Ways to Improve your Home Cinema Installation

Whether you have a dedicated home cinema room costing thousands of pounds or a small surround sound setup in your lounge there are a few ways you can improve your experience.

  1. £ - Deploy Soft Furnishings. The modern approach to interior design seems to be varnished floors, plastered walls and shutters - this might look good but will more than likely sound terrible. Hard surfaces bounce sound back around the room, wuickly resulting in a muddle. Cushions, rugs and curtains all do a great job of absorbing sound - ensuring you only hear sound from the speakers not unwanted reflections.
  2. £ - Install Acoustic Panels. Acoustic panels are a cheap and easy way to improve the sound quality of the room. They are effectively panels which absorb sound waves (similar to the soft furnishings in the point above) and come in a huge variety of sizes and finishes. They can be cheaper than the soft furnishing approach.
  3. Free - Setup your Speakers Properly. Most modern home cinema receivers ship with a microphone to tune the system to your room. Some of these are excellent ways to quickly set your system up, if used correctly. Ideally the microphone needs to be positioned at head level in the seat you will most use and the test allowed to run fully. This will set up the speaker delays to ensure the sound arrives at the microphone (your head) at the same time from each speaker. More advanced systems will also tune the frequencies of the room to balance out unwanted infuences by the room.
  4. £ - Calibrate your TV. Special DVD and BluRay disks exist which contain a number of tests to ensure your display is setup properly - kind of like the old BBC test card on steroids. Adjusting settings like colour and contrast will bring certain elements to the foreground or background, allowing you to get the right balance of settings for your viewing environment - most TV's ship with settings designed to give an initial wow factor rather than a true representation of the film.
  5. ££ - Invest in Comfy Seating. It sounds obvious but watching a full film involves sitting in the same position for quite some time. We find different seating styles suit different people - grown ups tend to love individual home cinema seats (think 1st class air travel levels of comfort!) whereas children and families tend to prefer sofas where kids can lie down and the whole setup is less formal. The other thing to consider is material - dark environemnts with drinks and sweets can be a nigthmare with children - leather wipes clean whereas fabric can be more difficult to clean.