A Screening Room of One's Own
 I know audiophiles who are quite
contemptuous of anything remotely to do with video, and I even sympathize with them a bit.
Listening to music is an incredibly important part of my life and I wouldn't choose to
compromise my music-listening experience just for the sake of television, for
pete's sake.
On the other hand, I also value the experience of immersing
myself in a great movie. And let's face it, between the dumbing down of the average film
and the seemingly relentless drive to subdivide any good-sized movie theater into three or
four tiny ones -- not to mention the complete abandonment of the social contract by modern
audiences -- the only place you can peacefully experience great cinema with superb
sound and good sightlines these days is at home.
So forget all that less-sullied-than-thou audio piety.
Ain't nothing wrong with wanting to experience great cinema at home -- the only trick is
to pull it off without compromising the home-theater experience or the serious
music-listening experience.
For a long time, I accomplished this the easy way. I had
two systems, each in its dedicated room. Then I moved to New York again and discovered
that New York apartments -- at least the ones I can afford -- don't come with HT-sized
bedrooms.
Since I was lucky enough to find an apartment with a huge,
light-filled 12.5' by 26' by 10' living room, I initially used the logic of Solomon and
split the room down the middle. At one end, I installed at 35" Toshiba monitor and a
complete 5.1 system grouped around our couch. At the other end, I installed my stereo.
Believe it or not, this actually worked very well for a
while. By carefully calibrating arrival of the HT surrounds (most processors allow you to
adjust the delay calibrated into the surrounds), I could achieve huge acoustic
soundfields in film playback. At the other end of the room, I did a lot of near-field
listening, and still benefited from the bloom of a large room.
And, as you can see over at onhifi.com, I dedicated a lot of time to tuning the room and arranging
its contents -- with very favorable sonic results for the HT system as well as my
two-channel rig.
But life began to get complicated. I changed from the
Toshiba monitor to an 8' Stewart Filmscreen FireHawk screen and a PLUS Piano HE-3100, the
first of many DLP projectors. The resultantly bigger (waaay bigger) image demanded
that we sit further back from it and that made things messy. If I had the screen at the
same end of the room as my stereo speakers, we could arrange all the furniture for viewing
and listening, but we then had three HT speakers plus a stereo pair all arrayed
across the same 12.5' room width. Something had to go.
In a stroke of genius, we decided it was the couch, which
was too big to move easily. If we had only chairs, we reasoned, we could still dedicate
each end of the room to its own art. We'd just have to regroup the chairs to accommodate
whichever system was in use. This fluid-use plan proved easy to deal with (well, easy
enough) and works like a charm.
It would be even easier if I suspended the projector from
the ceiling, but since I have to review different projectors, I need to keep my placement
options open. I do mount the surrounds and rear-channel speakers high above ear level,
which not only provides diffuse, unlocalizable surround sound, but also keeps the
interference with my stereo rig at a minimum.
Are there any tips you can take away from my HT experience?
I'm not sure.
I started with a room that was solidly built and well
proportioned. I covered the best part of three walls with record and bookshelves, which
make for an awfully good-sounding space, and then judiciously added bass control in the
form of 16"-diameter Tube Traps in three corners of the room and stuffed into a small
cubbyhole off to one side. I employed an additional seven 9" and two 11" Studio
Traps to diffuse the sound of the front and rear boundaries (Tube Traps and Studio Traps
have an absorptive arc and a tuned, reflective arc, which scatters high frequencies. You
simply rotate the columns until you achieve the amount of absorption and reflection you
require -- a process that sounds profoundly simpler and faster than it is.)
So I started with a good-sounding room and then used
everything I had at hand to improve it. But once I got the overall sound I was looking
for, I had to spend a lot of time integrating each different HT subwoofer to blend with
the rest of the system's speakers. There are some general rules that help, but ultimately
it comes down to moving heavy subwoofers around a few inches at a time. And, since
fine-tuning is a job that never seems completed, thank goodness for subs with easily
accessible controls -- like the front-mounted gain dial on my current faves, the Polk
PSW650s.
My need to optimize the performance of both my stereo and
HT systems caused me to come up with a solution that might be too much trouble for anyone
not doing this for a living. And it sure wouldn't work in a family where dad and mom and
the kids all want to utilize the living room for different things at the same time.
But most problems involving audio/video electronics these
days can be solved with a little forethought and a willingness to experiment. You don't have
to choose between high-resolution audio and a profound theatrical experience. You can
have both if you're willing to put a little work into it.
And if there's anything better than being able to watch a
theater-quality presentation of a wonderful film like Victor/Victoria on a Saturday
night, followed by a Sunday morning gospel hour that all but teleports the Dixie
Hummingbirds into my living room, I think it would be best to keep it between two
consenting adults and not even speculate about it here.
...Wes Phillips
wes@onhometheater.com
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