Home Theatre Installers
Expert Home Theatre Room Design & Installation
Home Theatre Installation, Engineered for Reference Sound
A home theatre takes the principles of a dedicated home cinema installation and extends them — larger scale, more ambitious engineering, higher specification. Where a home cinema might seat four to eight in a single row, a home theatre accommodates ten, twelve, sixteen or more across multiple tiered rows, with a screen that fills the visual field from every seat and an audio system powerful enough to fill the room at reference level without distortion or compression.
Design
Calibration
Treatments
Seating
Theatres
Custom Controls have designed and installed home theatres at the highest level — including a private IMAX Enhanced theatre in Dubai with an 11-metre room, a 6.4-metre screen, eighteen seats and a 13.2.14 Dolby Atmos speaker system running to a specification that rivals professional cinema facilities. It is, by any measure, one of the finest private screening rooms in the world.
What Defines a Home Theatre
Scale. A home theatre is defined by its ambition. The room is large enough that the screen fills peripheral vision from the back row, that the audio system fills the space at reference level without effort, and that the experience is genuinely comparable to attending a professional screening facility. This is not achievable in every property, but where the space exists, the result is extraordinary.
Tiered seating. Multiple seating rows require careful sightline design — each row elevated sufficiently above the one in front that every seat has an unobstructed view of the full screen. We calculate sightlines for every seat in every row, specifying both the structural build and the seating height to deliver consistent viewing angles from every position.
Acoustic engineering. A larger room presents greater acoustic challenges — longer reverberation times, more complex modal behaviour, the need for more total absorption and diffusion while avoiding the over-damped quality of a room with too much treatment. Our acoustic design for home theatres uses the same modelling software and the same construction documentation standards as our cinema rooms, but the engineering is more demanding.
IMAX Enhanced. For clients seeking the definitive residential theatre specification, IMAX Enhanced certification defines requirements for screen size relative to room dimensions, projector brightness, and a minimum 13.2.14 Atmos audio configuration. We have delivered IMAX Enhanced installations and have the technical relationships with the relevant manufacturers to specify and commission to this standard. Read our IMAX Enhanced Dubai case study →
The Technology
The technology in a home theatre is the same as in a dedicated cinema room, but at a larger scale and typically a higher specification. 4K or 8K laser projection from Sony, JVC or certified IMAX projectors. Acoustically transparent screens at three metres width or more, allowing the front speaker array to be positioned directly behind the image for accurate localisation. Dolby Atmos speaker systems at 7.2.4 or larger — up to the 13.2.14 configuration of an IMAX Enhanced installation. Trinnov Altitude processing for the most technically demanding rooms. Kaleidescape for source material at the quality the system deserves. Crestron for control and automation. Lutron for scene-based lighting.
Sound Isolation at Theatre Scale
A room operating at reference level (around 85dB SPL with peaks to 105dB) produces significant bass energy that travels through the structure of the house, and a theatre with more subwoofers and a larger volume only increases it. Where the theatre sits beside bedrooms, living spaces or external walls, we specify decoupled floor, wall and ceiling constructions with appropriate mass and damping, up to a fully floating room-within-a-room build for the most demanding projects. Isolation works in the other direction too: a quiet room is what lets the full dynamic range of a film register, so the soft passages carry as much weight as the loud ones. Our 18-seat IMAX Enhanced theatre in Dubai is so well insulated you could hear a pin drop during the quiet moments of a film.
Design, Drawings and Approval
Delivering a room at this level is 90% planning and design, so every element of the system is designed before we set foot on site. Room shape and dimensions come first, using the ITU-R BS.1116 and EBU Tech 3276 room ratio guidelines as a starting point, followed by the speaker layout, the acoustic treatment and the screen size, and only then the equipment specification. We produce photorealistic 3D renders of the finished theatre (seating arrangement, screen, wall treatments, ceiling design and aisle lighting) and iterate them with the client, and with the architect or interior designer where there is one, until the brief is met. A full set of construction drawings follows, covering stud wall specifications, cavity depths for concealed speakers, electrical and data requirements, conduit routes and joinery details, and it goes to the contractor as a working document rather than a rough guide. Read more about our cinema design process →
Fabric Walls and Concealment
A room of this level needs stretched fabric walls. The fabric hides every speaker and cable run, and it lets us place acoustic treatment exactly where the acoustic design requires rather than where it can be disguised. In a 13.2.14 layout, with front height, ceiling and “voice of god” channels as well as surrounds at every row, that concealment is what keeps the room reading as an interior rather than an equipment space. Clients choose from some of the world’s finest fabrics, so the finish can follow the rest of the house.
Calibration and Handover
Acoustic design determines the room’s potential and calibration realises it. Every theatre we install is fully calibrated before handover, audio and video: Dolby Atmos audio calibration using Trinnov Altitude, Dirac Live or Anthem ARC depending on the processor, and ISF-standard video calibration using professional spectrophotometer measurement. Speaker levels, distances, crossover points and equalisation are measured and set in the finished room, so every row hears a balanced, coherent soundfield rather than one ideal seat and a row of compromised ones. In a multi-row theatre this is what gives the back row the same experience as the front, as it does across all 18 seats of our Dubai IMAX Enhanced room.
Our Home Theatre Portfolio
Beyond Ghana, our theatre-scale portfolio includes an 18-seat IMAX Enhanced theatre in Dubai, built around an 11-metre room, a 6.4-metre screen and a 13.2.14 Atmos system, and a further Dubai cinema running a 17-channel Artcoustic system behind a 3.5m screen. View the full portfolio →
Across our portfolio we have designed cinema rooms in London, Cheshire, Dubai, Nigeria, Portugal, France and the Alps, from intimate four-seat basement rooms to full multi-row theatres. The second Dubai room sits within a two-villa estate whose Crestron installation won the Crestron Integration Award for Best International Project in EMEA, and the cinema itself was named Artcoustic’s Install of the Month. Both Dubai rooms were planned from the acoustic shell outward and calibrated in the finished space, so the performance designed on paper is the performance delivered in the room.