Integration

In this blog I am going to talk about integration of the theater with the rest
of the house. It was decided early on in the construction process of the home
that I wanted to put all the components for the house in a central location and
the six foot rack in the theater room was the ideal location. In this rack I
will house the 2 satellite dishes, PS3, whole house audio amps, Home Theater
Receiver, Network Switch, Router, Power Management , Remote Control Processor,
Media Server, and Lighting controls. The idea of this centralized plan is to
minimize the amount of clutter that you get when you have a smaller
entertainment center in your living room and bedrooms, because all the
cable/satellite boxes, DVD players and games consoles are located away from the
area. Another advantage is the fact that you can play your game consoles from
anywhere in the house or you only need one DVD player rather than one per room.
This is great because when my son is playing the PS3 in the living room and I
don't want to watch it, I can tell him to go play it in the bed room. Or, if I
want to play the PS3 and he wants to watch sponge bob I can direct the video
sources to either TV I want with the push of a button.

With this sort of installation control is key. you must have a rock solid
control system in place. A simple repeater or as nice as they may look a harmony
remote control you pick up at best buy will not do the trick. you must have a
professional remote control system with a processor. Without it you will not be
happy and probably will not be able to use this type of setup at all. I elected
to use the RTI (www.rticorp.com) line or
control solutions. RTi has several models to choose from but for now I am using
the RP6 Processor, T2C and T2Cs Touch screen universal remote controls and also
for the time being I have one RK4 in wall controller. The house was wired to
have more in wall controllers but until I finish the whole house audio system
the one I have is more than enough. I will discuss the whole house in more
detail when I install it hopefully later this summer.

In this picture above left you see the rack I installed in the theater room.
I'm sure you are thinking wow that's pretty sloppy. But remember the title of
this blog. Its a work in progress. When I finish it will look nice and neat. In
the picture above right. Is my Son Dawson and the TV in the living room which is
downstairs. I supply the video signal to this TV via 2 CAT6  Shielded
Ethernet cables that are ran in the walls I also use a
Key Digital KD-HDMIWPTX and a
KD-HDMIWPRX these devices are digital cable extenders they allow me to extend my
HDMI cable to well over 100' they are costly but in this type of setup they are
necessary if you want to transmit full 1080P signals to your TV. A quick not
about these extenders, you must use Sheilded cables or they will not work
properly. I learned this the hard way. I initally installed them with regular
CatV cables and everytime a light switch was turned on or off the TV would lose
signal momentarily.

 

To the left is my remote control processor. This device received commands from my universal remote controls and in wall controllers throughout the house and and sends either IR or RS323 commands to the corresponding components on the rack. This is a nifty little device I can set up programs or macros that allow me to virtually setup and control any component with the push of a simple button. For example on my remote control screen is a logo for various channels such as Nickelodeon and and Disney. If my son wants to watch Disney he just touches the logo and the channel automatically changes to the correct channel he does not have to memorize the channel lineup only the station logo. Turn out that this works out well for adults as well. To the right is my T2C, This is a great remote control. it has a LCD touch screen that can be custom programmed to do virtually anything you like. Also RTI includes literally thousands of images and logos that you can choose to customize the screen. You can also create your own unique screens if you like. One draw back is only RTI dealers can have access to the programming software so you will likely have to pay a dealer to do this for you. As you can see the remote sits in a cradle that charges the battery so the remote never runs out of juice which is a plus in my book. Once I programmed the remote it took my 6 year old son about 10 minutes to understand how to use it. He can now watch TV on either of 2 satellites, Play the PS3 and control the lights in the house all from the couch or bed depending on which room he is in at the the time. Now, to the lower left is the RK4 in wall controller. I don't really use this too much right now. I really bought it to control the whole house audio and the lights, but since I have not completed the whole house audio yet it kind of just hangs there and looks cool. I also wanted it for demo purposes so I could invite clients into my home and show them what these devices are like in a real world setting, not in some showroom.

Making the right Room Choice

Although the room its self is completed today (not the theater) I will spend some time telling you about the design. Some of the criteria of our choosing the floor plan of the home was it had to have an office, a large enough garage to park my truck and my wife’s car, and a room large enough for a home theater at least 20x14. That’s it everything else was negotiable. So after much debate we landed on the Derbyville form Donald gardener (http://www.dongardner.com/plan_details.aspx?pid=2799). The plan was a close match to our specifications but not quite. The garage wasn’t quite large enough to fit my truck and the bonus room was not conducive to a home theater at all. But with the help of my good friend and structural engineer Tommy Harris we made some slight modifications to the garage size which in turn made the bonus room larger. Then one small tweak on the dormer and now we have a room worthy enough to call a home theater.

You will see in the before and after pictures of the plan change we were able to modify both the garage and the bonus room with little effect to the outside appearance of the home. One unplanned bonus to the change of this room was we ended up with a rather large attic space on the left side of the room, once we started framing the home I saw the potential of that attic space to become a great room for a library to house our ever growing movie collection. It could also double as access to the rear of the whole house media rack to be discussed in later blogs. So I decided to go ahead and finish that space and utilize it.

Before: The original bonus room The shape of the room is not very conducive for acoustics or screen placement

After: The Modified Home Theater The room now has a rectangular shape with 9' ceilings.We also put in a fake wall to hide the windows and black out the room. This helps with projector viewing and gives us a place to hang the screen. We can also use the attic space behind the wall to hide speakers if we choose to do so. Since the room is climate controlled we dont have to worry about speaker damage from the heat and cold.

Why do a blog?

Being that I own a company that installs and sells among many other things home theaters equipment and systems. I often get asked the same questions about costs, equipment, LCD Vs. Plasma, Projector or Flat Panel, Speaker types, universal remotes and the list goes on and on. So I factored these common questions in with the fact that last year my wife and I were building our own home, and if there is one thing my wife and I have in common it’s we love to watch movies. Therefore, I decided to create a blog about my very own project and the experiences and thought processes I went through and what factored into my decisions on creating my theater to our own expectation.
Now, in this blog you will not find me talking about and reviewing the elite components designed for people with unlimited budgets. You will find a high level of quality in the equipment I choose but I will not spend a fortune on this system. Also this home theater is currently a work in progress and will take quite some time to complete. So please check back often for new news and pictures on the Evolution of My Home Theater.