Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Converting a Cellar in to a Home Cinema Room

We are often approached by people who are considering cellar conversions - is it a good space to convert in to a home cinema room? What about noise disturbing the rest of the home?

A cellar is a great place to be converted in to a home cinema - they are typically away from the rest of the family and contain little natural light. A decent sized cellar can easily house a cinema big enough for the entire family to enjoy a film in comfort. The lack of windows ensure sunlight streaming in won't affect your viewing pleasure and the fact that the room is being transformed allows us to incorporate features like lighting control, built in speakers and acoustic treatments. Creating a false wall at the screen end of the cellar allows us to build the front channels (left, centre, right) in to the fabric of the room and then mount an acoustically transparent screen in front.

Not only does this look extremely pleasing, with no speakers on show, it also enables us to closely tie the sound in to the film. Acoustic treatments can seriously increase the pleasure of the cinema, literally ensuring you are making the most of your investment in the sound system. Incorporating changes in to the room design make the best possible use of the space - making the back wall slightly out of square, even by a few centimeters, can have a huge increase in sound quality yet be un-noticable after decoration. After all the boom in most rooms is caused, in part, by their square dimensions.

Isolating the room from the rest of the house not only ensures you don't disturb everyone when you watch a film it also increases your enjoyment of the film - sound escaping is after all sound you are not enjoying. Mass loaded vinyl systems take up very little space, typically 4 or 6mm, yet stop sound waves as efficiently as a foot of concrete and work out relatively economical when installed at room construction time.

In the next article we will look at decoration and cinema seating for your newly converted cellar based home cinema room.

Written by:

Dave Chester

Custom Controls

http://www.CustomControls.co.uk

Custom Control & Entertainment Solutions - Home Cinema, Multi-Room Audio Video, Home Automation & Lighting Control. Premier Dealers for Crestron, Kaleidescape, Lutron and Bowers & Wilkins.

0 comments: