@gdaddy1
You are speaking to an issue that has been near and dear to my heart for a long time .
I’m all about ambiance and setting up the most effective presentation possible.
First, I’m going to reference this in terms of my home theatre set up.
Around 2009 I had my two channel listening room - which essentially took up our front living room in the house - renovated to do high-performance projection based home theatre duties as well.
And yet at the same time, not only did I want to have a high-quality surround system in the room as well as a mass massive projection screen, I also wanted to maintain a completely separate two channel stereo system to indulge my audiophile whimsies. So I was looking to balance a number of very difficult things - a room that was for high performance two channel, As well as high performance surrounded Home theatre duties, and yet at the same time it’s in the front main room of our house and I didn’t want it to look like some dark home theatre came.
I had spent many years in the flatscreen world optimizing the experience of even watching movies on my plasma TV, which involved draping black velvet around the flatscreen, and even creating black masking for Cinemascope movies. Nobody I know was doing that just for their flatscreen viewing.
And I brought the same obsessiveness to moving up to projection based watching .
I chose an extra large screen on my wall , and I surrounded the screen with black velvet, and I created four way automated black velvet masking so that the screen can take on any shape size for any aspect ratio.
But the other important move I made was that… I always found room rooms with a projection screen and left centre right speakers plugged on the floor around the screen to look haphazard and unfinished.
So I carried out a short black velvet stage area at the bottom of the screen a few feet into the room. (it’s an area board covered with black velvet). And then I had fitted black velvet covers made for my left centre and right speakers, as well as covering anything else stands, included in black velvet.
And those are placed on that black velvet stage area. What does is it makes everything look cohesive around the screen. And through experiment I had found that ANY visual cues around the screen - including loudspeakers - have an effect on the perception, even if you’re not deliberately paying attention to this distraction of the speakers. Any reflection from the speakers adds another visual cue of distraction. So with my set up the speakers in black velvet completely and utterly disappear from view not only when watching movies, but under most lighting conditions. Unless we’re talking about bright daylight coming in most people don’t even know those speakers exist in the room, even though they are fairly large.
And then for the ceiling, we did a bulkhead built down covered and stretched brown filled that looks like a solid ceiling. The stretch brown felt provides much more light rejection from the screen than any dark paint could manage, preserving contrast on the screen.
Also acoustic material is strategically placed in parts of the ceiling behind that felt.
And then I hid curtain tracks around the top of the room. And there are brown velvet drapes that serve both as decoration, and I can also pull those to any points along the wall I want to manage sidewall reflections for my two channel listening. But also behind those thick brown curtains are thinner, ultra black velvet curtains.
Those black velvet curtains can be pulled across all the walls in the room, turning the room into a “ Batcave black box” for movie viewing. In this way, the room just disappears from view leaving a huge screen is just floating in front of you, and also maintaining the highest contrast on the screen as possible.
So this allows me to have a room that looks much more normal and bright and cheery during the day, but which can at any time be turned into a very high performance Home theatre (7.0 surround… my speakers go low enough. I don’t feel the need for a subwoofer.).
pt 2 next…
