New House: optimum area for HT? (1 Viewer)

[Billy Gun]

I'm building a new house.
What area of the house would be the best to lay out my Home theater room?
The two most important things to me are:
1. Proper Acoustics.
2. To acousticaly isolate the HT from the bedrooms.
What do you think?
Basement?
First Floor?
Second Floor?
Over the garage?

 

[RAF]

A lot of this depends on the style of the house. I live in a high ranch house and when we built the addition we located the HT on the ground floor at the furthest point from the bedrooms.
While I didn't have too much of a choice in the matter, my priority #1 would be to maximize the distance from the bedroom, especially if you want to make the theater a 24/7 kind of thing and if there are others (sleepers) involved.
In addition, I'm not a big fan of "over the garage" if you can avoid it for a couple of reasons, the most important being the possiblity of fumes.
The possible down sides of ground floor installation include:[*] No under floor access to wiring.[*] Possibility of flooding depending on your water table.
Of course, since this is new construction you can design around these limitations.
Like I said, lots of options and new house constructions allows you to maximize the potential of your choice.
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RAF
[Demented Video Dude since 1997]
[Computer Maven since 1956]
["PITA" since 1942]
Link Removed

 

[Stan Marcewicz]

This is hard to cover properly in a scrolling message board format. You could write books on the subject. If you want max isolation, give the room it's own foundation or slab. Make connections to other living areas well away from the corners so less bass escapes. Perhaps make the room corners all exterior corners too since this is where lots of bass energy escapes. Multiple walls and decouping is needed. Maybe some closets to help with isolation too. This kind of stuff is trivial to do for new construction but difficult to change later on. Oh yeah give it it's own power circuits and have the electrical guys ensure good ground loop performance which also involves cable and satellite ground issues. Again the bass ranges are the tough ones to handle well. Perhaps in the house layout you could make sure that bedrooms were well away from the theater room with other rooms in between. There are tradeoffs between standing wave and cavity effect issues. You need to have good basic room dimensions considering the location of the viewers and equipment. Full control of lighting, where lighting is positioned and the color of the light is important. Ideally room layour factors need to be symmetrical to get good imaging and panning. For example lots of glass on one side of the room and book shelves on the other side is not good. HT rooms need to be pretty dead - plan on room treatments. Darkish colors in the grey family seem to work well. Plan to do lots of redundant wiring to allow for new toys. It would be nice to have the electronic stuff mounted into the wall with the rear of the boxes accessible via a closet arrangement. I personally prefer a floor with some give - I think it gives better tactile ground effects. Or for on slab consider a wooden subfloor, which can be setup to handle wiring. BTW strongly consider those buttkicker tactiles - they are amazing. It might be worth hiring out some of the planning stuff at least since there are so many things to consider. Check out the skywalker ranch for a really nice setup. Learn about and stay aware of the differing needs of stereo music versus HT sound. Room and equipment issues there. Bathrooms and refreshment access need to be good. HTH.
Stan