Review my 5.2.4 living room home cinema plan

Amazing render an a great use of space, but as someone who just had to fork out getting curtains for two 3.6m wide windows i'm wincing at the potential cost of those curtains, especially if you're going for a x3 gather as what looks like in the renders. Worth keeping that in mind in the budget.

I realise this is the cheap skate option.

like you I was horrified at the cost of near ceiling to floor curtains to cover a set of 4m bi-fold doors

in the end we bought 4 pairs of curtains similar size to these
and we then sewed the together.

like I say, cheap skate option but, very nice quality curtains at about 70% cheaper than the quick online quotes I was getting.

it does help that we bought very dark grey and the gather is about x3 so the join really is not noticeable. I would imagine with light curtains or low gather this would not work
 
I realise this is the cheap skate option.

like you I was horrified at the cost of near ceiling to floor curtains to cover a set of 4m bi-fold doors

in the end we bought 4 pairs of curtains similar size to these
and we then sewed the together.

like I say, cheap skate option but, very nice quality curtains at about 70% cheaper than the quick online quotes I was getting.

it does help that we bought very dark grey and the gather is about x3 so the join really is not noticeable. I would imagine with light curtains or low gather this would not work


Great shout, i ended up going down the same route. Getting custom made curtains for 2 sets of windows was coming up to £1500+, if you do a decent job sewing them together you can hardly tell for a 1/5th of the cost!
 
I'd suggest moving the sofa forward, currently your head would be about 3/4 from the front wall, acoustically the best place in any room is 2/3 back (or 1/3 but that's too close). That move would also give you more room for the surround speakers, they seem like they would be right by your head currently. The atmos top rears could be brought forward a little which should help a great deal.

Otherwise/ also rear wall treatment would help, 4" bass traps on the rear wall would help, simulator shows a lot of mess between 50 & 70 Hz with your sub up front, 4 or 5" traps would reduce that. Otherwise try the sub behind one of the rear corners of the sofa that seems a better place.

If you move the sofa forward a little it's better for the sub up front.

plan.png


Based on your suggestions I've moved MLP to exactly 1/3 part of the room. This helped me move rear in-ceilings and rear surrounds have some more space. Dotted lines are where curtains will be.

I'll prepare sub wiring for each 4 corners and later see where it sounds the best. I like the bass traps idea. I'm also thinking to cover the rear wall with curtains.

100" from that viewing distance gives me healthy 40 degrees viewing angle. I hope it's enough.

Can you tell me what tool you used for sound simulations?
 
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Great shout, i ended up going down the same route. Getting custom made curtains for 2 sets of windows was coming up to £1500+, if you do a decent job sewing them together you can hardly tell for a 1/5th of the cost!

Same here, we were quoted £3500! Ok for the best Velvet, thermal lined and a good gather but even so! My wife's godmother is a dressmaker but she wasn't keen to make heavy black curtains to cover ~14m of windows and walls, even then the material would have been seriously expensive.

We have two of the Amazon pairs hung together for the big window and door and a thermal/acoustic liner hung behind which holds the pair together and sets the gather, the liner pulls tight(ish) and the main curtains have a wave effect which we prefer to a normal gather. It took a lot of experimenting to get it all to hang nicely but it works. The smaller window and the rear sets are one set of curtains each, 14 curtain panels, 8 liners in total.

These are the liners we bought, not really sure they make a huge difference to the sound but they make the curtains hang much better. We didn't bother to sew the pairs together, in fact it was nice being able to part the ones in front of the doors in several places and walk through without opening them completely, that might be a nice feature for the OP?

 
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Based on your suggestions I've moved MLP to exactly 1/3 part of the room. This helped me move rear in-ceilings and rear surrounds have some more space. Dotted lines are where curtains will be.

I'll prepare sub wiring for each 4 corners and later see where it sounds the best. I like the bass traps idea. I'm also thinking to cover the rear wall with curtains also.

100" from that viewing distance gives me healthy 40 degrees viewing angle. I hope it's enough.

Can you tell me what tool you used for sound simulations?


That looks good to me.

I was moving my subs around earlier this week and clapping in our room stood behind the sofa (1/4 from back wall) gives a nasty ringing which is completely absent from 2 feet further forward where we have the sofa (1/3 from rear wall) so I believe what all the acoustics guys say.

The simulator I was using is built in to REW Room EQ Wizard, an excellent free sound measurement and analysis application, just register on avnirvana forums to download. I just realised though, I simulated with just your curtained off area as if that was the room but it's very much not. I think your room will be too complicated to simulate usefully. Maybe wiring for a few likely, acceptable spots is wise, wire is much cheaper than knocking holes and re-plastering! If you don't try a few places you won't know if it could have been a lot better, later on you could always add another sub in the second best spot if the wires are all in...

I found a really good combination for my three subs, the big one in a spot that simulator suggested might work. Looking forward to a couple of movies this weekend with the new, best yet config.
 

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