Dedicated cinema build - shortlist

elgaz

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Hi all,

My father is building a new house and it will have a 4000sq ft garage to the rear, in which there will be an upper level man cave and a dedicated cinema room. The cinema room will be rectangular, roughly 20ft x 12ft. He has no IT/AV knowledge or expertise so has kindly (!) left it in my hands to tell him what he needs for the cinema room.

We are literally starting with a blank page here so I'm trying to make a shortlist of everything that needs considered - I've searched through the forum extensively but there's a lot of information (some of it very specific) to take in.

Walls - joiner is planning on putting up typical stud walls, is there any particular material that's favoured for cinema room walls?
Seating - currently looking like 3 x rows of 3 seaters with each row being slighly elevated - typical cinema leather recliners with wedges between the seats
Lighting - ceiling spotlights & uplighters on walls, soft glow lighting around some recesses
Soundproofing all round - walls and ceiling, do we need to soundproof floor area too?
Floor covering - I assume carpet is best for noise purposes?
Projector - will be a decent ceiling mounted 4k model but I can research threads on here for this
Screen - the room won't be used for any other purpose so don't need a retractable screen or anything, looking at a large whitescreen which will be mounted to wall permanently
Input Devices - Dedicated enclosure at rear of room with the following devices - Sky box / Bluray&DVD Player / mini-PC / NAS Hard drive enclosure loaded with movies etc
Audio - I know very little about this but will research best speaker options on here.
Cabling - we will run CAT6, HDMI and all other cables from the input devices to projector.

I think those are the key areas above - have I missed anything obvious?

Thank you.
 
There is an awful lot to answer here. So I would recommend taking time at each step and take your time by do some research.

You can get lost very quickly.

Cabling should be an early thought which means you have to have an idea how many lights your going to need, what type of control system you wish to use plus how many speakers you are going to house in that room

With the speakers, take a look at Dolby's own room speaker configurations which will give you a starting point for how many cables you will need to run

Decide where the speakers are going to live (the front three might live behind the screen or are free standing and on show). At that point you will know whether you need a transparent screen. If you know where the electronics are going to live, this will give you some measurements from that point onwards (add 10% to those measurements as a minimum)

Once you know how many speakers are your going to use in that system, that will also answer the question about which kind of amplifier/s you need to look towards using

Ask the builders if any of the cables need to meet any regulations? If you do, you might need to look at QED Rolls which will give you another idea of costs

Go and have a listen to some speakers and if possible, do view some projectors to. JVC and Sony are really the only sensible priced native 4k projectors. But as your room is long, you will need to ensure they can meet the screen size regarding the throw distance. So its a bit like a chicken and egg situation

If you are having to mount the projector in the cinema room on the ceiling, follow the rules below for running your HDMI cable plus as you are looking at 4K, do make sure the cable can transfer up to 18Gbps or above. I would recommend using an optical HDMI cable

One note with the HDMI cable, all hdmi cables have an inherent issue and that is that they can fail, so be sure to ensure you can retrieve it easily as it will be easier to attach a new cable to the old cable and pull a replacement through a pathway that is free from snags or clips than pull the ceiling or wall apart to get to it
 
There is an awful lot to answer here. So I would recommend taking time at each step and take your time by do some research.

You can get lost very quickly.

Cabling should be an early thought which means you have to have an idea how many lights your going to need, what type of control system you wish to use plus how many speakers you are going to house in that room

With the speakers, take a look at Dolby's own room speaker configurations which will give you a starting point for how many cables you will need to run

Decide where the speakers are going to live (the front three might live behind the screen or are free standing and on show). At that point you will know whether you need a transparent screen. If you know where the electronics are going to live, this will give you some measurements from that point onwards (add 10% to those measurements as a minimum)

Once you know how many speakers are your going to use in that system, that will also answer the question about which kind of amplifier/s you need to look towards using

Ask the builders if any of the cables need to meet any regulations? If you do, you might need to look at QED Rolls which will give you another idea of costs

Go and have a listen to some speakers and if possible, do view some projectors to. JVC and Sony are really the only sensible priced native 4k projectors. But as your room is long, you will need to ensure they can meet the screen size regarding the throw distance. So its a bit like a chicken and egg situation

If you are having to mount the projector in the cinema room on the ceiling, follow the rules below for running your HDMI cable plus as you are looking at 4K, do make sure the cable can transfer up to 18Gbps or above. I would recommend using an optical HDMI cable

One note with the HDMI cable, all hdmi cables have an inherent issue and that is that they can fail, so be sure to ensure you can retrieve it easily as it will be easier to attach a new cable to the old cable and pull a replacement through a pathway that is free from snags or clips than pull the ceiling or wall apart to get to it
Thank you for this. I am in a similiar predicament and this is a good starting place.
 

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