[Mark Zuber]

We are building a home and the basement is 15' x 22' and I want to install a home theater as well as leave some room for "game space" (board game table, foosball, something like that). So the entire room is not a dedicated theater space.

Since I'm building from scratch, and have about a 25-30k budget, I'd like to do Atmos / DTS-X. I would love advice on speaker placement and whether to do 5.1.2, 5.1.4 or 7.1.2/7.1.4 given the size and layout of the room.

Current equipment list I'm thinking about:
* Denon X7200 receiver (that would get me 5.1.4 or 7.1.2 without a second amp, could add 2nd amp if needed)
* Bowers-Wilkins CWM 7.3 for front L/R and center channel
* Bowers-Wilkins CWM 7.4 for in-wall rear
* Bowers-Wilkins CCM-682 (?) for ceiling speakers
* Sony HW40ES projector (I want to be able to play video games so the low latency is important.)
* Oppo BDP-103D
* Subwoofer (need to shop here). Will definitely wire for 2 subs, may start with one and add a second later.
* Xbox One with DirecTV Genie receiver via hdmi pass through
* Screen Innovations Black Diamond Zero Edge with LED screen (1.4 gain). Probably 115" diagonal, 16x9.
* Possibly a Control4 for simple control / Wife Acceptance Factor. Interested if the Denon remote apps on iPad are sufficient here.

Floor plan for basement is attached to the image. The bedroom next door will be my office/studio and I plan on having the wiring panel and equipment rack installed in the closet there to keep it out of view of the main room.

Given the desire to have the layout shared with a "game space", I'd like to have the projector on the wall facing the garage and the couch/primary viewing area be on the back wall of the room. I've measured the space and the screen and speakers will fit on that wall between the walkway to the bedroom and the closet.

Main concerns:
* couch will be against back wall -- i've heard lots of stories in avsforum about this being bad
* where to put the side surrounds since i don't have a wall on one of the sides (ceiling?)
* where to put the subwoofer(s)

I haven't measured the wall between the bonus/bedroom area which I could also use for the screen. given the room is 15' wide, it's probably 12' on that side and I could put couch/listening space to the left (facing right in the diagram, towards the bedroom). However, I don't want rear speakers and the projector all the way back across the room since I want that space to be available for foosball or a gaming table without all of the speakers/projector "invading" that space.

This house is currently a piece of dirt so I want to get it right when i go wire in cat6/speaker wiring to get an amazing home theater experience. thanks for your help!

 

[dreamer]

We are building a home and the basement is 15' x 22' and I want to install a home theater as well as leave some room for "game space" (board game table, foosball, something like that). So the entire room is not a dedicated theater space.

Since I'm building from scratch, and have about a 25-30k budget, I'd like to do Atmos / DTS-X. I would love advice on speaker placement and whether to do 5.1.2, 5.1.4 or 7.1.2/7.1.4 given the size and layout of the room.

Current equipment list I'm thinking about:
* Denon X7200 receiver (that would get me 5.1.4 or 7.1.2 without a second amp, could add 2nd amp if needed)
* Bowers-Wilkins CWM 7.3 for front L/R and center channel
* Bowers-Wilkins CWM 7.4 for in-wall rear
* Bowers-Wilkins CCM-682 (?) for ceiling speakers
* Sony HW40ES projector (I want to be able to play video games so the low latency is important.)
* Oppo BDP-103D
* Subwoofer (need to shop here). Will definitely wire for 2 subs, may start with one and add a second later.
* Xbox One with DirecTV Genie receiver via hdmi pass through
* Screen Innovations Black Diamond Zero Edge with LED screen (1.4 gain). Probably 115" diagonal, 16x9.
* Possibly a Control4 for simple control / Wife Acceptance Factor. Interested if the Denon remote apps on iPad are sufficient here.

Floor plan for basement is attached to the image. The bedroom next door will be my office/studio and I plan on having the wiring panel and equipment rack installed in the closet there to keep it out of view of the main room.

Given the desire to have the layout shared with a "game space", I'd like to have the projector on the wall facing the garage and the couch/primary viewing area be on the back wall of the room. I've measured the space and the screen and speakers will fit on that wall between the walkway to the bedroom and the closet.

Main concerns:
* couch will be against back wall -- i've heard lots of stories in avsforum about this being bad
* where to put the side surrounds since i don't have a wall on one of the sides (ceiling?)
* where to put the subwoofer(s)

I haven't measured the wall between the bonus/bedroom area which I could also use for the screen. given the room is 15' wide, it's probably 12' on that side and I could put couch/listening space to the left (facing right in the diagram, towards the bedroom). However, I don't want rear speakers and the projector all the way back across the room since I want that space to be available for foosball or a gaming table without all of the speakers/projector "invading" that space.

This house is currently a piece of dirt so I want to get it right when i go wire in cat6/speaker wiring to get an amazing home theater experience. thanks for your help!

Not only do you not want seats right up against a back wall, you don't want then right up next to a side wall.

Since you are planning a tiny screen, with seating no more than 9' away, you have plenty of space behind the seats if the screen will be on one of the 22' long walls. Unfortunately, you are talking about a very asymmetric layout, with a wall close to the seats on one side and far from the seat on the other.

I personally have never heard anything good about the black diamond screen. It seems like a way to throw away half a projector's brightness and only be useful in rooms with poor light control, not a basement. Using spot lighting, you can have lights on over the seating area or a game area without washing even a plain matte white screen, which makes the black diamond a waste of money as far as I am concerned.

If it were me, I would place a 150" screen on the 15' wall with the "shelf" markings. I would have seats 12' away leaving 2.5' between the seats and walls for walking space and to give the sound fields space to mesh. That leaves 10' of width for seating -- 3 to 4 seats depending on style. I would have a bar with barstool seating behind the main seats. I would place the game tables in the 8'x15' space behind the bar. This would be an acoustically symmetric environment with space between the viewers for the sound fields, including the rear surrounds and subs to develop. I personally would never buy a Sony, but that projector would need to be 15' lens to screen and would be overhead of the bar stools, not the game table. I would place it hugging the ceiling so it wouldn't intrude much no matter where it was.

 

[Mark Zuber]

Thanks Kirk for replying. The problem with putting it along the 15' walls is that on the end with the stairs, those "shelf" markings are actually windows, and they're somewhat sizeable. The model home (same plan) has a 70-75" LCD hanging inbetween them with a bit of room to spare, but no way I'm getting a 150" screen on that wall (plus side speakers) and not completely covering the windows, and thus reducing the WAF. I could do the other wall (the one with the walkway to the bedroom) but I still have space considerations width wise (i'd have to figure out what to do with the LEFT front speaker so it's not in the walkway to the office/bathroom if I wanted to keep the screen and speakers from hugging the right wall).

If video gaming is on the list of things i'd like to be able to do (which is why I chose the Sony due to its low latency of 1.5 frames), which projector would you recommend as well as screen? This is my first "real" projector system so I'm going off of internet research and some input from a few friends. But that's why I'm coming to avsforum, since plenty of folks here have done this a lot and do it for a living, so some real-world grounding of my ideas before I spend $$$ on them would be very appreciated.

I did some experimentation with a 115" screen in a CAD program and got this layout with couch at about 11' for seating distance, which leaves room in the ceiling (the larger circles) for speakers. I put the side surrounds in the ceiling as directional CCM7.4 B&W speakers so I can aim them at the listener spot. And then rears in the wall.

Would this work well and not mess me up acoustically? If this layout is chosen, is there a place I should be considering to put sound dampening panels to help compensate for the asymmetric layout?

thanks!

 

[dreamer]

Having natural light coming into a room with front projection should be avoided, but the "best" place for it is from behind the screen, not off to the side and certainly not from the projector end of the room. I suspected "shelf" meant window, and my intent was to essentially cover them with screen with curtains behind the screen and speakers in front of the window area remaining. If that won't be WAF friendly, then your plan, or flipping it 180 degrees so the walkway to office and bath are behind the sofa would be a second choice. Without curtains over those windows, it will only be satisfactory for night time watching. A floor-to-ceiling "room divider" drape separating the game area from the screen area would be very useful if it was flipped 180 degrees and would only need to be 8' long, not the entire room.

Acoustically, having one sidewall close and the other far is never going to be ideal, but putting acoustic panels on the close wall will minimize the early reflections off that wall. I am not a fan of in-ceiling speakers. Partly because you are so limited in choice, but mainly because a surround audio track for movies is designed to come from the sides at just above the height of the viewer, not from above. A car chase should not sound like it is overhead. I would much rather have speakers on stands if there is no wall to mount them to.

As far as Sony goes, the 40ES gets good reviews, but my first impression of earlier Sony projectors -- their first SXRD projector, in fact -- was pretty poor while people around me thought it looked great. I was used to my JVC which was -- and still is -- head and shoulders above the Sony in image quality. Then I had a very negative experience with Sony customer service when an LCD RPTV that I felt I'd paid a premium for failed after barely a year. So I will never even consider a Sony product ever again.

I am very happy with my Benq W1070 projector now, even though I've got less than a 1000 hours of watching on it. I use it every day as my only TV on my 122" screen. It has even less lag than the Sony and is considered excellent for gaming. It does not have quite the contrast or black levels that the Sony does, but that only matters in a pitch-black room -- lights off and dark painted walls and ceilings and floors and furniture and all viewers wrapped in black Snuggies -- which the term WAF basically rules out. There are less than 10% of people who even notice the "rainbow effect" of DLP projectors, and even less with a W1070 because of its pure RGB color wheel and fast wheel speed. But it is a concern and the only reason in my opinion to even look at LCD projectors. That leaves you with JVC which are not good for more than 130" screens, or the Sony which can squeak out a 150" image. JVC=$4000, Sony=$2500, Benq=$700 and in an imperfect room, they would be comparable image quality. The JVC would be noticeably better than the other two, and the Sony only in certain scenes. The JVC is not a good gamer, however.

As far as screens go, I am a DIY kind of guy. I have spent about $1000 for screens in the past, including my current VuTec, but my next screen will be home built using either spandex or flexi-white. I would only go with flexi-white if I intended to paint it with SilverFire at some point. Spending almost $1000 for a piece of vinyl stretched over a steel frame just doesn't seem like a good value to me anymore.