Budget Allocation Help

339 Views 4 Replies 3 Participants Last post by Esperagus, Aug 3, 2021

Esperagus

Discussion Starter · Aug 3, 2021

New poster here, thank you in advance for any help. I apologize if this is not the correct subforum to post this on:

We are making one of our basement rooms into a media room. The room is about 13.5 feet X 17.5 feet with 9 feet ceilings.

We will be putting up an 83 inch OLED on the wall. That costs about $5800 plus tax. We have a roughly 10-12k budget overall (not accounting for seating), meaning after the OLED we'd have roughly 4-6k left over for speakers, receiver, bluray player, Apple TV 4k, etc.

Question for you all: does such a breakdown in budget make sense (about 50% for the TV and 50% for the remainder)? Further, how would you further break down the remaining 4-6k of the budget? For what it's worth, because of our room size, we will likely be doing a 5.1 system. Most likely only one subwoofer (unless this is nuts in this room size).

I am new to the home theater world and what I'm trying to avoid is overspending on one particular component at the sacrifice of some other component, and thereby bottlenecking the overall system in some weird way.

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airscapes

· #2 · Aug 3, 2021

Esperagus said:
New poster here, thank you in advance for any help. I apologize if this is not the correct subforum to post this on:

We are making one of our basement rooms into a media room. The room is about 13.5 feet X 17.5 feet with 9 feet ceilings.

We will be putting up an 83 inch OLED on the wall. That costs about $5800 plus tax. We have a roughly 10-12k budget overall (not accounting for seating), meaning after the OLED we'd have roughly 4-6k left over for speakers, receiver, bluray player, Apple TV 4k, etc.

Question for you all: does such a breakdown in budget make sense (about 50% for the TV and 50% for the remainder)? Further, how would you further break down the remaining 4-6k of the budget? For what it's worth, because of our room size, we will likely be doing a 5.1 system. Most likely only one subwoofer (unless this is nuts in this room size).

I am new to the home theater world and what I'm trying to avoid is overspending on one particular component at the sacrifice of some other component, and thereby bottlenecking the overall system in some weird way.

I can't comment on you actual question but to me $5800 for a tiny 83" TV seems like a waste of budget.
You could have a very good projector and a 120" drop down screen for that price and add inexpensive large TV for lights on events (behind the drop down screen).. Yes this would require more time and research to learn about projectors and other things (room environment) that impact the image or projection, so maybe not your cup of tea but figured I would mention it. I can tell you a 83" would be nice, but would not be very immersive.12' or 14' seating distance..

Good luck with your project, it will be a journey no matter what you do! One day I hope to be able to build an entire room like you are about to do, but for now I make do with 120" screen and 2:1 in my living room.

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Charles Collins

· #3 · Aug 3, 2021

$1,000 for a good receiver
$2500 for 5-speakers
$1000 for a subwoofer
$500 for BluRay, Apple TV
$500 for misc wiring, cables, etc.
Total about $5,500

Seems doable to me.

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Esperagus

Discussion Starter · #4 · Aug 3, 2021

airscapes said:
I can't comment on you actual question but to me $5800 for a tiny 83" TV seems like a waste of budget.
You could have a very good projector and a 120" drop down screen for that price and add inexpensive large TV for lights on events (behind the drop down screen).. Yes this would require more time and research to learn about projectors and other things (room environment) that impact the image or projection, so maybe not your cup of tea but figured I would mention it. I can tell you a 83" would be nice, but would not be very immersive.12' or 14' seating distance..

Good luck with your project, it will be a journey no matter what you do! One day I hope to be able to build an entire room like you are about to do, but for now I make do with 120" screen and 2:1 in my living room.

I hear you. I have gone back and forth on the 120" projector vs. 83" OLED question for weeks now and ultimately my wife and I have decided to go with the OLED. For what it's worth, we will be sitting a little over 8' from the screen.

Here is a quick recap of why we decided to go the OLED route:

Picture quality is super important to us. I would say it's probably decently ahead in importance of size. At worst, it's equivalent.
The OLED feels more versatile. Can play multiplayer games on it without worrying about input lag.
The floor seems higher, meaning we can just plug the OLED in and it's just great. Projectors take adjusting and dealing with light issues, which leads to...
While we will be adding blackout shades and heavy curtains on the door, it is not a lightproof room. You really want even your ceilings painted dark, and honestly we just don't want to do that as that would look bad imo.
While my wife wants me to do whatever makes me happy, her personal thoughts are that she prefers a superior picture quality to some huge screen that will be more "work" to watch on a regular basis, if that makes sense

With regard to that last point, I laid out a comparable experience for her by doing the math on viewing distance from a 65" screen with a 40 degree viewing angle. She thought that experience was perfect and nearing "overwhelming" status. She's just not generally a person who looks to get into loud super big screen type things, though she swears she's going to love the concept of a movie room despite that lol.

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Esperagus

Discussion Starter · #5 · Aug 3, 2021

Charles Collins said:
$1,000 for a good receiver
$2500 for 5-speakers
$1000 for a subwoofer
$500 for BluRay, Apple TV
$500 for misc wiring, cables, etc.
Total about $5,500

Seems doable to me.

This is helpful, thank you for the confirmation that I am not super out of left field.

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