3 Mistakes to Avoid When Designing Your Home Theater

A home theater or media room can be a dream upgrade for your property when designed and installed correctly. Plus, considering the frustrating traffic, lines, and prices at the nearby cinema, you and your family are better off enjoying the exciting movie experience from the comfort of your home.

However, an ideal home theater installation isn’t as easy as throwing a screen and speakers into a room and calling it done. You must have the right knowledge and equipment to create a worthwhile entertainment environment that rivals the cinema.

Before taking on a home theater or media room installation in your Ocean City, MD home, beware of the following design mistakes we often see in DIY setups.

SEE ALSO: Create a Comfortable and Relaxing Entertainment Space

 

Picking the Wrong Room

Your entertainment experience greatly depends on your room choice—especially if you’re taking on a retrofit home theater or media room installation. Be sure to select an area of your home that provides optimal sound and picture quality, as well as safe and secure wiring.

Consider a four-wall square or rectangular room that is large enough for maintaining appropriate viewing distance and comfortable seating. You should also consider a room that is exposed to minimal ambient lighting and is isolated from unwanted noise coming from outdoors or throughout the house.

Selecting the Wrong Display Size

When choosing a display, you might think bigger is better. However, a wall-size TV or projector screen will do more harm than good if you can’t install it at the right viewing distance from your seating.

A general guideline is to sit 1.5 to 2.5 times the diagonal screen measurement away from the display. The viewing angle should also be at about 30 degrees. So, if your projector screen is 100 inches diagonally, you should sit somewhere between 12 and 21 feet from the screen.

Not all rooms in your home may be able to accommodate such a large projector screen, and that’s okay. For more compact home theater or media rooms, consider a Sony OLED 4K HDR TV instead. Not only do Sony OLEDs come in a variety of sizes to accommodate different spaces, but they’re specifically designed to deliver unmatched color, contrast, and brightness from virtually any viewing angle.

Controlling Everything Individually

A proper home theater or media room consists of a multitude of technologies, which subsequently means a multitude of remote controllers. It’s already frustrating enough to find the TV remote when you’re ready to watch a movie. Now consider the speaker remote, source component remotes, and the controllers for your room lighting and shades.

Do away with the pile of remotes and start your movie night in one fell swoop with a centralized controller that adjusts your entire entertainment space in just a button press. With a personalized smart home control system, you can instantly dim your lights, lower your shades, power on your display and source components, and adjust the volume for the perfect movie night scene.

Anyone can create a mediocre home theater or media room. However, a home entertainment space that rivals the nearby cinema takes research, strategy, knowledge, and time. Why not leave the project up to a home theater professional? Our team at Impact Home Technology are seasoned experts in designing and installing high-performance home theater and media room systems that tick all your boxes and more.

To learn how we can help, call us at (410) 219-3095, fill out our online contact form, or send us a live chat below to speak to a home theater specialist today.