DIY Network

Enhancing Your Home Theater Experience Find out how interior-design elements can improve your home theater experience. From "Home Theater" episode DHTW-103

In this segment you'll discover easy and unique ways to enhance the sound and picture quality in your home theater.

In this third episode of Home Theater Workshop, host Corey Greenberg, a technology expert, and engineer Mark Midyett began the construction of a state-of-the-art home theater. In the first two segments the wiring, walls, ceiling and floors were completed, and now it's time to find out about certain interior design elements that can drastically improve the picture and sound in the your home theater.

Ways to Improve Picture and Sound

• One extremely effective way to absorb sound in your home theater is carpeting. For the DIY project, a thick Berber with standard padding underneath was chosen, but if you have hardwood or tile floors, try using an area rug that will absorb sound.

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	Figure A
	Figure B
	Figure C

• Lighting is also crucial to the overall quality of your home theater. You want the room to be dark, much like a movie theater but with just enough illumination so people can move around safely. You also want to arrange the light sources so they don't cast any glare on the big screen (figure A).

  Note: Directivity of the lighting is important. For example, a track lighting type of product, where you can aim and focus the light, works beautifully.

• Avoid table lamps and fluorescents because they will flood your room with light and cast a glare on the screen, use directional lighting (figure B) instead.

• One of the most important things you can do is to install dimmers, which is an inexpensive way to adjust the level of light in your home theater.

• If you have windows, thick draperies can block out most of the light, but if you want to go high-tech, specialty manufacturers make motorized shades and drapes (figure C). They cost more than standard fabric draperies--and most require professional installation, but they're designed to completely block outside light.

• The color of your room can also help reduce screen glare. When it comes to the walls and ceiling, the goal is to not use anything that would distract from the room's focal point--the video screen.

• You can cover walls with acoustic fabric, like what you usually see in movie theaters.

• You can also paint your home theater a dark color, but don't use a gloss, semi-gloss or satin finish. You want flat, no-glare paint.

  Note: Our homeowner, Peter Moore, painted his ceiling and the screen wall a "flat black," which is perfect for a movie room. But for the remaining three walls he chose a color that didn't quite work--a lighter shade of yellow. This was a bad choice because it lets light reflect off the screen and walls and into the viewers' eyes. You want to stick to a darker shade of paint if you're doing a custom theater from scratch. As with many do-it-yourselfers, Peter had to paint over.

• Your door is the weakest link in sound transmission. Standard-grade interior doors can let sound filter into other parts of the house via gaps between the door and walls.

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