• Acoustic Panels
• Bass Traps
• Acoustic Foam Panels
• DIY Acoustic Panels
• Church Acoustics
• Studio Acoustics
• Home Theater Acoustics
• Restaurant Acoustics
• Acoustic Insulation
• Room Acoustic Treatments

One of the hot trends in home remodeling is building a home theater room. The home theater is at once a focal point for family interaction with such activities as family movie night, and a personal retreat as individual members of the household use the big screen television and surround sound audio system for the big football game or to watch popular prime time shows like Dancing with the Stars or American Idol. The home theater room also serves as a convenient location for a get together with friends or relatives. Many of these home theater rooms are built in finished basements, beneath the home’s main living area. While the basement has advantages for a home theater room, it may have some disadvantages that need to be overcome as well.

Many large screen televisions, especially front projection and rear projection systems, have a significant weakness. They lack brightness when compared to conventional Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) televisions or Plasma televisions. In terms of the size of the screen, however, there is no comparison for a front projection television system. Using a basement room as a home theater room can help overcome the brightness issue for a projection television. The lack of windows helps keep the ambient light in the room low. It is the ambient light that washes out the image of televisions with lower brightness levels, much like an outdoor drive-in, if it gets dark enough, the image appears clear, sharp, and bright.

The underground location and thick cement walls are both bane and boon to the audio system in a home theater system. They certainly help prevent high sound levels from leaking out and disturbing the neighbors, on the one hand, but the solid reverberant nature of the cement walls and flooring, combined with the large rectangular shape of the basement itself can lead to acoustic difficulties if room acoustic treatments are not used. The highly reverberant surfaces can highlight treble frequencies, making the audio seem overly bright and cause listening fatigue after a short time. The same walls and the shape of the room may both concentrate bass frequencies in some areas and cause them to be cancelled out in other areas of the home theater room. To correct for these conditions bass traps and other acoustic room treatments will need to be added to most basement home theater rooms.

One of the goals of home theater systems is to reproduce the deep bass tones of the special effects used in many of today’s most popular movies. Unfortunately these deep tones can often penetrate the ceiling and provide a nuisance to those upstairs in the rest of the house. To prevent this, acoustic insulation can be installed between the basement ceiling and the floor above to dampen the unwanted acoustic vibrations.

As long as care is taken to correct the inherent acoustic issues with the room when installing the home theater, a converted basement can be the perfect home theater room.