Home Theater! (how much, new house, buying)

[futurehouse]

Hi I had few questions about Home Theater. How useful is it? The builder says he will leave the wires loose and whoever installs our Home Theater will fix it, how easy/difficult is it to install it on our own later? Should we skip this or go for it?

Thanks!

[Lije Baley]

First, my own personal rule: no speakers in the ceiling. IMO such a system will mostly get you a glorified P.A. system, rather than a home theater system. In other words, the audio portion of the movie needs to match up with the visual portion in the physical space the TV and speaker system share.

How useful? I think a properly configured system, at (almost) any price point, can make watching a movie much more enjoyable, for "chick flicks" but especially action & adventure movies. And concert dvds can be MUCH improved vs. using the usually-tinny and weak speakers built into the typical flatscreen TV.

My own speakers (except the sub of course) are on stands & at ear level, so I've never actually literally installed a system, so can't offer any useful advice in that matter.

[hoffdano]

I strongly suggest taking advantage of the opportunity to pre-wire for home theater now. If you don't do it now, then want it a few years from now, you will fret that you don't have wiring already for the surround ("rear") speakers.

I agree with above - NO ceiling speakers!

The wiring where your TV will be should have at least two runs of coax, two runs of CAT5/ethernet, and at least four AC outlets. If the A/V equipment will not be with the TV, be sure HDMI cabling is installed from the TV location to the equipment location.

[Lije Baley]

Oh yea, another personal rule if this system will be used most of the time for music playback: try to avoid using really tiny speakers (usually called satellites or just "sats"), especially those used as the front left and rights.

For me, for the typical living room (typical = @16ft X 22ft?) a speaker with at least a single 6.5" woofer is the minimum size I suggest, or a high quality speaker with a 5.25" woofer from brands like Definitive Technology, better JBLs and especially Dynaudio or B&W. Otherwise to my ears you can end up with a system that can sound rather "thin" or weak at certain frequencies, particularly male voices, drums and bass guitars. That's because IMO most tiny woofers cannot handle the area around @100Hz very well, 100Hz being where the sound "crosses over" to the subwoofer in many such systems. And using a subwoofer to try to make up for this i.e. by moving up its crossover frequency to cover what the sats should be doing, I believe many times just causes these to sound muddy.

This interactive frequency + instrument chart shows where those sounds are located.

[tourbound129]

Definitely go for the prewiring when you have the chance. Are they going to charge you alot to do it?

If they will let you, you will definitely be able to save some money buying all the wires yourself and letting them run them for you. You can pick up everything from HDMI to speaker wire, cat 5, coax for really cheap online.

Whatever drops they will install for you now during construction will save you alot of hassle later on.

And there are wall plates for every connection so you can clean up those dangling wires pretty quick as well.

[funicorn]

A few things:
1) Running the wires can be a real headache. Depending on how much your builder wants to charge to do it for you, this could be money really well spent. Even just for re-sale, future buyers might be happy to see a pre-wired room. YMMV but I don't think that setting up a home theater is hard so much as it is expensive and tedious. There are tons of great DIY resources online that document the process step-by-step. Hiding wires is one of the least fun parts of setting up a home theater, so if I had the opportunity to tell a builder to do it, the rest would have been fairly painless (except the price tag). We turned our drywall into swiss cheese. That means we had to try to match our drywall patches to the texture of the existing walls, re-painting, etc. Pain in the bootie.
2) Home theaters can be insanely expensive if you let yourself go nuts. Surround sound speakers, a decent receiver, a worthy TV or projection system and seating can add up fast. If you are a movie person, it will be awesome. If you watch a lot of TV, it will be great. If you don't, it could be a bit of a waste if you end up spending thousands on a room that rarely gets used. We built an all-out home theater in our last house complete with 2 levels of seating and a 10ft wide movie screen. It was AWESOME. Now that we have kids, we didn't even bother to do 20% of that in our new house. We don't have time to watch nearly as many movies, and we'd rather have more room for our kids to play. That said, our friends LOVED us. Superbowl parties, movie nights, even just watching our favorite shows was fantastic.

How much does your builder want to charge you?

Good luck!

[futurehouse]

Thanks a lot for all the replies! I know more about it then I ever did before. How far should be the speakers from the floor, we have a toddler and a 5 year old? We are going for 7:1 for $450, does the price look okay?

[drshdw]

Ideally at ear level, but I don't know how feasible that'll be for y'all.

[robino2001]

If you're going to mount the tv on the wall, ask for a conduit to be put in from tv level down to below to hide the wires in - just makes things easier. We did the prewiring in our living room and in our home theater/media room. Bought wall plates, wires, etc from monoprice.com (insanely cheap, great quality). May my own wall plates w/ the right number of HDMI and USB (kinect, etc) cables for components up to TV.

I'm sure you can have someone come in and "finish" it all, but it's really not that hard to strip the wire yourself and connect it to a 50 cent wall plate from monoprice... Only one that was difficult for me to do because I'd never tried it before was stripping/preparing the coax cable for the subwoofer run.

[Austin97]

Originally Posted by futurehouse

Hi I had few questions about Home Theater. How useful is it? The builder says he will leave the wires loose and whoever installs our Home Theater will fix it, how easy/difficult is it to install it on our own later? Should we skip this or go for it?

Thanks!

Have them label all the wires, you can figure out what they are in the future but it is a pain