One of the very interesting things about learning to build very high-end home theaters, is that you learn also learn by default how to build some very good budget theaters. Like everything else in life, audio and video equipment begins to have a rapidly declining return on investment or gain on investment after a particular price point. Just like going from a Toyota to a Lexus where you get a nicer car and spend a whole lot more money, in wall speakers are the same way.
In fact this is true of all aspects of building a home theater or media room. I am going to let you in on a few secrets that you can use to spend less and get a whole lot more out of your home entertainment experience. The first thing to understand is that room is 50% of the problem. If you have a large open family room that can’t reinforce sound, money spent on speakers really isn’t money well spent. Better speakers sound better in better rooms.
A good friend of mine built a very nice little outdoor audio room by taking a tool shed kit from the local home store, acoustic insulation and bamboo flooring and turning it into a studio grade sound room. In this room even subtle differences in the speakers became very clear. Larger speakers didn’t necessarily at volume that wasn’t wanted, instead they were able to add depth and “warmth” to the music.
This is where speakers aren’t like cars. The old saying goes “it is more fun to drive a slow car fast, then a fast car slow” isn’t true of speakers. Running small cheap speakers won’t sound nearly as good as better speakers played lower. Never buy the smallest or cheapest speakers. Sound is about moving air, and small speakers can’t move enough air, this is just simple physics.
Most home media rooms do not follow the correct size and structure for sound. THX has a fantastic home theater design course that covers how to engineer the size of the room. Since 80% of us are building our media rooms or home theaters in an existing house we have to deal with what we get. Fortunately, the consumer electronics industry is aware of this and several manufacturers include processors in their receivers to correct for the imperfect room.
So my advice is pretty simple, for in wall speakers do not select the cheapest or smallest speakers available, they will sound cheap no matter what you do. By good middle-of-the-road in wall or cabinets speakers if you have an open media room. The place to spend money on audio here is the subwoofer and the receiver. You will need a bigger subwoofer to drive the air of a big open room. The walls reinforce the sound in a room that is enclosed, allowing you to use a slightly smaller subwoofer in a dedicated room. If you have a dedicated room that is rectangular in shape, then good speakers make sense if your budget can handle them. The folks at THX do a lot of testing to make sure speakers sound right, so make it easy on yourself and get THX certified speakers if you are trying to build a really good theater.
Since this isn’t about building a really good theater, this is about building a great room on a budget, let’s just stick with some slightly above the bottom of the line in wall or box speakers. If you can get the wires in the wall, use in-wall. Also make sure speakers have at least a 5 inch driver for in-wall speakers and 3.5″ for cabinet speakers. Cabinets can be smaller because the box they are build into has a known resonance. The smaller cube or satellite budget speaker kits just won’t cut it no matter how hard we try.
As far as receivers go, I prefer Denon and B&K they just work. The only brand of subwoofer have ever recommended is Velodyne, by the best you can afford. Now for the fun stuff, the screen. Even a room with average sound becomes stunning to 90% of the people out there when the pictures rocks your socks off, so here are the budget tricks. As far as first quality bang for the buck picture, the Mitsubishi WD Series offer the best picture for the money from 65 inches now to 80 inches. Budget theater picture in a box without a doubt. They can be a little picky with HDMI though, so make sure you get a really high quality HDMI cable to go with it.
If you want something a little more, there is nothing like a projection screen for the true movie experience. There are a lot of really good projectors out there for under $3000. Once you realize that at normal setting distances most people can’t tell the difference between 720p and 1080p you figure out that you can get a pretty good projector at a good price. Just remember, the bigger you go the brighter the bulb needs to be. Lumens are ok for comparison, and make sure to use the watt rating of the bulb to compare. LCD and LCOS lose the most light internally, and DLP is the most efficient.
You will get the brightest picture per watt most of the time from a DLP. The problem is DLP’s have moving parts unless you get one of the really cool (and expensive) Runco LED projectors. The movign parts mean a little more noise, and something else to break. As LED projectors come down in price, that will be the way to go. The new laser projectors sound promising too.
The next step of course is the screen,. The super budget trick use a “hue free” gray paint and paint your screen on to any smooth wall indoors or out. When you order the paint, you want to start with a pure white base and add only “Lamp Black” or “pure black” and to achieve a gray hue of 1% to 5%. The gray hue helps with the black levels from the projector, and may help to reduce the visual “hot spot” for people sitting right in the middle.
When deciding the percentage of gray that you will use for the paint, it is a little bit of guesswork. If you are doing it outdoors or indoors in a room with a lot of windows, use 5%. In fact outdoors I might go as deep as 7% or 10% gray, if there is outdoor lighting or pool lighting that would be on during the movie. If you’re not sure where to start, paint is relatively cheap so start with a lighter grays and go darker if the picture appears to light or washed out. When you are changing shades, paint half of the screen and watch a light movie like It’s Complicated, and a dark movie like Men in Black. Then decide what shade of gray you like better. DLP projectors will use about 1% more gray than a LCOS and LCD’s are all over the board with color so it is more experimenting than pure numbers.
That is really it, you can build an outdoor theater with a projector, screen painted on the wall, five rock speakers with an inexpensive receiver hidden indoors for an outdoor kitchen very inexpensively. You can also use all the same tricks to build a media room indoors very inexpensively using good in-wall speakers. If you pay someone else to do it, the job won’t be inexpensive because of the labor costs. At this level of performance, the labor cost is normally higher than the cost of the equipment. So if you’re willing to do it yourself you can build a really nice room very inexpensively.
