New Theater FINALLY Complete!!!! - Self Designed - Pictures Inside. - Page 2  

Will get to the questions later today. Keep posting em, I love to give back at least something for all the help this forum has been to me.

Honestly when my wife and I watch movies we don't use them much. But our kids love them. Guests also LOVE them. It really adds a WOW factor for company and parties. If however you will just be using your theater for personal use, the subs are probably adequate. Considering the cost of the theater we did, they were just a very small amount of the total, so we got them in all the seats.

Most of the AV people I talked to thought they were "gimmiky", but I got them anyway and don't regret it.

Art,

Thanks so much for the comments. Believe it or not, your theater has been an inspiration to me during these years of planning and constuction, from your previous theater to your recently expanded one. I even copied the fringe on the bottom of your drapes because I loved the design your wife did on those. BTW, thanks for the advise on the PM's I have sent you over the years, wether you remember them or not.

I'll have to look for those rough-in Grafik eye pics.

The Theater is part of the house, not an addition, so you can not tell there is anything odd or jutting off of the house. It was designed in from day 1 of planning.

For ceiling heights look at the first picture on my theater and it will tell you the heights. The lowest ceiling we have downstairs is 12 feet. Our Foyer is 23 feet and the living room has an 18 foot ceiling. The entire house had to be framed with 2x6's and steel support beams not 2x4's because of the massive ceiling heights. Our final roof height is actually at 30 feet up. Ironically our entire outer framing is double framed, because our HOA requires us to have rescessed windows. Essentially we had to build a house inside a house. That added a pretty penny in lumber costs unfortunately.

It's funny you mention that, because 90% of my research and planing was done here in AVS Forum. I really didn't use any of the large HT magazines at all. I agree they provide such little useful information for building a HT. They are mainly about pretty pictutes. HT builder also came in hands a few times, espeially for proper stage construction. Honestly anyone can build a theater like I did it just takes research, research, research.

I talked with 6 different HT designers before I embarked on constuction, but none had the vision I had. They were all mostly interested in their version of cookie cutter theaters and really didn't look into the details. By reading AVS forum over and over, I think one can make a theater as good if not better than an HT designer. By the end of my reseach I had almost 500 pages of printouts and info on how to do things right. About 90% of that was just posts from AVS. I even have approximatly 300 pictures of peoples HT construction from here at AVS. I would just go picture by picture and copy them to my computer and then uploaded them to kodak photo center and had prints sent to me. I have 2 albums full of them. It showed me how others went from day 1 to completion and what stages to do things in. If you had a log of your theater construction posted here at AVS, I probably have pics of it at home.

BTW, the curtain thing on top of the front stage soffit is called a valence. I scoured fabic and curtain stores all over the web, looking for the type of design I liked best.

Although it may look expensive, other than the basic room constuction, I price shopped EVERYTHING to death. In someways I am a cheap bastard, but I got excellent stuff for about a cheap as anyone was willing to sell it for. I love the internet for buying stuff. I bought the speakers, subs, wall fabric, speaker grill fabric, seats, batting, rope light, grafik eyes, wire, projector, projector mount, screen all from the net.

Sound containment:
All walls double framed with 2x6's and gapped an inch between them. Double 5/8†Drywall on every inside and outside wall, that has been screwed and glued. Double Insulated Everywhere. All outlet boxes covered with electrcal putty pads or insulating foam. All speakers except for the center speaker (which is adjacent to the garage) were built into the columns and placed on shelves so the walls have virtually no cut outs in them. They are as solid and uniform as can be. No bedrooms were intentionally placed anywhere near the theater or above it. The entire upstairs floor had a 1 1/2" layer of lightweight concrete poured on it (about 3300 square feet of it upstairs) to prevent most all sound from coming up from the downstairs and vice versa.
The entire house was insulated and I mean every freaking wall. Nothing was left including the entire garage was insulated. Sound leakage anywhere in the house was a big pet peeve of mine, so I made sure to do everything I could to help prevent it. All doors in the house are solid core also.

Sound Treatment:
All speakers were diagramed and placed according to the most common published guidelines for proper angles and height based on the sweet spot "center row" in the theater. The entire front stage wall and side walls of the stage were covered with Insulshield. All panels below the chair rail have insulshield behind them and all the panels above the chair rail have polyester batting. These were all then covered with the Guilford of Maine Fabric.

Not sure what you mean by that. Each seat has it's own buttkicker unit built into it, so no seat shares one. Each row is powered by a single buttkicker amp (3 amps total). Thus each amp powers 4 seats. So each row can be turned on and off individually, but not each individual seat, then I would have need 12 different amps.....not worth it, but still possible. I can basically set them how I want to. There area then the 2 SVS subs in each front corner of the room, hidden behind the curtains/paneling.

I gotta give at least a little shout out to Dennis Erksine. Although he did not directly help with the theater design, his hundreds of posts here on AVS were invaluable. I would frequenly do a search by his name alone and just go from post to post, printing out little pearls and gems of info. Wanna design a theater the right way, do what I did, and search and read and search and read again. All the info is out there, you just need to find it.

Thanks Dennis, although you probably never realized it you really helped out quite a bit.

My dad acutally got the sign from Home EXPO for me, I will have to go home and take a close look at what it says exactly. Something like "Rue de Paris....."

Ya know I honestly never thought about having it published in a magazine, but I guess it wouldn't hurt to try. The only 2 that come to mind are Audio Video Interiors and Home Theater Builder.

Anyone out there have any other magazines that may be interested.....and how would I go about something like that. Any suggestions??????

Here are some pictures requested.

The first is the wiring into the grafik eye boxes. This is a front box view.

The second is after I covered the boxes with electrical putty pads for sound control. The light blue wires are the low voltage Grafik eye control wires. This is a view from the back of the box.

The last picture is an elecrical box covered with special foam insulation for sound control also.