Home Cinema Installer Cheshire — Design, Installation & Calibration

Home Cinema Design and Installation for Cheshire Properties

Custom Controls are specialist home cinema designers and installers serving Cheshire and the North West, with more than 25 years of cinema room design, installation and acoustic engineering behind us. Our Cheshire portfolio runs from double garage conversions in Hale to a glass-walled garden cinema near Knutsford and a multi-zone entertainment complex in Prestbury. We are 5 x Crestron Integration Award winners, unique in EMEA as the only company to have won the award five times, and five consecutive times. We are also a Crestron Dealer of Distinction. Our Cheshire office is in Didsbury, Manchester.

Cheshire is ideal cinema country. The county’s large detached properties, generous garden footprints and separate outbuildings offer acoustic isolation that urban properties rarely provide. A double garage or a garden building, properly converted, can deliver a cinema that outperforms many purpose-built internal rooms, because the structure keeps the sound away from the rest of the house.

Types of Home Cinema We Install in Cheshire

Garage cinema conversions. The double garage is one of Cheshire’s most successful cinema room formats. The garage door is retained externally, preserving the street scene, and an insulated acoustic wall built inside it houses the front speakers and treatment. The existing concrete floor provides acoustic mass, and a detached or semi-detached garage keeps sound transmission to neighbouring rooms to a minimum. Our luxury Cheshire garage cinema and our Hale garage conversion are both reference projects for this approach.

Garden cinema rooms. For Cheshire properties with space for a garden structure, a garden cinema room is the acoustic ideal: no shared walls, no sound path to the house and the freedom to play at reference volume at any hour. Our garden cinema near Knutsford, with two glass walls managed by motorised acoustic curtains, is our definitive Cheshire garden cinema reference.

Dedicated internal cinema rooms. Where garage or garden space is not available or not wanted, a dedicated internal cinema room in a spare reception room, study or basement delivers a full cinema experience without the construction of an outbuilding. Our Knutsford cinema, a 6m x 8m room running into a bay window, shows how an internal room can combine formal cinema seating with everyday use. We model every internal room acoustically before specifying equipment.

Media rooms and entertainment spaces. Where a room has to work for sport, parties and films, we design open-plan spaces in which the cinema, a games area and a bar each have their own AV and lighting. Our Prestbury entertainment complex is the reference for this format.

The Technology — What We Specify for Cheshire Cinemas

4K laser projection from Sony and JVC. Sony projection features across our Cheshire cinemas, from the Sony VPL-VW760ES native 4K laser projector in the Knutsford garden cinema to the Sony 4K laser projectors in the colour-matched Knutsford room and the luxury garage cinema. Read our projector guide →

Acoustically transparent screens, with the front speakers directly behind the screen so sound and picture are aligned. The colour-matched Knutsford room uses a 180-inch Screen Excellence screen, and the Hale, Prestbury and Knutsford garden cinemas each use 3.8m screens. Read our screen guide →

Artcoustic speaker systems, our primary Cheshire cinema speaker specification: modular, scalable and available in any finish, including colour-matched to the paint, as in the colour-matched Knutsford room. We also specify Krix, as on our modern Cheshire cinema room. Read more about Artcoustic →

Trinnov and Anthem processing. Trinnov for our most demanding installations, as in Prestbury, and Anthem with Anthem Room Correction, as in the Knutsford garden cinema. Room correction calibration is part of every installation.

Kaleidescape movie servers, delivering lossless Dolby Atmos and full 4K HDR. Read our Kaleidescape guide →

Crestron and Lutron integration. Our Cheshire cinemas are typically integrated with Crestron control and Lutron lighting, so one button press dims the lights, starts the projector, selects the source and lowers the screen.

Home Cinema Calibration Cheshire

We calibrate every Cheshire cinema installation and offer professional home cinema calibration as a standalone service for cinema rooms installed by other companies across the North West. Our calibration service uses Dirac Live, Trinnov Optimizer and ISF-standard video calibration tools.

Audio calibration sets speaker levels, distances, crossover points and equalisation from measurements taken across the seating area, so every seat hears a balanced soundfield rather than one ideal position. Video calibration uses professional measurement to set the projector or display to the reference standard, so colour, brightness and contrast are what the film-maker intended. Rooms we calibrate are re-checked at service visits, because projector brightness and room furnishings change over time.

Home Cinema Service, Renovation & Maintenance Cheshire

We provide ongoing service and maintenance for Cheshire cinema rooms we have installed and for rooms installed by other companies. Our maintenance covers an annual system health check and calibration review, projector laser health monitoring, Kaleidescape server management, Crestron and Lutron programming updates, fault diagnosis and repair, with priority response on annual maintenance contracts. For rooms that were poorly installed originally, or that have fallen behind current audio and video formats, we also offer full takeover, renovation and recalibration. Read more about our system takeover, repair and renovation service →

Cheshire Areas We Serve

Alderley Edge · Wilmslow · Prestbury · Knutsford · Hale · Hale Barns · Bowdon · Altrincham · Bramhall · Poynton · Macclesfield · Nantwich · Chester · Tarporley · Northwich · Frodsham · Congleton and all Cheshire postcodes. We also work regularly across Greater Manchester, Lancashire, Yorkshire and the wider North of England.

Cheshire cinema projects are designed and installed by our team based at the Didsbury office, who also handle calibration and servicing after handover. We work closely with local architects, builders and garage conversion specialists, providing the cabling schematics and construction drawings they need to build the room shell correctly, as we did for the build team on the colour-matched Knutsford room. The same engineers stay with the project from the first survey to the last calibration visit.

Home Cinema Projects in Cheshire

Our Cheshire cinemas range from compact garage conversions to rooms at the heart of large entertainment complexes. Each of the projects below has its own write-up describing the design and the equipment, and the case study that follows covers our award-winning glass-walled garden cinema near Knutsford.

Colour-Matched Cinema Room, Knutsford

A 6m x 8m cinema room running into a bay window with doors out to the garden, designed for a warm and intimate feel. Six electrically reclining leather cinema seats, with independent headrest and footrest control, face a 180-inch (roughly 4.5m) Screen Excellence screen lit by a Sony 4K laser projector. Artcoustic speakers are used throughout: three front channels and two subwoofers behind the screen, surrounds on the side and rear walls and a pair of ceiling speakers for Dolby Atmos, with every wall-mounted speaker colour-matched to the Little Greene paint on the walls. The house was undergoing full renovation and extension, so we produced cabling schematics and construction drawings for the build team, then installed and calibrated the system after decoration. We also designed the whole-home entertainment system and mood lighting control for the wider property.

Luxury Garage Cinema, Cheshire

An unused 18ft x 20ft (roughly 5.5m x 6m) double garage converted into a cinema room seating six on Home Cinema Modules Sirius seating, two individual seats flanking two double sofas, with room for two more viewers on bean bags. The garage doors were kept so the outside of the house is unchanged: a 400mm-deep false screen wall inside them houses the Artcoustic front speakers and insulates and soundproofs the doors, and even at reference volume there is no noticeable sound leakage. A Sony 4K laser projector drives an Artcoustic 7.2.4 system, the suede fabric ceiling is lit by dimmable LED strip in built-out coving, and every light in the room is dimmed through Lutron lighting control. Keeping the garage door externally meant no planning permission and no structural alteration to the main house.

Garage Conversion Cinema, Hale

A double garage in Hale converted into a cinema room with no external evidence of the conversion. The up-and-over door stays in place to preserve the street scene, with an insulated acoustic stud wall behind it that houses the front speakers, the two subwoofers and a substantial quantity of acoustic absorption, all wrapped in fabric with the 3.8m screen mounted over it. A Sony laser projector and an Artcoustic 7.2.2 Dolby Atmos system serve a bespoke velvet wrap-around sofa, and the thick pile carpet was chosen for its acoustic contribution. Crestron control lets a single button press lower the screen, warm up the projector, select the right receiver input and recall the Lutron cinema lighting scene, and the Crestron app can switch the projector off remotely. Lutron lighting control runs the LED strip along the edges of the walls and ceiling and the recessed spotlights above the seating, with bright, cinema and cleaning scenes and slow, cinematic fades between them.

Entertainment Complex, Prestbury

An open-plan entertainment space in one of Cheshire’s finest halls, built beneath the gym of a new swimming pool and gym complex in the grounds. The room divides into a cinema, a pool table area, a lounge for nine and a kitchen, each with its own AV and lighting, all run by a single Crestron control system with Lutron lighting scenes. The cinema end has a 3.8m acoustically transparent screen, a ceiling-mounted Sony projector and Artcoustic speakers in a 5.2.2 format powered by a Trinnov receiver and amplifier package, with four bespoke Cineak Intimo seats and four bar stools behind. A 65-inch Samsung at the pool table shares the Sky, Apple TV and Amazon Fire sources with the main screen or runs independently, and the lounge has its own speakers for background music or the full cinema soundtrack.

Modern Cinema Room, Cheshire

A 6m x 7m cinema room within a new home entertainment complex that also includes garaging, a pool, a gym and extensive terraced seating. Beyond the cinema we provided audio video across the complex, with four displays and three additional stereo audio zones sharing the cinema sources over a Crestron distribution backbone, so a film paused in the cinema can be continued on a poolside display. The room was modelled in software before construction to optimise the Krix and Trinnov audio system, and the treatments and speakers are covered in fabric matched to the Little Greene Dark Lead walls. The lighting dims automatically when a film starts, the curtain spotlights and each row are independently controllable, the motorised Cineak Fortuny seats return to their home position when the room is switched off, and the rear row sits on a 300mm step for clear sightlines.

Frequently Asked Questions — Home Cinema Cheshire

Can you convert a garage into a cinema room in Cheshire?
Yes, and it is one of our most common Cheshire project types. Our luxury Cheshire garage cinema turned an 18ft x 20ft double garage into a room seating six with an Artcoustic 7.2.4 system, and our Hale conversion fits a 3.8m screen and an Artcoustic 7.2.2 Dolby Atmos system.

Does a garage cinema conversion need planning permission?
On our Cheshire garage conversions the garage door is retained externally, with an insulated acoustic wall built inside it. On the luxury Cheshire garage cinema this meant no planning permission and no structural alteration to the main house were required.

Can you build a garden cinema room in Cheshire?
Yes. Our garden cinema studio near Knutsford keeps glass walls on two sides, managed by motorised Tempo Wave acoustic curtains, and won Artcoustic’s Install of the Month award.

Do you offer home cinema calibration as a standalone service in Cheshire?
Yes. We calibrate every cinema we install and offer professional calibration for Cheshire cinema rooms installed by other companies, using Dirac Live, Trinnov Optimizer and ISF-standard video calibration tools.

Do you service, renovate and take over home cinemas installed by other companies in Cheshire?
Yes. We provide service, maintenance, takeover and renovation for Cheshire cinema rooms regardless of who installed them, including recalibration and updates to current audio and video formats.

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