as you might imagine we get called in all the time to look at home theaters that people feel like
they installed or someone installed for them and they're just not what they expected and because of
that we've put together our top seven home theater mistakes to help make sure when you're building
your theater you avoid these the number one home theater mistake we see is the wrong screen size
most of the time it's because the screen is too small for the room and the seating position
sometimes although a lot less often it's too big and the seating position is too close
and people can get vertigo because it's just done wrong if you want to nail the
screen size or you're trying to figure out go over to audioadvice.com we actually have a free
home theater design tool that will allow you to put where your seats are going to be the size
your room and it will help you figure out exactly what the right screen size is for your situation
number two home theater mistake wrong paint color we go into a room there's a great projector a
great screen and you've got basically white or light-colored walls that are bouncing all the
light around the room and it just doesn't look good make sure when you're planning out the
color of your room ideally you want darker colors there's a reason when you go into a movie theater
that it's dark the picture looks a lot better when you don't have white walls bouncing
everything around also when you're choosing the paint color think you want a matte or flat
color so we're not getting gloss reflections or anything else like that around the room
also think about furniture that's around it sometimes we'll walk into a room
and we'll see this great television and we've got great sound but there might be this
furniture right below the screen that's gloss and reflecting light straight back onto it
number three is bad sight lines sight lines are the lines when you're sitting in your
chair and you're looking at the screen itself you can mess this up in a couple of ways one
is if you don't have high enough risers and you're basically looking into the back of someone's head
so you really need to think about the design of the room if you've got one
two maybe three rows of seats how high the screen should be how high the riser should be
if you go over to audioadvice.com our free home theater design tool will
actually make sure all of your sight lines are perfect and you don't have an issue
number four is spending too much money on video when you think about your budget what happens
is people will go in and say okay i want the biggest screen i can get or the best projector
and the sound is anemic and what you'll find when you go into a theater and it just
immerses you in the emotion it's because they found that balance of great video
and great sound when you cut the sound out and you put everything into video and the cables
aren't good and the components aren't good and the speakers are tiny you just don't get that
great experience you're looking for if you're trying to figure out how much money to spend in
the various portions of the home theater you're designing one now go over to audioadvice.com we
actually have a great video and whole article on how we recommend people allocate budget between
cables and video and audio and everything else to get that right optimal theater
number five is not enough power so what happens is you go to design your theater room maybe you're
just grabbing off of an electrical outlet that's being used for a bunch of other things in the room
and your amplifiers just either one you know blow a circuit or they actually blow their own fuses or
you just can't get that deep bass because you don't have enough amps for what you're running
in the room so in some cases you need to actually pull a dedicated circuit for the room itself it
gives you that power to get the punch and the video and the audio and everything you want
number six is not calibrating the system again sometimes we'll be brought into a home and they're
ready to upgrade to theater they've heard about audio advice or they're calling us for advice
and we realize whoever installed the system they just plugged all the components up but they really
were not audio and video experts consequently they never calibrated the system pretty much every
decent receiver or processor today has some auto calibration on it and you can run that calibration
yourself whoever's installing it if they're audio experts or theater experts they can guide you on
running it and actually tweaking it really getting it right in fact for all the top processors
and receivers audio advice sends our tips and tricks guides on how to do these calibrations
to our customers obviously if we're doing it ourselves we do it if someone's buying from us and
they're do-it-yourselfer we will send it to them and really make sure you get the calibration right
and i'm telling you from an audio perspective when you hear a system that's been calibrated
and it's really taken out all the modes and nodes in the bass and everything else it just
sounds totally different and the experience is so much better this is also true in video
you'll see on our site we've got a couple videos and reviews and buyer's guides on how to do
these kinds of calibrations on video in particular we'll find that people know how to calibrate it to
get it matched up for instance a projector onto a screen but they're not going back and doing panel
alignment in the colors and all the things you need to do to really get that great pop another
part of calibration is making sure that you're getting the best sound that you can sometimes
we'll go in and we'll actually see the surround sound settings set to not get the best sound
what we typically advise people is you either want to set to bit stream or in most receivers
and processors it gives you the ability to choose what the default decoding is for multi-channel and
also for 2-channel for most people setting to dolby atmos for your multi-channel and actually
setting to dolby for 2-channel is the best outcome now let's talk about the two channel just for a
second because the multi-channel most people get it i want to get that great dolby atmos
sound or dts if it comes in but in two channel most people enjoy where it's taking the dialogue
and putting it into the center channel and it can take a stereo feed whether it's listening to
music or watching a television show and actually make it really quite impressive in the theater
some audiophiles prefer to set the two channel to just stereo which is fine as well
number seven of the top mistakes that we see is not getting the acoustics right in the room
and what i mean by this is not the settings and calibration that we just talked about but the
actual acoustics of the room itself so when you're designing a room if you've cut
a lot of hard flat walls or it's cube-like you don't have carpet you're going to have a very
harsh sounding room there's some easy things you can do to make that room sound better using carpet
soft textures maybe bookshelves in the back of a room or if it's a true theater room you know
the kind of furniture that you use in it but doing acoustic panels is one of the easiest things to do
it's not that expensive and can really soften up a room to make it sound great if you've got
questions on how to do that we actually have an article on how to think about the acoustics and
set up the acoustics in a room at audioadvice.com i hope these seven mistakes will keep you from
making the same mistake when you build your dream theater if you've got questions about anything
home theater related or audio related jump over to audioadvice.com you'll find we've got people
on chat and on the phone that are happy to help you out plus we have a full home theater design
tool there that will help you figure out where your seats should go how big your screen should be
and avoiding a lot of these mistakes plus a whole list of buyer's guides that go into details on
avoiding all these mistakes and the things you should do to get your home theater right
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