Theater Rooms
A true home theater experience can transport you from your home in Columbia County right into the heart of the action of your favorite film or TV show. This is what happens when you create a dedicated home theater room equipped with immersive surround sound and crystal clear visuals.
The Film Experience
The goal is to create exactly what happens in a movie theater, where a high-quality projector delivers a stunning image that reflects off a large cinematic screen directly to your eyes. Your screen size, mounting height, and how many rows of seats you have are all factors to account for in your theater room design. The key is getting the sight lines right. Every viewer should be able to see the entire picture comfortably without looking over someone’s head or straining their neck to take it all in.
Room Design
With a dedicated home theater room, your focus should be on perfecting the sight and sound experience. That is the whole point of true home theater design. Our team in Albany, New York helps plan every detail, from screen layout to precise projector, speaker, and component placement. Visual aesthetics and acoustic treatments are equally important, working together to shape both the look of the room and how the system performs. Thoughtful acoustic design, in particular, ensures clear dialogue, balanced sound, and an immersive experience that brings movies to life the way they were meant to be heard.
If you do not have a dedicated theater space, we can also help design multi-functional media rooms that deliver outstanding performance without compromising the look and flow of your home.
Acoustics and Soundproofing
When designing a dedicated home theater, speaker and subwoofer placement are extremely important. By far, the most important track in a film is the dialogue track. This is produced through the center channel speaker. If you cannot understand dialogue, the impact of the movie is greatly reduced. In theater rooms with multiple rows of seats, hearing dialogue clearly can be a challenge. Not only should your family and guests be able to see the entire screen, they need to hear all of the speakers. No speaker is more important than the center channel. It’s fairly easy to get sound right when there is only one row of home theater seating, but with two or more rows, the location of the center channel becomes critical. Our experts will help you with your design to optimize the center speaker position.
The subwoofer (the speaker providing deep bass effects) can usually be hidden under the screen. Again, we can help with design options. Remember that the worst spot for a subwoofer is in the middle of your room, the best, close to a corner. And the more subs the better – four is ideal! Finally, surround speakers can be positioned to your sides and on the rear wall. You should have one or more pairs of side speakers and one pair of rear speakers. Their placement will be related to how your seating arrangement works out. We can offer lots of advice here.
Ventilation
In most dedicated home theater rooms, AV equipment and components are housed outside the room to minimize noise. It is critical for the life expectancy of components that they have adequate ventilation. Your amplifier or receiver will put out some heat, but the cable box, satellite box, or video game radiate a great deal of heat. If you use an existing cabinet, passive ventilation by drilling holes is not sufficient to exhaust hot air. Hippo’s typically installs a ventilation fan in the cabinet to exhaust the hot air, and using a remote mounted thermostat controlled fan is even better. We can mount one of these in your crawl space so you never hear the fan noise.
Controlling It All
If no one can figure out how to turn the system on and make selections, it’s obvious the enjoyment factor will drop! A well thought out remote control can make all of the difference! Reliable options now exist so you can hide all your components and get signals to them perfectly. Already have a smart home automation system like Crestron installed? We can integrate your theater components so you can control everything from your smartphone, Crestron touchpanel, or via a handheld remote.
The Ultimate Home Theater
Imagine an area of your home decorated with a cinema theme, perhaps with a vintage popcorn machine and concession area setting off the area outside the screening room. Your invited guests gather here for wine and conversation before the movie begins. At the scheduled time for your film, your lighting control system automatically dims your lights as programmed, signaling when you and your guests should move to your theater to enjoy this week’s latest Blu-ray movie release. When everyone is seated, a single touch to your personalized touch screen controller dims the lights to viewing level, activates your projector and starts the movie.
During the film, images have almost three-dimensional vividness, and you are enveloped in the music and effects of the soundtrack, clearly understanding everything that is said. When the movie ends, your friends comment that the experience is so much better than a movie theater, they can’t imagine why you would ever leave home! Is this your ultimate home theater dream? Whatever yours happens to be, our design team can help your dream come true.
Theater Seating
Theater seating is the finishing touch to compliment any home theater and/or audio/video system. Hippo’s is proud to feature theater seats from Salamander Designs. If you’re designing a dedicated home theater room, you’ll want at least a row or two of theater seats.
If you have children, it’s likely their friends will be coming over to use the theater and making your home the neighborhood hangout. If this is the case, you may want to consider modular seating. It’s far easier to fit 10 small kids on a big sectional than in four theater seats. When the kids get older, you can switch the sectional out for theater seats.
We invite you to visit our showroom in Albany and sit in our samples of theater seating. We’re certain you will find something that fits your style and budget.
