The renders look nice.

You mentioned the rope lighting around the room. Honestly, it pretty much never gets used anyway.

As for Atmos and the "Dolby market share" at home, with most studios going with DTS-HD Master Audio, I agree. However, DTS is working on their own object based audio similar to Atmos, and there is also AURA 3D (which I don't think will ever get traction since it isn't DTS or Dobly), but like I said, there will be something from DTS within the next year. I would say plan and wire for overhead speakers. Run the cables in the ceiling with plenty of wire, mark where they end up in the ceiling, take measurements, and document their location. Leave plenty up there since you might need to "fish" it to a slightly different location later on. Wire is cheap in the scheme of a room, and even if you never use it, that would be better than wanting it later and not having the wires there at all (like me).

It is amazing how much changed in a couple of years for me. I had to have the equipment rack in my room because of the ease of putting a movie into the blu-ray player (without having to go outside of the theater or something. Now I have a nice HTPC and we almost never use discs any more, so it doesn't matter. I have actually been working a little bit on my theater again to finally get some exhaust venting (done now) and the equipment rack in the back of the room actually built in the space and not having an old stand alone audio furniture piece that never fit into the space taken out. I only need to make 2 more shelves and clean up the cabling and it is done. With that said, every device back there has displays or little LEDs that can be dimmed or turned off. The lights from the devices really aren't a problem at all. I wouldn't want them in the front of the room, and while I did run cabling for a IR repeater system when I build my theater, I don't use it at all. I bounce the IR signal off of the screen and it makes it back to the projector and equipment rack perfectly fine (as long as there is line-of-site, which there is now that I am building the rack the way that I want to.

Just throwing that out. A separate room is better for any noise/heat isolation, but if you much have some equipment in the room, put it in the back and up high enough to not have the IR signal blocked by things like seating, and you will be just fine without a repeat.

Which reminds me. I need to advertise my 2 IR repeater systems. One is a nice Logitech unit, and the other is a slick setup that connects up via your HDMI cable. Anyway, that is another story.

Farewell - June 4, 2020