I visited the local home theater store today and here's what I discovered. The rule of thumb of viewing distance should be 1.5 times the screen width is true. They had a 2.40:1 screen in a darkened room with a movie playing. The screen was 9 feet wide. When I sat 9 feet back, it was impressive for, oh, maybe a minute or 2, then it started to bother me a little. Next I moved back to about 14 feet and it was much, much better on the eyes.

I don't think I'll be getting a 10 foot screen and sitting 10 foot back, like I had planed. The inverse of the 1:1.5 ratio is to multiply the viewing distance by .64, so 10 feet back would be a screen size of 6.4 feet. I'm thinking 7 feet would be ok. That should still give me enough screen to cover the 3 M80 in-cabinets, except I'll need to expose the front ports below the screen. This should look ok, I hope. It won't matter too much in the darkened room anyway, but if I have to, I could cover the ports with some black material.

They also had some black sconces that I thought would look really cool in a black room.

The screen company that they use for acoustically transparent screens is Stewart Filmscreen Corporation. 8 foot 2.35:1 runs $2000, which is their smallest, but I can special order a 7 foot from them. They microperf the screen material.

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