets to have the rest of the house. The main theater room is comprised of two levels for the theater seating and my ceiling is 10' on main level and 11' 6 in the lower level. The room is construction is primarily concrete..concrete slab, concrete block walls, and the balance will be 2 x 6 walls. The AV equipment will be installed in the equipment room but visible from the main theater room. Both rooms will be climate controlled by a dedicated HAVC system.
In the overall design, I plan on installing large diameter PVC conduit to key audio/video areas in the home to future proof later developments in cable. I plan on distributing my video throughout the house via cat5e or cat6 cable. I will probably run some curtest RG6 coax in the house but not sure how much it will be used. The primary location we watch TV is our media room but I do plan on installing TV's throughout the house.
I do have most of the equipment for my theater room which I will list:
Lexicon MC-8 balanced processor
Lexicon RT-10 disk player
(2) Genelec 1034B Main Monitors
http://www.genelec.com/products/main-monitors/1034b/
(1) Genelec 1038BC Center Channel Monitor
(4) Genelec AIW26 Active In-Wall Loudspeakers for sides and rears.
http://www.genelec-ht.com/active-2-way/aiw26/
(2) Genelec HTS4B's (although dreaming about a Genelec HTS6)
http://www.genelecusa.com/ht/products/subwoofers/hts4b/
When I sold my house I also brought with me the 7 theater chairs from my old theater. It will definitely not be enough seating for the room so I will have to figure out a solution. I am considering adding a couch on the lower level but it is too soon for me to make this decision.
On the equipment front I will ask for help determining a projector, screen (size matters!), Blu-Ray player. I had been using a MX-3000 remote control by Universal but looking for options. Fiber optic ceiling and floor lighting.
For lighting control I have chosen Lutron. I have Lutron Homework's 8 Series Processor running the garage system until I move it to the main equipment room in the house. Yes, I got a little crazy with the garage and I have lighting control. We have fountains and lots of exterior lighting, landscape, sconces, soffit lights around building, etc and it is nice to have the capabilities to program scenes so the night time lighting gets turned on and off at the proper time. I have 2 inch conduit connecting the small equipment room in the garage to the main equipment room in the house and I will be able to share the Lutron processor between both buildings. Once the house is finished the processor will be moved to the house and will be connected to the garage to maintain function of the garage keypads. The Lutron system is pretty awesome and the iPhone app allowing me to control the lighting is pretty fun. The garage is pretty big so it saves a lot of steps. We have relays set up on the Lutron so I can open any garage door on the building, turn on and off lights, turn on relay to start compressor, etc, etc.
IP Camera system software is by Exacq Technologies. I have a combination of Acti and Vivotek camera's (6 cameras at the moment. We have almost 4 acres of property and I have installed over 3600 feet of conduit to feed cat5 cable and other wiring. I currently have cameras in multiple locations on the property.
In conclusion, I have a lot of work to do. The biggest issue I have to tackle is the room interior design. Yes, believe it or not I designed the house and garage elevations and floor plans but did not dive too far into the theater room. Our house is an Old World theme and I will carry this over to the theater room. I have some stone columns to build in the theater, plan on a fiber optic ceiling but otherwise I have a clean slate. Looking forward to sharing ideas.