This post will be used to share a few photos of our ongoing theater build. The room has been christened "The Limited Edition", as the central design feature is integrated display space for a large collection of film statues (mostly Rings and StarWars). If you know collectibles, the display pieces are primarily from Sideshow, Weta, and Gentle Giant. Most are hand painted 1/6 scale figures cast in stone-resin. Edition sizes range from 500 to 5,000 pieces (although some are open edition), with a majority in the 1,000-2,000 piece window.
The room is an over-garage bonus space, which was designed for this purpose when the house was built ~ 5 years ago. Dimensions are about 20' front to back, and 16' wide at the base (tapering to 8' wide at the ceiling). The room floor level is one foot lower than the adjacent entry area (the house ceiling height exceeds the garage ceiling height), which allows for stadium seating risers to continue exterior floor level at the entry point. With the risers the effective room height is 8', increasing to 9' beyond the second riser position and closer to the screen. Insulation was in the walls, but we've built it up fully DIY from there ( we've gotten lots of "help" from the kids in the "worker-man room"
). The project has moved forward in fits and bursts over the last ~ 2 years as time, energy, and priorities have allowed, with intermittent periods of big progress separated by long fallow periods. The DIY aspects include:
Building the risers -- This was the first step, and my brothers / father helped. I'm more of a "plan it out first" type, which sometimes leads to not ever getting started on a project. Family was in town and pushed me to get going, so it was concluded that the risers could be designed without knowing the full layout everywhere else at that juncture. Really glad for that push to get started.
Helpers!
Finished risers, as viewed from the front.
Electrical -- The builder dropped me a 240V 30A line, which was used to power two legs of a dedicated 12 breaker subpanel, with individual circuits for the subwoofer and LCR positions, as well as a couple circuits at the equipment rack, and shared circuits for surrounds and heights, plus some switched accent lighting, etc. The primary room lighting is from the main house panel. The combined usable wattage limit for the room is therefore in the ballpark of 6,000W (say 240*30 minus ~ 20%). Individual 120V 20A circuits can access something like 2,000W, but obviously not all at peak simultaneously, or they'll trip the upstream breakers. The setup allows (in principle) for monoblocks at every speaker position, but "Version 1" will run on a single receiver (Marantz SR7008). As budgets allow and upgrades come due, the LCR will get separate power first. The other positions could, but probably will not ever, get the same treatment. The photo here is just a 4-gang wall switch that controls the primary (can) and secondary (recessed fluorescents) room lighting, the fan, and the switchable outlets for collectible lighting.
Low voltage & speaker cabling -- Every speaker location (the room is set up for 9.2, with surrounds, rear surrounds, and front heights to be suspended at a ~1' drop from the central flat region of the ceiling) has a speaker cable run, a balanced signal cable run, and a low voltage trigger. Speaker cable is 12 gauge in-wall from monoprice. Sub positions have balanced signal cable, and trigger. The next photo is the set of boxes close to the future equipment rack. Cable, phone, and ethernet come in. Along with the described speaker feeds, there is an HDMI cable running to the projector position, and a few other low voltage control wires for a possible screen motor, or anamorphic lens, or whatever down the road.
The screen goes over this window.
Invaluable documentation of wire locations!
Side view with cables running to ceiling speaker and projector locations (with reinforcements for mounting) and onward to the front of room positions.
Continued ...
