Nick's Homebrew Bar and Entertainment Area - Page 3

Nick, I would most likely put the door just in front of my first row seating, but keep behind your first reflection point on that wall (so you can treat that wall area if necessary), if you can do that. I would much rather it be there than in the rear if you're planning a full width riser.

For the eqpt rack, you could just cut it into the north east corner of your game room wall (next to your south HT wall left of the entrance door) extending into the storage area behind that. That location would be right on your way into the theater and convenient in my opinion at least.

Hi Nick, glad to see you are into homebrewing - that's is super cool. While I don't do it myself I do have a friend who has done it extensively. I've gotten quite a bit into local craft beer recently, and have considered brewing - but I doubt I'd want to invest the time.

Lots of options for an equipment closet. One would be to frame a false wall (with a false door on the right or left), moving your screen forward. One advantage of this is you could hide all sorts of acoustic treatment behind it with no need to make it look publicly acceptable (same with cabling runs etc). For example you could SuperChunk both corners, and place your equipment just inboard of that. This solution also makes it easier to deal with your game consoles, and all of your cable runs can be short except those to the projector and speaker cables to the surrounds, which seems pretty convenient (those are relatively stable in technological terms, for the PJ just run HDMI/component/composite/S and you should be done for a good long time - though large conduits are always a good idea). One problem is that you would need to move your door backward, risking getting into the area you want to put the Bowler. You'd need to revise the drawings to do a good job evaluating this. Also, I haven't exactly reviewed a lot of the build threads so I don't think I probably have that many ideas compared to those more experienced.

Studiotips Superchunk: http://forum.studiotips.com/viewtopic.php?t=535

Another option would be to build an equipment and media closet in one side of the rear of the room. This has the advantage of not threatening the the bowler space (and providing you somewhere to put your media) but will make dealing with the game consoles a hassle.

Are the seats to scale in your image of the theatre? If so, then your room is a LOT larger than mine (which is a good deal, really). One thing I think is that for better acoustics you need to pull your seats all forward so the rear row is farther from the rear wall. Do you have a planned screen size yet? Knowing that will help you figure the viewing angles to know where good seating locations are for different resolution material, and you need to know that to calculate sight lines for your riser(s). Easily done with the calculator here: http://www.theater-calc.com/ Also having an approximate screen size would help you plan for where you want to mount the projector by considering projectors in the technology/price class you'd intend to buy - note that projectors' image quality is better in certain zoom ranges. Your room looks long enough that you'll definitely need a hush box, which is going to steal some height from the ceiling somewhere in the room. With the ceiling height you have, I think you can get away with a reasonable height riser and could easily have a bar-height seating third row like the one I showed you in the other thread. I'm 5'10" and in bar height seating my head is roughly the same position as when I am standing - and since the seats aren't on a riser you don't have to provide clearance for someone to step up.

I can't clearly read the size you have laid out for the room, but it sounds like you also have enough data to run the room through a room mode calculator to get an idea of how much acoustical work you will have ahead of you, or be able to make few-inch adjustments now to avoid more work later. http://www.bobgolds.com/Mode/RoomModes.htm

I'm not sure how good it is for making layouts of things, but the riser I showed you was designed in Google Sketchup. There's an extensive library of architectural features/furniture/etc (I didn't model the sofa and chairs and switches and lights!), though I'm new enough to it to not know if it's any good at creating layouts to build from. The price is right: free.

I still use laserdiscs, and S or composite (depending on player and video device) are the best video transports for it. Also, composite is all you get on the NES (yes, the old-school 8-bit Nintendo) which I am planning to hook up shortly. I think you may be able to get a component cable for Wii, but I don't think it has a digital video out capability either. Admittedly, if you don't have any old-school sources you can skip the analog video transports. When I ran my cables, I figured I'd just cover every input my projector has and I'd at least be done until I got something else.

What components in your rack are going to make a lot of noise? Maybe if you have a large UPS it will have a fan, and I think some amplifiers (probably multiroom stuff) may have fans but most I know of are passively cooled. The major sources of noise in most HTs, I think, are the projector, then the HVAC system. In my theatre I'm not likely to ever deal with either one. Most guests won't even notice those. Oh, I guess if you go HTPC then you might have a noise issue with that also.

I ran your room dimensions through the calculator, and they actually look pretty good: you don't have any pink or red modal groupings. I didn't try to vary them a bit to see if I could improve them further, but this would be pretty easily done. Still, you're starting from a better point than many acoustically. You could also consider playing with the demo of RPG Room Sizer, it might give you more insight. http://www.rpginc.com/products/roomsizer/index.htm

The door looks small on your layout... add that to your to-do list for improving your design since it will be critical to fitting the bowler in especially if you built the false wall. I think most go with an exterior size door. I've seen french doors also, which I think is a good idea for getting things in and out but it'd be twice the hassle to sound proof so I don't think I'd use them.

Here's maybe something else to think about....do you really need your HT to be 19' wide (seems like it may be wasting some space to me)? If you take the 090 seating for example, a curved row of 4 are just over 12'. If you add 2-2.5' aisles either side, you could take your room down to around 16-17' vs. 19'+. That would add another 2'+ to the wall length on the left side of your gameroom (running along the storage area), which should then allow you to put your bowling game along that wall, and then you won't have any issues with door placement along the theater wall.

Layout's are always fun the part!

I have a nice wall at my house you could fit that bowling machine... it would save you a lot of space

Now you're getting there! With this you can really start to get a feel for the scale of where things go.

Looks like you'd want to go with a 92 to 96 inch screen... http://carltonbale.com/1080p-does-matter

I still say the last row of seats is too close to the rear wall. To make the acoustics decent in the back row the only option that gives you is to make a fully-absorbing rear wall, and even then you might not get decent bass response back there depending on how modal problems go in the room. Curved seating is always going to make this more difficult.

I'd suggest to not show the equipment all the way to the corner, since you're going to want acoustical treatment there. Move it off the corner by ~3 feet... in fact directly behind the screen is ideal since it's sort of an acoustically "dead" zone unless you are planning to use a perforated screen.

Honestly I didn't read enough of that guy's stuff to know what shape screen he was basing it on. I'd guess at 16:9 but would have to check. All I did was read across from your 12-ft viewing distance to the "can see full effect of 1080p" line and drop down. And I didn't even use a ruler... I am mostly trying to point you toward some tools in most of the comments in which I provide links.

I haven't ever played with anamorphic lenses or thought about going wider than 16:9 so I've no opinions on that. In my case I decided that matching the screen to the projector shape made the most sense. I also have a hefty amount of 4:3 material that I still want to watch, which is worse quality so it makes sense to make it smaller. However I don't know if I'd want it as small as it would have to be in a 2.35! I also have no intent to ever use a masking system. If you are, that obviously affects things significantly.

I personally am not willing to deal with the acoustical hassles of an AT screen, plus I don't have that much depth to play with in my current room, and I like the visible-speaker aesthetic anyhow. But if it's your plan to do that, obviously that changes how you do things.

I'm in the process of studying up on acoustics in a major way, so that's in the forefront of my mind lately.

I can't say I've studied all of the issues with the "AT" screens so I definitely don't know all the issues. I do know that they aren't actually acoustically transparent - their level of transparency varies significantly with frequency so you are supposed to EQ the channels for the speakers that are behind to adjust for it (hopefully this gets better with each successive generation of screen but I bet you can't entirely get away from it). I've also recently read of people who had some comb filtering effects who had to put absorption on the front baffles of their speakers (beside the drivers) to stop it. I wonder if such effects can't happen between the screen and the wall.

As for the video side, I have also heard that perforated screens can cause visual moiré effect. I'm not familiar enough to know whether that is a modern or ancient concern, or understand factors that make it better or worse. Plus, the perforated screens do cause some loss of brightness of the projected image.

I came to HT more from the audio world, so I have the audio person's setup - speakers out into the room. I also have a KISS attitude for most things, in which I figure that rather than adjusting things to fix them later I'm better off if I can avoid breaking them in the first place.

Must be a heck of a network if you need a 24-port switch. It looks hard-ish to find a switch in that size range with wallmount slots, but did find:

NETGEAR ProSafe JGS524 on eBay ($120)
Cisco Linksys SR2024C on eBay ($150)

If you really demand this wall mount thing and aren't willing to DIY a solution to attach to rackmount ears or something (that's probably what I would do, attach wood blocks to screw the rackmount ears onto) then you are going to pay a premium given that you can get 24-port gigabit switches in the 68-75 dollar range:

D-Link managed switch DES-3226 (older model I guess) on Amazon ($64 + ship)
Cisco SR224G on buy.com ($75/free ship)

I'm not sure about the forum rules of posting links to this stuff, so I'm just giving hints for the moment. It's all fairly easy to find... all I did was use Google shopping.

Sorry about that... they said gigabit and I guess I should have had a careful look at the specs. I didn't realize they were only gigabit-uplink, which I clearly knew was not what was requested. I was surprised to find gigabit switches with that many ports for that low a cost... that explains it.

That's some serious home networking! For the moment I just have wifi flying all over, but I do have client bridges so I can have some faster network segments and deal with wired-only devices.

I've been using a D-Link DGS-1024D switch for a while now. I've been really happy with it. It runs pretty cool and uses a little bit less power than most.

As far as I can tell, the first two I mentioned ARE gigabit on all the ports, but the second two are only 10/100 on all the ports.

I ran a Cat5 to the projector and one to the screen, from the equipment closet. Cat5 cable is good for other uses, such as wired IR repeaters, screen motor control, remote signalling, T-stat, etc.