q's new home and associated home theater

Q

qfour20

Limp Gawd
Joined
May 17, 2005
Messages
314
Well [H]ers, I've finally purchased property. I hope to close on the 16th of this month on a condo that my wife and I are both very excited about. This offers me the opportunity to re-work my home theater in a whole new space. Here is the situation:

Home theater is moving into a shorter space that has a much larger volume overall. Let me explain: the condo is a loft, and has about 1300 sq ft of area that is basically one room (bends around some walls for the bathroom and such, but acoustically, it's one chamber).

I'm REALLY excited, as the place has concrete floors, and I'm anxious to see what that does for bass response (although it may muddy things up a bit with the harsh reflection of the floor that will track phase problems with more prominence...). My home theater system currently consists of:

My mythtv box (and associated backend hardware)
Westy 37"
samsung HT-DM150 from forever ago, rear channel speakers still kicking (for now)
Insignia Bookshelf Speakers (Radiient re-badges)
Dayton 10" Subwoofer

The new location for these devices will be about 12' from the wall with seating close to the wall. I've already ordered a tv mount and some speaker mounts, now I need to figure out a center channel to match the Insignia speakers (gonna buy two more for rear next time they go on sale). What do you guys suggest that would match them? Right now, I just have one of the two speakers in the TV hooked up as center channel, and it sounds horrible.

Also, the condo already has a Niles IR repeater installed in the wall. Anybody know a good place to pick up an amplifier and extra emitters for it?

Any experience that people have had with tips and tricks for a concrete floored home theater would be appreciated. Nothing can / will be changed about the space, so I'm going to have to deal with lots of reflection in my room. WAF and all that jazz.

Thanks for reading my rant.
-q

**edited: apparently, hardwareextreme has been gone for a while**
 
To help with reflections off the side walls, you could go with some sort of non-permanent aucoustic treatment. I've seen a few at avsforums, usually it's some sort of compressed insulation board (Insul-shield?) wrapped with GOM fabric. Something like this picture I snagged off some guys site a while ago: Treatments. You could also build some bass traps that just sit in the corners. Nothing is permanent, so no worries there.

That said, I've got my theater in the basement (cement floor, cement walls with drywall over, drop ceiling), and it sounds just fine to me with no treatment at all. But I'm not some sort of audiophile, so who knows how "correct" my setup is. I think the drop ceiling and the thick pad/carpet probably help a bit with the highs.
 
Some have suggested simply picking up another set of Insignia's for the center channel. The things are so darned cheap that it's usually better to buy two Insignia's and have one on hand for spare (or 6th channel in a 6.1 setup) than it would be to buy a separate center channel from somewhere.
 
Thanks for the info, Jbark. If I get some nasty reflections, I'll have to give some of that stuff a shot. I'm sure I can get the wife to help make it look like art instead of equipment.

So, any suggestions about center channel speaker? Also, I need to figure out what the best mounting height will be for the LCD. I want to be able to have it at very close to ideal height for when we're sitting on the couch, but when there's a lot of people over, I want to be able to swing the LCD out so that it can be viewed by the kitchen/living room area and still be at a nice height. I think this will end up with me mounting it a few inches higher than I would for just viewing from the couch.

Speaking of couches, anybody have suggestions for furniture shopping? The wife is thinking "modern" style furniture, and my budget is pretty low right now. Maybe $1000 for a couch. A sleeper couch would be a bonus, as we don't have any other place for guests to crash.

Thanks again for reading!
-q
 
I can't help you because I see you live in Dallas, but if you have Weekends Only stores available they are usually a good place to find decent, cheap furniture.
 
Recommendation for screen height is usually to have your eyes level with the bottom 1/3 of the screen. A guy I work with just put up his LCD, and he's got the bottom of the screen pretty much level with his eyes. He says it's just a bit too high, but he put it up that high so his kids couldn't hit the screen.
 
qfour20 said:
Any experience that people have had with tips and tricks for a concrete floored home theater would be appreciated. Nothing can / will be changed about the space, so I'm going to have to deal with lots of reflection in my room. WAF and all that jazz.
Click to expand...
First off, congrats and good luck with your new home :)

But yes, subwoofer afficionado's have long tried different ways of dealing with how LFE interacts with the floor underneath it. There are commercially available products you can try and the auralex subdude is recommended by nearly everyone at avsforum. Some people have even built their own but i am unsure of it's exact composition.You can probably concoct a home-brewed subdude (pardon the pun) by layering some plywood and foam then wrapping it all up with some carpet scrap.
 
I recently took the carpet up in my room, and at the moment I have a bare concrete floor. I have to say... if anything I almost like it more. Sure, I've always had plenty of bass, but now it seems like my music is almost more full. The sub sounds alot bigger now, which is pretty cool :D
 
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