A Room Too Big?

Could you incorporate a bar into part of it? My room is going to be 18.5'x30' and will have a bar in the back and I will have 3 rows of seats with the last row being counter height bar seats.

I'd suggest making a floorplan of your basement and a list of what you want it to accomplish. Are you thinking a dedicated closed in space with room for 6-8 people? Or perhaps an open concept with a bar area at the back or to the side? Do you need a kid space or hangout space? Does that space need to be separate from the theater space?

For acoustic purposes a smaller less open area should perform better. It just depends on what your priorities are. There are some really nice rooms here on AVS both dedicated and open concept to give you ideas whichever way you decide to go.

Also, check out Houzz.com for some ideas. Tons of good photos for different layouts. For floorplan tools check out Google's Sketchup or Floorplanner.com

I think the first thing to do is figure out how many rows of seating you want to plan for and if you have a back bar or not.

Adding an AT screen will also eat up some of your room.

Sound proofing will also shrink your room pretty quickly...especially if you end up doing a double stagger stud wall with an air gap in between.

Theater seats are wide and do eat up your room too.

Another good thing is to look at other rooms. Many people like myself provide floor plans with dimensions right in the front of their thread so it's easy to gather information quickly. Then you can see how much you can squeeze into certain spaces.

The good thing is you have some options to work with.

Hope that helps a bit.

It is not too big, always better to work with more space than less.

We'll need to see how you are planning to layout the room before we can chat acoustics; need to know where everything is going to be placed in the room.

Two subs can work, but depends on how you end up setting up your room - and on what size/power those two subs happen to be using.

Soundproofing is possible, however it will require lots of work. The drywall will need to come down - you basically need to strip it down to a clean slate and then you can design a sound isolation plan.


The starting point is to decide how you want to use the space, what sort of room you want to have, how many people you want seated, and so on.

Enjoy the ride!

From an acoustic standpoint, a larger space can work to your advantage in that placing the speakers further away from the listeners will reduce the seat-to-seat variation in the levels. The downside is you have to have speakers capable of playing at the necessary levels at those distances. Generally speaking that rules out soft dome tweeters.

Actually, it is much easier to acoustically treat a bigger room. It means you have a much larger flexibility on types of treatments, and typically huge resonant modes are below what most speakers put out (under 30 Hz or so) so you don't need to focus as much treatment on the low frequencies. You'll still likely need bass treatment, you just wont have towering problems at 50 Hz or even 40 Hz compared to a smaller room. Diffusion can also be a wonderful addition to a large room. I personally like the concepts of slats - wood in front of absorption. If you sequence the wood correctly, you can get diffusion and scattering as well as the absorption behind, which isn't too affected by the slats either. Something like these: http://gikacoustics.com/product/gik-acoustics-scatter-plate/

As has been pointed out, that depends on the power of the subs. Transducers could always be used to keep the "feel" in the bass in the back of the room, while the subs can provide the sound.

Just as possible as a smaller room. It only costs more since there is obviously much more wall surface area.

I would go with in-wall speakers on the left wall and hang an acoustically transparent screen over them. Turn your seating to face and leave that area above the support column as a game/play area. Back of first row at 11 ft from screen. In your planning you need to allow 6 1/2 ft for reclining style theater seats.

Your surround speaker locations look odd as drawn, Visit the Dolby labs website for recommendations.