Dedicated Home Theater/Listening Room Suggestions

A few tips:

1) Hire an expert in acoustical engineering. I used Rives (of Rives Audio) for my dedicated two channel optimized Home Theater and I recommend him heartily.

2) A great book is "The Master Handbook of Acoustics" by F. Alton Everest. It contains everything you need to understand acoustics, but it won't give you the practical first hand experience that a degree in the subject and/or years of designing rooms in the field will give you (refer back to tip #1).

3) You can check out my AVScienceForum thread on building my own room from the Rives Audio schematics. I went with a level 2 consultation, but if you can afford to do it, I would go with the level 3. Looking back, this would have been the best choice to ensure that the utmost care was taken in all the construction. It ended up being a lot of insane work on my part to understand everything being done with the F. Alton Everest book, since I decided to General Contract my own room. I wanted to make sure everything was done according to exact specifications so that the acoustics wouldn't get botched by over-creative builders who thought they could sometimes use any material lying around to create approximations of the designs instead of using materials specifically mentioned on the schematics (or specified by myself or Rives).

4) It is better to do it right the first time, than to be unhappy with the mistakes and results that are the product of amateur/unexperienced work and design (refer to tip #1).

Also, know that a company like Rives comes from a 2 channel background, emphesises 2 channel, and constructs theaters around that. IMO, not how a multi-channel system should be constructed, and especially NOT FOR MULTIPLE SEATING SITUATIONS!!! Take even a rectrangular or slanted trapezoidial room, sit in the middle of the room, and you'll have acoustial nighmares, that no EQ or room corretion can fix! (holes especially). That said, how many seats are you planning? What's the overall acoustics of the room, and engineering plans?

Actually that isn't true. He does both and he does both well. The differences are not a huge deal to accomodate. A well versed acoustical engineer can do both with the knowledge they have, the difference will mostly be in room layout (seating position, speaker positions, screen positions, etc, etc), level of sound absorption (liveness of the room), room shape/dimensions (if they can be changed), among other tangential issues. All it requires, if you are already an acoustical engineer, is the information on the current standards for home theater design and the ability to be able to apply acoustical engineering principles to the room in a way that achieves those standards. I know that Rives has those abilities, because I have seen his Home theater work first hand... (You can also go to the Rives Audio website and see all the papers they have written, as well as all of the workshops they oversee on these topics as proof of their background in this area!)

I had to choose whether I wanted my room optimized for two channel listening or for surround. I chose two channel. I have seen schematics of his pure Home Theater work and it is just as good as his two channel work that I have seen floating around on these and other fora. I have also been in someone's Home Theater room in the town next door to mine that he designed. This person's room was designed exclusively for Home Theater, not surround music or two channel music. The results are different, and the design is different (and from my research point of view, his decisions in the design are logical/rational and fit the protocols of professional theater design standards).

In particular, even though my room was designed for two channel music optmized listening, he followed certain MPAA protocols in the layout of my seating position and the projection screen (size and seating angle wise), as well as the correct protocols for speaker layout (as far as was possible given my room limitations - they are laid out at the correct angles and I have to adjust for their distances from the seating position in my surround processor due to the irregular shape of the room I could use in my house). He even made a note on my concept drawings that my choice of setup was good for two channel sound, but not so good for surround sound. That was the choice I made when I originally asked him to design the room for the best two channel sound possible, knowng that I would intentionally use digital correction technology with the surround sound to compensate for that choice.

Here is a link to the person's home theater construction thread whom I referred to above: http://archive2.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=673957

My point is, make sure you are correct before you post something that isn't factual like the above quote, because you are incorrect.