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Home Theatre Rooms | Design & Installation | London & Cheshire
Designers & Installers of the UK’s Best Home Theatre Systems!
A home theatre takes the principles of a dedicated cinema room 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.
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.
Design
Calibration
Treatments
Seating
Theatres
Cinema Ideas
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.