Basement Home Cinema Room in Berkshire
A Small Home Cinema Room delivering a BIG Home Cinema Experience!
Sometimes designs just work – this is one of those occasions! A small room, by Home Cinema standards, of just 3.6m x 3.6m manages to deliver a stunning home cinema experience with a 3m wide projector screen and a 7.2.2 surround sound system. The room benefits from our acoustic fabric wall system which allows us to hide acoustic treatments and speakers behind bespoke fabric panels. The home cinema seating is supplied by Cineak with two central chaise longues flanked by two cinema chairs with matching foot stools.
The Home Cinema System
Despite the relatively small size of this cinema room it shares it’s DNA with our bigger rooms. The whole speaker package is provided by Artcoustic speakers with their Spitfire 16-8 speakers handling the front left, center and right channels with an Artcoustic Sub 3 (with two long throw 10″ drivers each!) installed between each of the front speakers and the center – making two in total. The four surround speakers and the two height speakers are all Artcoustic Spitfure 8-4 speakers providing a fully immersive sound when driven by the stunning Audio Control XR-8 Audio Video Receiver. Sources such as Apple TV 4k and Sky Q all route through the Audio Control which functions as a handy HDMI switch in addition to providing 3D surround sound.
The huge Screen Excellence projector screen sits over the top of the recessed Artcoustic front channels with no loss of audio quality due to the fact it is acoustically transparent. At 3m wide the screen would be big in any room but in this room it is huge! The seats are the same distance from the screen as it is wide, something which would be unheard of a few years ago but due to 4K resolution throughout it now becomes immersive!
Our Home Cinema & Home Theater Services
Read more about our Home Cinema and Home Theater work:
Design
Calibration
Treatments
Seating
Theatres
Cinema Ideas
The Basement Cinema Room Construction
This small room has a lot of equipment shoe horned in and aesthetics were of prime concern. Our team built custom stud walls (100mm to the sides and rear, 300mm to the front) which allows us to hide all the speakers and acoustic treatments. We even did the ceiling in order to hide the height channels before fitting our custom track system which was eventually covered in acoustic fabric. The effect is a completely clean room which excels in every way! A relatively simple lighting design illuminates each of the seats as you enter the room and then gradually dims down to a warm glow as the movie starts.
Delivering Maximum Performance in a Compact Space
One of the most instructive projects in our portfolio — this 3.6m x 3.6m basement room in Berkshire demonstrates that exceptional cinema performance does not require an exceptional amount of space. What it requires is exceptionally careful design.
At 3.6m square this is among the smallest rooms in which we have installed a full home cinema system. The 3m wide projector screen fills the entire visual field from the viewing position — a screen-to-seat ratio that is actually more immersive than many larger rooms achieve with larger screens and greater viewing distances. The 7.2.2 Dolby Atmos surround system uses Artcoustic speakers integrated behind the room’s acoustic fabric wall system — every wall surface is wrapped in acoustic fabric over an internal structure that simultaneously houses the speaker drivers and absorbs early reflections. The result is a room that looks like a beautifully finished interior and performs like a purpose-engineered cinema.
The fabric wall system is one of our most effective tools for small rooms specifically. In a compact space, parallel reflective surfaces create comb filtering that blurs the stereo image and reduces clarity. By treating all four walls with absorptive fabric from floor to ceiling, the room’s acoustic behaviour is controlled to a degree that a partial treatment approach cannot achieve. The room measures small; it performs large.
Project Details
- Location: Berkshire
- Room dimensions: 3.6m x 3.6m
- Screen width: 3m
- Audio: 7.2.2 Dolby Atmos, Artcoustic speakers
- Treatment: Full acoustic fabric wall system
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The below image shows the room before the fabric wall system was installed and shows the locations of the Artcoustic speakers behind the projector screen and around the seating area.
