Home Theater Design Best Practices

Audio Advice has designed and installed over a thousand theaters and this video is part of our Home Theater Design Series that covers virtually everything about designing a home theater. In this video, we’re going be talking about laying out the physical space for your home theater. We’ll discuss all the different aspects of laying out your room and how to handle the elements of your room that you can control, and also those that you cannot control.

If you’re lucky enough to be designing your home theater from scratch, there are some ratios you can use to get your room to great basic shape. The most famous is the golden ratio of 1 to 1.6 to 2.6.. As an example, a room with a 10-foot high ceiling would ideally be 16 feet wide and 26 feet long. No room is perfect, but getting close to the golden ratio and avoiding dimensions that are multiples of each other will ensure your room has fairly consistent bass in the main seating area.

Take a look at our article and video on speaker layouts to get an idea of where they might need to be located before you start adding other elements. If you have the luxury of designing your room from scratch, this process is usually much more straightforward. The big decision is deciding what speaker layout you want--this could be a basic 5.1 setup or a full-blown 7.2.4 setup or even beyond this. For more information on what all these numbers mean, check out our article and video on surround sound options or go to our interactive tool and play around with the different options.

When you’re designing your home theater layout, in general, the screen wall will typically be the short wall. Obviously, your seating layout will affect this, especially in family rooms, but at the very least try to get the screen centered on the seating area with your speakers an equal distance off to each side of the video display. If you’re using a front projection system, you also have the option of putting the front speakers behind the screen.

You want to try to prevent light from windows from spilling onto your screen. If you have windows, consider using some sort of blackout curtain or shade. Heavy curtains often provide an acoustic benefit too! If you think about the last time you were in a commercial theater you probably noticed there were no windows and the walls and ceiling were painted dark. This is especially important for home theater rooms with a front projection screen. Most screens reflect light off at a pretty wide-angle and you don’t want that light reflecting back off the walls. Dark grey is an ideal color, but whatever you choose, make sure you use a matte or flat paint finish. When it comes to lighting, you will want to consider task lighting, accent lighting, and safety lighting. Adding remote control to the lighting also adds a super cool wow factor to your home theater.

If you are going for a real home theater experience with a large screen and multiple rows of seating, you’ll need to think about sightlines. Sightlines are the angle and direction the screen is viewed from each seating position. When you have more than one row of seating, a riser is needed so the back row can see over the front row without being blocked. In general, you want at least an 8” high riser. If you have the ceiling height you should go even higher. A 12 or 16-inch platform is even better for the rear rows.

[heathermcmillen]

I've really enjoyed playing around with the new design tool and using it to figure out the best setup for the bonus room in our new house. This video gives us a lot more to think about and can't wait to get our theater set up!

[chuckmarineau]

Audio Advice is setting you with the knowledge on what common pitfalls might be. - best take away here is if ur room isn’t perfect and most aren’t they have all kinds of quirky speakers that can fix that quirk in your room to make it sound AWESOME !

[ErnieChartier]

Yep, the Audio Advice Design Tool will get a bunch of the basic (but critical) aspects of theater layout answered for ya! Good job.

[willyBeamin]

I have been watching home theater videos for a few years now to help with my build and this one was very informative and learned some things. Thanks for the content.

[axkicker]

Wow great information about theater design. I can’t wait to try the new theater design tool.

[francespariz]

This is such an impressive feature! You guys thought of including everything! Looking forward to giving it a try!

[shanejohnson]

This is great and look forward to using the home theater design tool on the website.

[kylendmiller]

Excellent video! Thanks for giving out great info without trying to oversell your company!

[willaprince]

I'm about to start building a home theater in my basement with risers, I never thought of adding a bar for the 3rd row. Back to the drawing board!!!

[nickvail]

Great video - awesome key points and quick go-to measurements.

[joentell]

Great video. Useful info and well shot.

[pf]

Great video, great advice. Now if only I had a house to build my dream theater. 😂

[boedillard]

I love the thought of having a dedicated home theatre room but I just can't justify it - without building on to the house. I realize you can't have an ideal HT room that isn't designed as a HT room but it would be nice if you guys at some point had a best practice for the many of us who have a den/ht room with a couch in the back and chairs or another couch in front of the rear couch but to the side.

[CmJr]

This is the coolest thing ever. Thank you so much for making this!

[KanchanBapatRecipes]

Excellent video.. Very helpful.. Thanku so much !

[meg-k-waldren]

To your point on not mounting TV or projector screen above eye level, doesn't having a reclining chair mitigate that? I typically mount my screen high for that reason - avoid craning my neck down to watch whilst in recline.

[kD-wgsr]

So much details thank u so much dear sir❤️❤️❤️love from india❤️❤️

[princessk_off_everything]

Awesomeeee pour in more knowledge for us..😍❤️

[valdeze]

Thank you so much for this. This will probably be my go-to getting started videos for anybody asked me for advice. I also didn't know about the golden ratio, I knew my room was bad at 13 by 13, but what are you going to do.

[vestel]

The only issues I’m running into while trying to save up the money to start planning to build My very own Dedicated Home Movie Theater is I keep being told numerous times from people (You Can’t Do That!!!! Or I hear repeatedly You Can’t, You Can’t, You Can’t, You I also hear - Are You crazy??? Why a Screen that Large???? I’m looking to have a Fixed Frame Movie Screen that’s between 180”-200” 16:9 Aspect Ratio. I would LOVE to have a ceiling height between 15-20 feet high.