The SuperNoVA Theater - Planning & Build - Page 2

Hey...thanks for the kind words! Let me know if you want to make the trek out here for a visit.

Yes, I did push my rear side chairs against the walls, primarily due to space constraints. I used bipole (quad-pole actually) surround speakers for the sides and rears, but sound there is noticably diminished from the money seats in the middle. *I* can hear the difference, but my guests can't. So, consequently, those side chairs are reserved for guests.

Go big or go home! That's a great size. At 19' width, you can go much larger (but the light cannon that you will need to properly illuminate that screen will cost $$$). I did 130" width (141.5" diagonal) 2.37:1 AT screen in my theater (with a 13' width). I LOVE it!

Just not this Saturday...family thing to go to. Other than that, shoot me a PM and we'll work it out.

Folks sitting in the front row reclined 3/4 of the way have their eyeballs 11.5' from the screen in the front row. The front of the seats is 9'4" from the screen. It IS a different experience than the back row, that's for sure!

You are going to be constrained by the length. 19' is short for two rows of recliners and an AT screen. Time to make some compromises.

You could always go with a different ratio screen to get a little more height, like a 17:9. Just a thought.

There are some threads about 2.0:1 screens, you'll need to search for them. 4 way masking makes them really great if you can work out the details.

Awesome! Good to see another local VA/MD build. Welcome to the club!

I haven't had ANY issues. I went down to the Leesburg Gov Center and came out with my permit in less than two hours. And that included having to re-do all my drawing on the forms they handed me (As opposed to the ones I downloaded and filled out). But the lines were short and that was at the height of the housing market. It's probably faster now.

Inspectors were very helpful, even when I failed. One gave me his desk number and said I could call him directly for a re-inspec to know if he could come to my place first that day so I wouldn't have to take off an entire day. The online scheduling worked great, too. Most inspections didn't take more than 10 minutes. My insulation inspection was about 30 secs and the guy said, "I wish they were all this easy. You should see some of the things I see."

I think that as long as they see things being done properly, they're pretty lenient. If they walk in and see a mess of mistakes, they'll take a harder look.

Haha, I've seen some of these things in my previous customers homes. It's really amazing there aren't more house fires.

Many people treat inspectors like the enemy. But they are there to make sure you don't flood your basement or burn your house down. If you do the work right, they are in and out. I just had a fp inspection, the gas line and final were both done right there and it took five minutes.

It also helps to keep your site clean when the inspectors show up. Makes everyone happier.

Many people use them for a number of things combined. HVAC, rope lighting, can lights way they each dont need to be sound sealed, and then the look in general. Having just a soffit in the front and back would be the owners choice I would think. I dont see it causing any problems with acoustics but leave that to the experts. When I said the word tray ceiling to Dennis he spoke up really quickly and said NO you cant do that because the arent square. Thats when I learned not to call soffit a tray even though a lot of contractors will call a design that is exactly like soffit a trayed ceiling.

I didn't have any problem firestopping the decoupled walls. I installed a strip of rockwool about 6" wide between the wall and the framing along the top of the wall. The idea is to plug the gap between the framing, the foundation wall and the ceiling joist cavity.

Looks good and provides a good place to mount cornice molding and/or a small light tray for indirect lighting, See Damelon's it becomes a place to install recessed down lighting without punching a hole in the sound containment drywall bunker.

Place to run duct work horizontally around the room to the proper locations and to use the soffit as a dead vent, something you will want to do with your proposed HVAC design

Other unused parts can be used as a bass trap by filling with insulation and covering with a fabric bottom, See Sandman's and Damelon's

You can use it as a chase to run ALMOST ALL of your rooms wiring, High voltage, Speaker and other low voltage, rather than punching another set of holes in the walls. Outlets are mounted in Columns, Stage and riser not in the walls. Bring all wires into the room thorough two holes with conduit up in the soffit. One for HV the other for LV. Once all wiring is done, plug the ends of the conduit.

You can build a projector hush-box integrated visually with a soffit.

Bottom line is soffits are your friend if you have the headroom.

Extending the duct to the door is better than having a "hump" but, if it were my space, I might try to close off the theater itself, so it were a rectangular room, and also so the fridge/rack area were outside, which would let that area have full-height ceiling and keep out unwanted heat, noise, and lights.

It looks like the soffit is just 1' wide on the side walls - will there be enough room for both the HVAC duct and can lights?

I had the exact same idea of extending the soffit to the refreshment area, glad you realized the need. The soffit drop of the bacon race was 10 inches. The width can vary and you need to consider the objects you need to hide. The duct work over the screen may be a defining element of soffit height at least for that part.



You can go with a taller soffit over the screen and there are some design tricks you could use to make it look intentional, Like a rounded soffit coming out over the screen with some lights bouncing off the screen. sketch coming up.

Hey....that looks like Logan's design! Except his has one soffit much larger than the other, but it's darn close.

Big, how significant are the risks of running both HV and LV parallel to each other in the same soffit? I have read that HV and LV should not run parallel to each other for any significant distance unless they are at least 2 or 3 feet apart.

I just ordered a set of curved 4-seat chairs from Roman IOVOOVOI (Jives). My room is also 13' wide. Given the specs for those chairs I expect people sitting in the outer seats will have their head about 3' from the wall (even greater distance to speakers). That is a reasonable distance. My front row is only 3 curved Jive's IOVOVOI. This allows me to center chairs in the room and still have sufficient width aisles on both sides.

My build thread shows current planned use of soffits. It will be a mix of HVAC, bass trapping and soffit lights. If you're creative with positioning you can still keep the soffits fairly narrow and low profiled.

Like you I'm also undecided on screen size but will be going scope between 120" and 130".

speaker wire and HV no problem on opposite sides of the soffit.
The thing I would be careful of is a un-amplified sub-woofer signal cable. Keep them on opposite sides or route your sub cable differently.

You beat me to it!

I WANTED to extend that soffit on the left but the room is so narrow and the soffit so wide that I don't think I would have passed code for ceiling height.