Sandmans Home Theater Construction Begins! - Page 2

Nice work so far! Good luck on your venture.

Ruben you guys are flying! Those anchors are pretty serious looking. I'd say your structure is going to get a hurricane/earthquake certification

Glad the foam on a roll is working.

Quick question, how are you going to attach drywall to the backs of the walls if you put the frames up first. I can see that you have access to the two long walls (well at least one if you can't raise the door with the frame in place) but what about the short walls against the garage side walls?

Keep us monday morning quarterbacks posted on the progress and we'll be happy to offer suggestions.

A quick glance at your room plans, as I've been in this business doing custom theaters for some time now, as well as an acoustical engineer, say's that you really have a couple of issues that will affect ultimate performance of your theater acoustically.
ONe is that, where's all the excess bass energy going? You'll really need some bass traps with limited absorption in that room, to help the "Q" of the room, from being to bass heavy and slow. I recommend accessing the space above the theater for this (do some research on this). Othewise, this will be a problem with high fidelity ultimately.
Smaller spaces don't absorb enough bass, while larger spaces absorb more bass.
Yes, you can still "EQ" things with speaker and seating, use and EQ, etc, to get flattest response possible from listening positions. STill, reverberation will be long in the bass if you can't get rid of the excess energy there.
Another thing is double drywall inside and out. I recommend double drywall on the outside only! Why?...it's going to be to "hard" sounding if you make the wall stiffer, which also hurts your "reverb" in the room in the bass....just a thought.
Also, the low ceiling in that room (8.5) will dictate etither more "controlled focus" design speakers up front, to limit ceiling interaction between you and the speakers in that setup. Otherwise, back-row listeners will get the worst of it in this respect.
Using typical "tweeter over mid/bass driver" designs, won't help you here, maybe benefited by "first order crossover" designs however. STill, THX, Dappolito's, Horn's, Planner/electrostat's, and other similar will help greatly!
Otherwise, plan on doing some acoustics on the ceiling! I suggest looking at what PMI makes in there "cine-pannels"??? I think that's what
they call em. Anyway, unless you do your own acoustics, these pannels look great, and work fantastic!...just a though. Also, bass traps in all the corners, treating all corner reflection points helps.
Also, I recommend Russ Hershelmann's theater seating/speaker layout scheme for you. That means "no center seat", as that's the worst in the room!!!! (lot's of peaks and dips in the response...not good!).
As things look now, your seating spots are difficult acoustic spots It appears. Also, speaker locations should correspond and compliment the seating possitions.
Do some research???...
Also, doing a 140" diag in that size room? I recommend against.
Even if you're using a 1920x1080 rez, progressive, it's still better smaller around 100-120" max! I think you'll run into seeing more than you want as far as pixles, scan lines, low rez, whatever. That's just me however.
WE all want a big pic, but BALANCE is critical with your viewing distance. I prefer quality over quantity myself. But whatever floats your boat...it's all groovy, you know?
Anyway, your sitting at less than 1x's the diagonal, which most pro's would shun, even with higher rez. To each his own however.
Back to sound, you might want to do some research on speaker placment before you cement things in. Otherwise, plan on some serious "EQ'ing"! Still, the foundation is seating and speaker location, locaiton, location! Don't get that right, and you'll never have serious sound.
Good luck...looks fun

Rubin, I've got the 79 if you have any questions.

Been thinking about that wall against the garage door. One thing that I would investigate is if there was any way possible to make the door removable from the outside for construction purposes and for future access if you need to do some maintenance on the door either due to deteriation or careless parking by a visitor eager to see the theater.

I know on my wood doors all the bolts holding it in place are tightened from the inside but if I reversed the bolts maybe I could remove a panel from the outside. If you could modify the top panel mounting so that you could remove it from the outside then you could reach in and unbolt the other panels. Maybe leave the top panel held in place only by the hinges to the panel below and some latches at the very top secured to the door frame. Just thinking out loud.


All said, I don't have a clue what kind of door you have but it's worth thinking about now before it's too late.

If you could do your double rock through the open door that would save a lot of hassle.

Had some time to think about that door as I drove around to a couple of different carpet stores today in search of the perfect carpet for my HT.

what if you take everything out, all the tracks

Then put a 1x1 piece of trim moulding around the perimeter of the inner part of the opening. Lay the first section down tight to the ground (assuming you have a good seal at the bottom. At the edges screw through the 1x1 with stainless steel screws holding the section in place. Move up and do each section one at a time, If there are screw on hinges use them to secure section to section if not invent something else.

I finally noticed that you actually had some pics of the door (hidden behind your piles of goodies)

I think you'll need to something with the venting at the bottom
I also think the door would benefit from some material glued to the back to reduce sound transfer (like compressed fiberglass panels glued to the back)

Sandman, keep this in mind...
I'm not talking about some bass trap cyliners stuck in a corner here and there! I'm talking about real bass traps that actually do something to your overall reverb and bass response in the room!!!....SERIOUS BASS TRAP ABSORPTION.
This is one of the most overlooked in home theater construction, especially by enthusiests.
Bass waves are big and long(ehem...). They need serios space to absorb...thus the attic/ceiling recommendation.
Anyway, if it's workable, I'd work it into the "build", definitely!
Anyway, these all add up to better and better sound, even dubbing studio quality reproduction in response.
Never the less, at the very least you might strongly consider my seating/speaker placement suggestions as a foundation. Even response and flat response all around is a key core fundamental. It all adds up remember, just like gourmet cooking...only more lasting and worth while if you ask me. The difference between what everyone else ends up with , and world class!
Cheers

Hello Sandmanx

Great thread keep the info coming. I have a construction question for you.
If you don't drywall the back of your walls do you still need the staggered walls? I was thinking you could just build a standard wall and put it a couple inches a way from the concrete and have the same effect. I'm going to be in a similair situation and just want to know if either way would work.

Also nice to see another Martin Logan theater. I have all ML's and an 18" Vely. as well.

Great work you are really making fast progress. As has been mentioned before that's the best looking lumber I've ever seen used for framing. Those "hand picked"ceiling joists almost look like "furniture" grade. I imagine the next customer got stuck with the crap I usually end up with.

I see that the drywall is in place on the outside of the garage door wall. What did you end up doing about the garage door? and keep the pictures coming.

Those seats look like they belong in a $200,000 sports car. I used Leatherdirect myself and was quite surprised when the chairs arrived from the factory in 21 days. They came on a freight truck in these HUGE boxes. The driver actually helped me unpack my 6 and carry them inside and would not take a tip. He would take a cold soda and bottle of water. Let's hope you have the same level of service. You get a phone call from the freight company and then they want to come the next day if possible.

I think I spent about 2 hours cutting up those boxes into sizes small enough for the curbside pick-up. They also come with some pretty durable foam bag packaging which I saved and have used for a number of projects and protection during construction. It's kind of like big bags made with that foam on a roll stuff.

Man, those chairs are nice looking!!
I wish I had them instead of my 090's.

Looking good, keep it up.

Craig

Are you saying that you took out all those "handpicked" good looking ceiling joists and just put 3 layers over top of the one existing layer of drywall?

If yes how did you extend your wall framing up to the ceiling? just curious.

There was a lot of conversation with myself and Brian R. about how to deal with the ceiling. He wanted to move it up to 9' for a more spacious feel.

The options were:

1. Rip off the existing drywall and put up RSIC and hat channel and double DW with GG.

2. Go RSIC and hat under the existing DW - dismissed early on.

3. Go 3 layers of DW with GG in between the layers.

The 3 layers were determined to be probably a wash with option 1 performance wise for less cost.

My intial recommendation was to pull the drywall, use DC-04's to attach the walls to the joists above, and then do RSIC, 2 layers, and GG for the ceiling. This would be the max for isolation purposes. Cost became an issue and Brian said either method would yield good performace so he decided to just do 3 layers on the ceiling.

His main concern is keeping sound from getting to the outside world. Above him are 2 guest rooms that are rarely used.

Sounds good. Still curious about how he dealt with the walls which were a foot short?

Sandman,

Looks good, man you're making some progress! Mine is just crawling along.....