A tailor-made home theatre can give a rich viewing experience, and the experts advise buying the best equipment you can afford. Multi-speaker sound systems bring movies to life.
A tailor-made home theatre can give a rich viewing experience, and the experts advise buying the best equipment you can afford. Multi-speaker sound systems bring movies to life.
A tailor-made home theatre can give a rich viewing experience, and the experts advise buying the best equipment you can afford. Multi-speaker sound systems bring the movies to life, chairs that move with the screen action are an option and it can all be controlled with one remote.
Home theatre technology has reached the point where some people can have a better movie experience at home than at the cinema. Home theatres use big-screen TVs, high-definition projectors, computer-customised sound systems and immersive seating.
Muzzi Shalash, managing director of AV Expression, says systems can cost from $4000 to $250,000. He says the average cost for a family going out to watch a movie is more than $100 for five people, and the cinema doesn't give the privacy or convenience that families want.
Screen
"The biggest theatre we've done seats 16 people and has a 115-inch curved screen," Shalash says.
The latest ultra high definition (UHD) projectors can set you back $35,000 and have a resolution of 4K which is nearly four times the number of pixels in the 1080 pixel Blu-ray. Unfortunately there isn't a lot of 4K content yet. But Shalash still recommends that people installing a home theatre go with a 4K player, although an 8K video format is in the pipeline.
"Get the best of what you can afford at the time and run it as long as possible. We never really overhaul a system any time before 10 years after we install it."
Big LED screens are equally as popular as the projection systems. With the high running costs of plasma screens, most people are going with LED, LCD or OLED. The 65- or 85-inch screens are standard.
High-end sound systems use monoblock amplifiers to separately power left and right audio channels. The front speakers are recessed into the wall behind the screen and another four to six speakers are placed around the room for surround sound.
"The speech sound comes out exactly from where the image is. It gives a more realistic feel."
The processor reads the information encoded with the movie and distributes it to the correct speakers. These systems use a digital-to-analogue converter, which uses the movie audio fully uncompressed.
These rich bold sounds have to be insulated to enhance the movie experience and avoid disturbing others outside the theatre.
A tailor-made home theatre can give a rich viewing experience, and the experts advise buying the best equipment you can afford. Multi-speaker sound systems bring movies to life.
"We do full acoustic treatment to the room whether it's soundproofing, sound treatment or sound dampening. We put sound panels around the room to try to minimise the echoing effect and minimise the sound bouncing around the room," Shalash says.
The sound system is calibrated based on 3D calculations of the dimensions of the room. It also takes into account the materials in the room, what the floor is made of and what the ceiling material is. Shalash says you are better off to spend money to get the soundproofing right even if you have to go with a less expensive audio system. When retrofitting a home, spraying foam installation inside the walls is the best option.
Seating
Seating in home theatres can also incorporate motion effects. D-Box motion platforms react to audio and video content to roll, vibrate and pitch to immerse the viewer in the movie or video game. But if you want to enjoy food or drink on one of these machines you can forget it.
"If you have your popcorn or drink, you can be wearing it by the end of the movie because it does move quite a lot. It's a love or hate type of product."
It's not for everyone, but about 30 per cent of customers request motion seating.
Streaming
Streaming movies online is gaining popularity. But a lot of people who are installing home theatres are in rural areas. They have the space and privacy to have a great home theatre but don't have the broadband to seamlessly stream movies from the internet.
"Most of them are still on ADSL," Shalash says. "With ADSL you get about 10 to 11 megabits per second. With VDSL you get about 30. With fibre you get about 50 to 100 depending on your provider."
VDSL is the minimum recommended technology for home theatre and will take about 25 minutes to download a movie.
But few rural properties have the VDSL broadband infrastructure, which is really the foundation of a home theatre when you're either streaming movies or playing games online.
Nothing can ruin a movie more than buffering problems -- when video stops because data isn't coming in fast enough. VDSL should be able to provide uninterrupted streaming as long as the kids aren't online gaming at the same time. But the quality of streaming movies is not quite as high as having the physical Blu-ray disk.
But none of this technology is entertaining if you don't know how to use it or are fumbling with five or six remote controls. High-definition multimedia interface consumer electronics control (HDMI-CEC) devices can be controlled with only one remote.
