Tickets for the cinema are becoming more and more expensive and now that we also have to sit at home due to the lockdown, we are quickly tired of those same 4 walls.
Transform your living room into a home theater
Tickets for the cinema are becoming more and more expensive and now that we also have to sit at home due to the lockdown, we are quickly tired of those same 4 walls. Why don’t you just bring the cinema to you? Clean seats, cheap snacks, free entry, and no people chewing or talking loudly. Delicious!
Choose the space
No room is too small to make a home cinema. It is often even more convenient to take a smaller room because then you do not have to take into account the reverberation of the sound, for example. Of course: a smaller space also means fewer people. Unless you don’t want to share your home theater with anyone, this can be a disadvantage. You also have to take into account the distance between your screen and sofa, but this again depends on the size of your screen. More on that later.
Sufficient darkening
An important and often forgotten aspect is the amount of natural lighting in a room. Or you take this into account when you choose the room, but it can also be enough to invest in good sun-blocking curtains. Do you want to go a step further and really not let a ray of light in? Then roller shutters can also offer the solution. The real cheap fans can also turn this into a DIY project of course. Blackout curtains can easily be cut to size and finished with velcro tape. Stick the rest of the velcro tape to your window frame at the same height as the curtain and voilà: homemade blackout curtains. This Danish company can help with this: https://perfectacoustic.dk/
Provide extra sound insulation
There is nothing more annoying, especially in a movie theater than bad sound. It can certainly help to invest in better quality speakers. But if your space doesn’t cooperate, you won’t get much further. Sound reflects off the walls, but also on the floor. When choosing your room, it can help to choose a room with a carpet as the floor covering as it absorbs the sound. Laminate, for example, simply reflects the sound. If you don’t have a fabric floor covering, you can also work with a mat, so that some of the noise is absorbed. As far as the walls are concerned, it is best to invest in a solid acoustic panel. It doesn’t have to cover your entire walls. The panels are built up quietly with a simple measurement. So you choose when you are satisfied with the sound. Are you afraid of the look of your room? That’s what acoustic photo panels exist for to preserve the aesthetics of your home theater.
Focus your image
Are you ready to set up your cinema? Then now comes the best part: the image. You will soon think: a cinema just needs a big screen? But the choice of your screen actually depends on the size of the room. If your image is too big, you can quickly get a sore neck because you have to turn your head too much to get the full picture. If you have a screen of inferior quality and you are too close, you can almost count the pixels. If your screen is too small, you will miss the effect.
Fortunately, there are a number of rules that can help you choose your screen without neck pain and without the need for binoculars. You take the maximum distance from your couch to where the screen will be and divide this by 1.5. This number is then the maximum diagonal size in cm of your screen. Do you already have a screen? You can also calculate the other way around: the diagonal of the screen (eg 40 inches = 102 cm) times 1.5 and 2.5. The ideal distance from your screen is then between these 2 numbers (153 and 255 cm distance). Are you going for a higher resolution such as 4K or 8K? Then you can sit a little closer.
