Home Theatre Rooms | Design & Installation | London & Cheshire

Scaled-Up Cinema, Engineered for Reference Performance

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.

Home Cinema Design

Design

Home Cinema Calibration

Calibration

Acoustic Treatments

Treatments

Home Cinema Seating

Seating

Home Theater Installers

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.

34.7.15 Reference Cinema, Ghana

Case Study: A 34.7.15 Reference Cinema, Ghana

This 5.5m × 12m room in Ghana is one of the finest private cinemas we have ever delivered, and it needed Trinnov processing simply because no conventional AV receiver could handle it. A 34-channel surround system with a further 15 height channels and 7 subwoofers — 46 individual speaker outputs in total — runs from a full Trinnov Amplitude32 pre-amplifier and Magnitude32 room equaliser through seven Amplitude8 channel amplifiers. Five Artcoustic array channels sit behind a 4.5m acoustically transparent screen, split across two arrays with four dedicated subwoofers, so bass arrives from the correct spatial position at every one of the room’s 12 seats rather than from a single central point.

Trinnov’s Optimizer calibration ensures identical audio performance is delivered to every seat across all three tiered rows — Cineak Intimo day beds at the front, Cineak Vedette leather recliners behind — while a Ghanaian Unity sculpture above the equipment rack, proposed by our design team, ties the room’s aesthetic to the heritage of the home it sits within. It’s the scale of engineering a genuine home theatre demands, and proof of what’s possible when a room is designed acoustically from the very first sketch. Read the full case study →

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 →

Discuss your home theatre project with us. →