Posts Tagged ‘home theater’

How To Improve Your Home Movie Watching Experience Without Breaking The Bank

Thursday, September 12th, 2013

Home theater can be a very expensive hobby—if you chose to make it that way. I’ve seen some absolutely stunning, amazing home theaters. There is absolutely no limit to how much money you can spend.

On the other hand, even if you don’t yet aspire to having a home theater you can improve your own movie watching experience with minimal effort and very limited cost.

Here’s where to start:

  1. Seating and sight lines: where do you sit in relationship to the picture? A lot of family room movie watching happens with a TV in a corner and viewers sprawled across couches and chairs in the room. The ideal place to view the movie image is directly in front of it with your eyes focused easily at the middle of the screen without moving your head up or down or to either side. When you sit more than 45 degrees off this center point you diminish how clearly and easily you can view the picture. Arrange your seating so that movie watchers can sit upright comfortably and see the screen straight on (a lot of flat screen TVs are mounted too high). That might mean moving the screen and will probably mean rearranging your furniture. It’s worth it.
  2. Hit the lights! Bugs Bunny is right: when the show starts, the lights come down. Your ideal movie watching experience is to see the image float before your eyes in a completely dark room. That’s when movies achieve their dream-like heights. It may not be possible to completely darken the room where you currently watch movies, but try and darken it as much as possible. Pull the shades and curtains on your windows and turn off ALL of the lights.And if possible, watch after dark.

    And please, please, put away your tablet, laptop, and phone. Keep your eyes on the big screen!

  3. Surround yourself with sound. In my best movie-watching experiences I’ve gotten lost in the story and become completely immersed in the created world I see before me. A big part of that is what I hear. When the sound is completely matched to what I see, when people’s voices seem to come from in front of me where I see them and other sounds, sounds that the characters hear and react to, come from other directions, I begin to believe what I see.

    Surround sound isn’t difficult to achieve. There are lots of the poorly named but workable “home theater in a box” kits available. What you really need is an audio receiver and either 5.1 or 7.1 speakers. The first number refers to the number of speakers, the “.1” is the subwoofer. It’s the big speaker that produces the strong bass sounds.If you minimally have a center speaker, front speakers to the right and left, and two speakers behind you, you’ll begin to get an idea of what the surround sound experience can be like.

    My theater is a 7.1 surround system.

  4. Treat your movie watching with respect.  Why is movie watching in the home sometimes unsatisfying? Because too many of us treat it as just one more thing going on in the room. If you want to really enjoy a movie with your friends and family, treat the experience just like you would in the commercial theater (without the usher asking you to keep it down).
  • Make yourself comfortable, but don’t sprawl across the couch or floor.
  • Turn off your phone and put away any other distractions.
  • Agree with the other movie watchers that you’ll talk after the movie.
  • Watch the movie from start to finish. In my theater I do allow intermissions, but they’re treated just like that: the movie pauses, the lights come up, and everyone takes a break before we start the movie again.

Do any of these steps and you’ll improve how you watch movies in your home. Do them all and you’re on the road to having your own theater!

 

Four Simple Guidelines To Make Your Home Theater Experience Better

Wednesday, September 11th, 2013

Building a home theater in your house can be a rewarding hobby and experience. Here are four simple guidelines that will help you get started:

  1. The space is more important than the equipment.
  2. The installation is as important as the equipment.
  3. Cables should never be seen.
  4. As little equipment as possible should be seen.

You can buy a bunch of equipment, take it out of the box in any room, hook everything up, and start watching movies. But will that be the best possible experience? Probably not. That’s what these four guidelines are about: to help you get started in the right direction so that you can enjoy watching movies more.

The Space You can spend a shocking amount of money on audio equipment and projectors and still have a crappy movie experience. I’ve seen it done and it’s a shame. I’ve also seen the complete opposite done where someone has taken great care in selecting the space and preparing it while spending very little on equipment to produce a terrific movie watching experience.

Why is the space important? Because the audio part of the audio/video experience is at least 50% of the package, perhaps more. When people visit my theater they first talk about how the room looks, how big and clear the picture is, but when they leave all that they typically talk about is how it sounds. Your ideal space will be rectangular with the shorter side of the rectangle being your screen wall. You’ll also need to avoid or correct reflective surfaces. Windows and untreated walls allow sound to bounce and create bad echoes. Modern movies are designed to create a specific audio experience. If your room disrupts what the movie’s sound editor slaved over, you won’t get the best experience.

All of my early theater planning was about the space. Don’t start your planning by shopping for equipment.

Installation How you build and install your theater matters. A lot of people worry about “sound proofing,” but this isn’t typically a real issue. Most worry about sound proofing because they believe that movie audio needs to be loud. It doesn’t. If you design your room well, you can get a great audio experience without rattling the neighbors’ windows. Home theater hobbyists like myself try to create spaces where the sound is great in the room and don’t worry much about what’s heard outside the room. Soundproofing just isn’t an issue.

The same goes for the image. A great movie experience comes from a BIG picture. The easiest, most movie-like way of doing that is to use a projector and screen, not a TV. While you can buy big TVs today, the experience is more movie-like with a projector  (and it’s cheaper to project a really big image). I may be a snob, but I don’t consider anything under 8o inches to be a big enough image for a home theater. And equally important TV or a projector, if you can’t control the light in the room you’ll diminish the experience.

How you install the equipment in this room will make a big difference.

Hide The Cables It’s just sloppy and unsightly. It’s not that hard to snake cables through walls or to create channels along your baseboards. Do you see cables hanging from walls when you pay to see a movie at a commercial theater? Don’t let them spoil your home theater experience, either.

Hide The Equipment A lot of my fellow home theater geeks love their equipment and take pride in displaying all of it. Yes, I also love to see what you’ve got, but not while watching a movie. My goal for a great movie experience is to not see any technology. Just the picture. I don’t need to see your speakers, amplifiers, and other cool equipment.

It’s very easy to put your equipment at the back of the room, or even better, in another, separate room. That will make it easier for you to hook up and gets all of the unsightly cables and distracting lights and heat out of your theater. It’s very easy to use an IR (Infra Red) or RF (Radio Frequency) repeater to make it easy to control everything.

It all boils down to this: think first about the experience of watching a movie. Don’t start with equipment or gadgets. Think about how you want to experience movies and TV. Focus on that first and these guidelines can help you get started creating your own home theater.

What Is A Home Theater (And What Is Not)

Tuesday, September 10th, 2013

One of the first things to get clear is this: what exactly is a home theater?

Here’s my simple rule: if you take a stranger to your room and they say, “Wow, this is exactly like a movie theater!,” then you have a home theater.

Everything else is not.

Yes, you can have an excellent TV, sound system, and comfy chairs, but your family room isn’t a theater. It’s a family room where you watch movies. Your bedroom isn’t a theater, either. And yes, you might have a big flat-screen TV on your office wall, but it’s not a home theater.

A theater is a very specific space. It’s a dedicated space and it has one purpose: watching movies & TV. Not everybody needs or wants a full theater, but if you want one, it needs to be a space where there are no other distractions. For example, a Sports Bar is a great place to watch a football game with friends, but it’s an awful place to watch a movie (conversely, theaters aren’t great places to watch sports with friends—theaters are too confining). If you want a room where you and your family can do lots of different things, including watching movies, you will have to make compromises and sacrifices that will dampen your movie experience. That’s not a theater.

You can incorporate many aspects of movie theaters into almost any room and improve your movie watching experience. That’s really what most people want. But if you want the ideal, immersive, movie going experience, you’ll need a theater. I’ve seen great little theaters in rooms the size of walk-in closets, built into garages, bedrooms, and attics. Each one fit my definition because when I walked into them because I instantly could recognize that “this is a theater and nothing else.”

Your first step in building a home theater is to decide if you really want or need a home theater. It’s possible, likely even, that you just need to improve how you watch movies in a particular room. But if you do want a true home theater and you have the right space for one, you have a remarkable opportunity AND a new hobby. I’ve had great fun with the hobby.  My friends and family, many of who called me crazy when I talked about building a theater, now call me a genius. They can’t wait to come over for a movie.

You Can Have A Movie Theater In Your Home

Monday, September 9th, 2013

I love movies.

I mean I really love movies and going out “to the movies.” Some of my favorite times have been in great movie theaters. Unfortunately, there are very few great theaters around today. If you’re not careful the typical cinema-plex experience is like being herded into a boxy, sticky room with the sound turned up too loud, the bass overwhelmingly, ear-rattelingly extreme, and the audience rude, noisy, and occupied with everything from talking to messing with their phones.

So I built a movie theater in my home. It’s been ten years now and it was a terrific decision. My family and friends have had wonderful times in my little theater.

When I first had the idea of putting a movie theater in my basement it was simply with this thought: if I bought (or borrowed) a projector like we have at work, put a sheet up on the wall and got a couch this could be “kinda like a movie theater.”

And then I discovered just how much you can do with a little time, planning, and the right equipment. It doesn’t have to be expensive, either (or it can be as expansive as you like). Almost anyone can have a real movie theater experience. The “screening room” use to be available to only the very rich and the top Hollywood moguls. The fact that I have one sometimes makes me swell with pride up to Louis B. Mayer proportions.

If you want a great movie watching experience, you have to do more than display the movie. Yes, you can watch a movie on your iPhone or iPad, but it’s not a great movie watching experience. The TV in your family room is not a movie theater.

A great movie watching experience is about huge pictures, immersive sound, and the isolation of everything else. It’s possible to do in your home, just not possible in any room. This week I’ll cover some of the basics of home theater and share a bit of what I’ve learned. It’s worth the effort and the difference is stunning.

Here’s the first thing I learned: everything you need to know is on the AVSforum.com. The people there have some amazing theaters, are deeply knowledgable about the subject, and are happy to share what they know.

My theater? I call it Cinema Murray. And as you’ll see, I tend to take my hobbies VERY seriously.

3D TV: Cool Demo, Then Back To Regular 2D Viewing

Monday, July 15th, 2013

I recently bought a new TV for our newly remodeled bedroom, a Sony 55-Inch TV. It’s very nice, with a beautiful picture and very thin design. And it came with 3D capabilities. I didn’t want the 3D stuff, but it came with every TV of that class that I looked at.

We also received a new Blu-ray player with the TV as a part of the package, a Sony 3D Blu-ray Disc Player with Wi-Fi. Once again, didn’t want or need the 3D functionality, but it came with it. I’d investigated 3D out of interest, even written about it for clients (telecom/Cable TV) and I wasn’t impressed. Actually, I found the experience in the showroom very poor. And I’ve had very few good 3D experiences in movie theaters. Avatar in Imax 3D is the only movie I can name that I thought really benefited from the technology.

We mounted the TV on the wall (OK, I hired someone who knows what they’re doing to hang it), and plugged in the new Blu-ray player. I looked through our movie library and discovered that I had exactly one 3D movie: The Avengers (Four-Disc Combo: Blu-ray 3D/Blu-ray/DVD + Digital Copy + Digital Music Download). I fired up the equipment, put on the glasses, dimmed the lights, and pressed play.

Wow.

The picture was bright, clear of distortion, and the depth of field was astonishing. The movie looked great. Even Diane, my wife and someone generally uninterested in cutting-edge tech, was impressed.

We watched for a few minutes, then we turned off the movie, put the glasses in the drawer, and went back to watching regular 2D HDTV. We probably won’t purchase any more 3D movies. If we get one in a combo pack, that’s fine, be we won’t go out of our way to buy them, even when they do look great.

Why? Because it’s the wrong technology, the wrong solution. I don’t want to wear the glasses. And for the most part, movies don’t really benefit that much from 3D. I believe at some point we’ll have really good 3d entertainment, but the current approach isn’t interesting or workable. Given a choice between watching a movie in high definition or having to put on dark glasses OVER your existing glasses I’ll pick the one without the extra headgear.

3D makes a great demo, but it’s really not interesting enough for most movies and it’s pretty unworkable for watching sports (while watching sports you typically don’t give the screen 100% of your visual attention. Looking around the room and at other people with those damn glasses on is weird and annoying).

I wouldn’t recommend going out of your way to get 3D, but if you do end up with it, as I did, it’s fun to play with for a little while. But then you’ll probably forget about it and go back to watching good old easy to watch 2D HD TV.