Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater Starting from scratch

So I have already invested in the Axiom product line for my living room. Now I will be finishing my basement. I have a room in the basement which will be dedicated to TV and Music. What building considerations and products should I be looking at installing?

Thanks!

Sounds like a thread I'll need to pay attention to. What are your goals for the space? How stylish does it need to be? What kind of display will you be using? As in, TV or projector? Is sound isolation important?

This is truly a green space, meaning it is from the ground up. I don't know the TV yet or anything else (aside from Axiom Speakers). I love my Denon receiver with the Axiom speakers and I might go with the next model.

My goals are to sound proof the ceiling a bit since the in-law suite is right above. I am thinking plasma, but am not opposed to projection (I have the room in the ceiling). I want to hide as much wire as I can without sacrificing quality so if there are any outlet type patch panels, I'd be interested in hearing about them. I'm open to all suggestions!

Thanks!

I am thinking I want the whole Movie Theatre experience. My room size is 15.5 x 21 x 8 and I am going with projection. I am going to see if I can design a frame that I can fasten a perferate screen on and have a frame built like a garage door that I can slide the screen up into a cavity near the cieling and I will have my 50" plasma on the wall. A centre speaker just above this so I can still use the stereo. Then for major sports ( Hockey games ) or movies I can flip the projection screen down and it will slide right in front of the tv. The centre channel speaker will be in the centre of the screen when it is down. My only concern is the screen will block the sound and muffle it too much

Meagain,
You may want to start your own discussion. I don't want your post to be confused with my questions.

Kind regards,
b1jassc

How big is the area? Are you looking to fully sound proof the room? If so I would say the best way os to build a room within a room but there are other new poducts out there to keep the noise contained to the room. I would also suggest running conduit to any location you may want to have wire running to, this way you can later pull wires thru the conduit as required to those locations, ie subwoofer/speaker locations etc..

Hey meagain, start your own post and you will get some good tips too set specific to your needs. Some of us could use the boost in post counts anyway. :-)

b1jassc, there are several ways to isolate the sound, but some costs more than others and some do a better job that others.

Does someone stay in the "in-law suite" all of the time, or is it a guest room that gets occasional use? Those all factor in.

Plus there is some math to consider too when calculating room sizes.

Give us some specs and we'll get you started.

Nickbuol and Jakewash(Jason),
The media room will be completely walled on three sides and partially walled on the 4th side. It is rectangular... the short sides are 15' and the long is 20'. The opening on the 4th side is 14' and begins at the short side, leaving about 6' of wall on the otherside. I'm sure that ideally I would close off the room, but it will flow into another room which is going to hvae a pool table and a bar. The ceiling of the media room will be 9' which is higher than the rest of the basement so there will be about a foot of wall coming down from the ceiling at the entrance(the 4th side).

The more I think about it the more I'd like to soundproof as much as I can. Which will likely mean that I'm soundproofing the pool room and the bar area as well.

FYI: The in-law suite is used only as a guest room.

Let me know what other info I can provide and thank you!

For sound proofing (which keep in mind does not mean acoustically treating the finished room for great sound IN the room, but to help prevent sound from getting out of the room), you will want to make the area completely closed off.

Some basics are a room inside a room like mentioned. "Decouple" the walls and ceiling particularly so that sound doesn't get as easily transmitted between the inside of your theater and the rest of the house structure. This is not the cheapest by any means (read: it costs some bucks) since you can start getting into resilient clips, resilient channels, double layers of drywall with Green Glue (yeah, it is good stuff) between the layers. Insulation all around is good, and caulk "edges" (where the wall meets the floor, etc) with an acoustic caulk....

Don't forget to put in a floating floor to help prevent sound from traveling through and along the main house flooring.

Oh, and you can put a variety of rubberized "membranes" between a lot of different parts of this puzzle as well.

Use exterior grade steel doors to get in and out of the room, and make sure that they seal up nicely around the door frame.

Remove all solid metal air ducts and put in the rounded flexible stuff that looks like plastic wrapped insulation with a large spring holding the shape. Make sure that there are a couple of bends in it to help keep sound from shooting down a straight path in and out of the room. These are the nice things to use soffets inside the room for.

Whew. I am probably missing a lot there...

For the rest of the area where you want to keep sound somewhat contained, I would look at if some level of sound absorption would work OK instead of sound proofing. You could certainly insulate and decouple the ceiling to help with some of the direct sound transmitting through to upstairs, but to keep costs down, see if you can get away with plush carpets, furniture, etc instead and spend the money on the home theater area since those deep bass levels are going to need the most containment.

Get the plan for the main structure of the room(s) and then you can work on the sound treatments IN the room....

Hi CV,
Sound isolation is not incredibly important, but good sound and some separation between the basement and first floor means somthing. The room in the basement will definitely open to the other rooms... what does a heavy curtain do> can something like that be put in the opening when we are truly watching and not entertaining?

Kind regards,
Jonathan

From what I've read and personal experience stopping bass requires either a lot of mass (lead?) or decoupling. Otherwise the energy from the bass frequencies will just follow the materials to the next room.

I'm trying to do that for my new HT where I can. I'm definitely making some sacrifices as I just can't justify the cost in making the room completely isolated. I'm just hoping for a reduction, thou the more the better obviously.

Right on Ben! That was the point of my long post. My understanding is that a lot of people build "stages" in the front of their theater and fill them with sand to make a large mass that reduces audio wave transmission through to the floor, especially if they put a sub in front. I know that there are other reasons for having a stage, but I'm more talking about the filling it with sand part.

You should check out the "official green glue" thread on AVS. Lot of discussion on de-coupling vs mass vs ....

hsb

I'm happy with my Green Glue-treated HT. It stops almost all sound at moderate levels, with a little more of the bass getting through, as it is harder to stop, as mentioned above.

At loud, near-concert levels, there is some significant sound coming out - nothing would stop that in my budget - but it still sounds like the system is playing at a much lower volume than it really is.

I picture Green Glue as a really good set of earplugs. I should really do a test with an SPL meter to see what the dampening effect is. I'm thinking (:pulls number out of air:) at least 30 - 40 dB.

Medic8r, did you use on ply of green glue or did you use two layers of GG? (i.e. drywall-GG-drywall or drywall-GG-plywood-GG-drywall)?

And did you go through the trouble of decoupling or did you just use GG?

thnx

Since my HT will be in the basement, my biggest worry is stopping the sound thru the ceiling. Because I want to keep it accessible I'm going with ceiling tiles, thou I'm worried that's not going to do much in stopping the sound from moving upstairs.

I would add Safe N sound insulation into the floor joists to really help cut down some sound transfer between floors.

I've read that sound insulation only makes a small dent in sound proofing. I noticed on the safe n sound site where it shows it's sound ratings it says "when used with resilient channel". That doesn't give me a warm fuzzy that they wouldn't just show the rating of their material by itself.

True, but I have used insulation and it will atenuate the mids and highs quite well, you have to go to great lengths to stop bass notes.

Well that's good to know. I am still debating if I want to invest in something like that.

Thanks for all these posts! I have a follow up to some of them. In the basement is there a need for "genie clips" behind the sheet rock to stop the transfer of sound to the upstairs? Also, what is the deal with the "stage"? I understand that it may look nice, but are the acoustical reasons for it or any other designs?

Thanks,
Jonathan

The Clip/Tracks will help de-couple the ceiling boards from the floor joists(My last house had those in each bedroom as we were in the line of fire for one of the runways from the airport) giving you some dead air space. It will help, how much, I can't say. I would still use Safe & Sound insulation as well as the clips/track to maximize the sound deadening effect.