Summary Continued
And then we started in on the insulation. Didn't go with the pink stuff because I had the impression (probably just marketing) that this stuff was slightly less toxic but the same price. Who knows.
Don't forget the simple things like can lights that can be put up against insulation, etc, otherwise at this stage you are taking a couple days to build boxes around your cans -- no fun.
While there were several earlier milestones (new floor, ripping the old garage apart, framing the build, putting in wires) once the insulation went up, the feeling and sound of the space changed in a dramatic way.
Okay, so you remember those structural beams in the outter structure, the garage, that got in the way of having a nice regular height room?
They turned into good places to run wire.
And frame around them.
Drywall is another big milestone. And putting blue tape on the walls and temporary chairs on the floor really gives you your first taste of the space. Yes, it does not sound right yet, and look right yet, but still, it's a glimpse.
Maybe I took it too far by hooking up some powered monitors! At least I resisted putting the projector in there (NOOOOOO, not among all that construction dust!!!).
If you can, hire an expert for the drywall. Yes, if you are being a stickler, you will have to educate them about how to hang it and how to mud it, for acoustic perfection. But, especially at the mudding stage, an expert is going to get much better results super fast.
And then the paint.
Black seems like the hardcore, perfect choice.
After having lived with it for some time, I am not so sure! I didn't get the ultimate perfect, flat black. I just got the flat black that was easy to get at the local hardware store. So I may not be getting the full effect of a flat black room.
And don't get me wrong, it is very dark!
But I think were I to do things over again, I might do dark gray on the walls, and save black for the ceiling and screen wall -- and trim/panels in black or gray, depending on location.
In fact, in "theater 2.0" (tm) that may be where I go. Not sure yet.
---
ANOTHER LESSON LEARNED: In addition to perhaps not going ALL BLACK throughout the room -- which sort of goes against conventional wisdom for a hardcore space -- I will say I have to agree with another conventional wisdom idea that I did NOT follow: Carpet.
Everyone does wall to wall low pile carpet with the biggest thicket pad under it that they can stand. I figured I would be classy and do a hardwood floor and use area rugs. FAIL. Well, I mean, it has worked and does work but is pretty much a waste and is lost to the eye since I have worked so hard to cover it with area rugs.
I don't know that I will install wall to wall carpet as part of theater 2.0, but if I were starting from scratch on a dedicated room in the future, I would not choose to add hardwood! I would spend the money on good carpeting instead.
While all this is going on inside the theater, outside the theater in the anteroom, the equipment rack was coming together. Yes, could have done the clean and cool thing and gotten a traditional rack from one of the big vendors.
But I didn't. At this point in the process, my budget was getting stretched, and for a fraction of the price of a mid atlantic kind of rack, I could get a double tall wire rack at a kitchen store -- which had great ventilation, adjustable shelves, wheels on the bottom, and fit most gear very well.
Funny to look at this now! HD-DVD, HTPC, a traditional DVD player! Blu-ray didn't exist at the time. My how things have changed.
--
The other end of the anteroom was, for a time, a workout space, with a treadmill facing an old tube TV on the wall. Later it became the DVD and blu-ray library, and storage. (Freakin TUBE TV over the treadmill. Old school.)
And then the money shot.... hanging the screen, hooking up a few speakers and the sub, throwing some panels around to tame the room a little, pulling in some furniture from elsewhere in the house for temp seating.
Okay okay, it's all super ugly! And you can see I was already making notes with painter's tape about where I needed to mask the screen. It was a 10 foot wide 2.35:1 stewart screen and while that seemed really cool for a 12 foot wide room, it was actually too big -- at least, in terms of fitting speakers on that wall, too.
In theater 2.0, I am adding a AT screen, that is 8 feet wide, on a false wall, and I have got the Stewart screen up for sale. Strangely, I guess it must be too big for most other people, too, since no one has bought it yet!
Yes, the eagle eyes among you will note that the projector is the classic Sony Pearl, awesome bang for buck in its day.
Adding the riser was a cool step (no pun intended). You'll notice that the room is built, and the riser it getting added into a fully built room.
You might think this was because it's easier (maybe for me it is, but that's another topic). You may think it was because it was an afterthought (it wasn't). But the real reason is that while I was building a room within a room and the building shares no common walls with anything, I still wanted to seal in the sound and seal out the outside world as much as possible, and building interior pieces into a completed room helped maintain those features of isolation.
Adding all the insulation to the riser helped keep it from becoming a drum.
LESSONS LEARNED: I should have researched how to make the riser into a bass trap. That would have been an almost free (other than effort) nice big bonus! I should have probably made it a bit taller, even though it was already a little close to the ceiling for tall people. And I should have made the riser one foot deeper (minimum) than the four I allowed. Reasons:
1. A basic theater recliner seat needs 5 feet for the user to raise their legs and have at least a foot rest, if not recline fully.
2. It turns out, after much more acoustic theory learning, my front row (head location) should be at 55% of the room for the least standing waves (68% is also an option but then there would have been no second row). For more about why this is, see Anthony Grimani's interviews on HT Geeks. If the back row riser had been another foot in size, my front row would have been in the PERFECT position! Yes, I can pull the front row seats forward, but that's a bit low-rent looking.
Speaking of things looking "low rent": PLEASE excuse the random furniture! I was working with what we had in the house that could be spared
Time to add some acoustic panels from GIK. They guys there were helpful with advice and recommendations.
LESSONS LEARNED: Even though a basic diffuser is twice the price of a absorbing panel, getting a similar amount of wall space covered in each type is ideal. I should have cut back on my absorption factor a bit in order to buy diffusion, even if it meant less overall coverage for while as the budget built back up.
-----
Similar to the current look, though with different surround speakers (side and rear), a different area rug (on a single level), etc.
-
And then we started in on the insulation. Didn't go with the pink stuff because I had the impression (probably just marketing) that this stuff was slightly less toxic but the same price. Who knows.
Don't forget the simple things like can lights that can be put up against insulation, etc, otherwise at this stage you are taking a couple days to build boxes around your cans -- no fun.
While there were several earlier milestones (new floor, ripping the old garage apart, framing the build, putting in wires) once the insulation went up, the feeling and sound of the space changed in a dramatic way.
Okay, so you remember those structural beams in the outter structure, the garage, that got in the way of having a nice regular height room?
They turned into good places to run wire.
And frame around them.
Drywall is another big milestone. And putting blue tape on the walls and temporary chairs on the floor really gives you your first taste of the space. Yes, it does not sound right yet, and look right yet, but still, it's a glimpse.
Maybe I took it too far by hooking up some powered monitors! At least I resisted putting the projector in there (NOOOOOO, not among all that construction dust!!!).
If you can, hire an expert for the drywall. Yes, if you are being a stickler, you will have to educate them about how to hang it and how to mud it, for acoustic perfection. But, especially at the mudding stage, an expert is going to get much better results super fast.
And then the paint.
Black seems like the hardcore, perfect choice.
After having lived with it for some time, I am not so sure! I didn't get the ultimate perfect, flat black. I just got the flat black that was easy to get at the local hardware store. So I may not be getting the full effect of a flat black room.
And don't get me wrong, it is very dark!
But I think were I to do things over again, I might do dark gray on the walls, and save black for the ceiling and screen wall -- and trim/panels in black or gray, depending on location.
In fact, in "theater 2.0" (tm) that may be where I go. Not sure yet.
---
ANOTHER LESSON LEARNED: In addition to perhaps not going ALL BLACK throughout the room -- which sort of goes against conventional wisdom for a hardcore space -- I will say I have to agree with another conventional wisdom idea that I did NOT follow: Carpet.
Everyone does wall to wall low pile carpet with the biggest thicket pad under it that they can stand. I figured I would be classy and do a hardwood floor and use area rugs. FAIL. Well, I mean, it has worked and does work but is pretty much a waste and is lost to the eye since I have worked so hard to cover it with area rugs.
I don't know that I will install wall to wall carpet as part of theater 2.0, but if I were starting from scratch on a dedicated room in the future, I would not choose to add hardwood! I would spend the money on good carpeting instead.
While all this is going on inside the theater, outside the theater in the anteroom, the equipment rack was coming together. Yes, could have done the clean and cool thing and gotten a traditional rack from one of the big vendors.
But I didn't. At this point in the process, my budget was getting stretched, and for a fraction of the price of a mid atlantic kind of rack, I could get a double tall wire rack at a kitchen store -- which had great ventilation, adjustable shelves, wheels on the bottom, and fit most gear very well.
Funny to look at this now! HD-DVD, HTPC, a traditional DVD player! Blu-ray didn't exist at the time. My how things have changed.
--
The other end of the anteroom was, for a time, a workout space, with a treadmill facing an old tube TV on the wall. Later it became the DVD and blu-ray library, and storage. (Freakin TUBE TV over the treadmill. Old school.)
And then the money shot.... hanging the screen, hooking up a few speakers and the sub, throwing some panels around to tame the room a little, pulling in some furniture from elsewhere in the house for temp seating.
Okay okay, it's all super ugly! And you can see I was already making notes with painter's tape about where I needed to mask the screen. It was a 10 foot wide 2.35:1 stewart screen and while that seemed really cool for a 12 foot wide room, it was actually too big -- at least, in terms of fitting speakers on that wall, too.
In theater 2.0, I am adding a AT screen, that is 8 feet wide, on a false wall, and I have got the Stewart screen up for sale. Strangely, I guess it must be too big for most other people, too, since no one has bought it yet!
Yes, the eagle eyes among you will note that the projector is the classic Sony Pearl, awesome bang for buck in its day.
Adding the riser was a cool step (no pun intended). You'll notice that the room is built, and the riser it getting added into a fully built room.
You might think this was because it's easier (maybe for me it is, but that's another topic). You may think it was because it was an afterthought (it wasn't). But the real reason is that while I was building a room within a room and the building shares no common walls with anything, I still wanted to seal in the sound and seal out the outside world as much as possible, and building interior pieces into a completed room helped maintain those features of isolation.
Adding all the insulation to the riser helped keep it from becoming a drum.
LESSONS LEARNED: I should have researched how to make the riser into a bass trap. That would have been an almost free (other than effort) nice big bonus! I should have probably made it a bit taller, even though it was already a little close to the ceiling for tall people. And I should have made the riser one foot deeper (minimum) than the four I allowed. Reasons:
1. A basic theater recliner seat needs 5 feet for the user to raise their legs and have at least a foot rest, if not recline fully.
2. It turns out, after much more acoustic theory learning, my front row (head location) should be at 55% of the room for the least standing waves (68% is also an option but then there would have been no second row). For more about why this is, see Anthony Grimani's interviews on HT Geeks. If the back row riser had been another foot in size, my front row would have been in the PERFECT position! Yes, I can pull the front row seats forward, but that's a bit low-rent looking.
Speaking of things looking "low rent": PLEASE excuse the random furniture! I was working with what we had in the house that could be spared
Time to add some acoustic panels from GIK. They guys there were helpful with advice and recommendations.
LESSONS LEARNED: Even though a basic diffuser is twice the price of a absorbing panel, getting a similar amount of wall space covered in each type is ideal. I should have cut back on my absorption factor a bit in order to buy diffusion, even if it meant less overall coverage for while as the budget built back up.
-----
Similar to the current look, though with different surround speakers (side and rear), a different area rug (on a single level), etc.
-