Where to Place a Home Theater System in Your Westfield, IN Home

There was a time when dedicated home theaters were a standard feature in luxury homes. Enjoying a movie in a professional cinema in the comfort of your own home was incredibly popular. And while many families are still purchasing dedicated theaters and designing them with their own personal touches, media rooms are becoming increasingly popular. New technology allows you to choose between installing a home theater system in a dedicated room, like a basement or extra bedroom, or in the living room. In this blog we’ll help you choose where to put your surround sound system and screen.

If you’ve got a media system that you’ve gradually amassed over the years, you might have experienced the design conundrum where a tangled mess of wires and dust bunnies collect behind your gear or your system is constantly overheating and shorting out. If so, it’s time to nip this trend in the bud and invest in a solid rack solution to keep your gear housed properly and in tip-top shape. Here’s what to look for in a good A/V rack.

Hide it right. These days, the trend is to centralize sources for the entire house in one central location. Rather than have sources for every display, you can use one source, like a satellite receiver or Blu-ray player, and distribute it to several different locations, saving you both money and space. You’ll need an equipment closet somewhere in your home to house the rack. That means you need to beef up your wireless network to provide unfettered access to all your gear and entertainment services, which we can also help you with.

Viewing Distance, Viewing Height, and Screen Size

The first question we are frequently asked is “just what size screen should I buy?”  There a variety of reputable sources to ask this question and tons of research has been done by SMPTE (Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers) and THX (Tomlinson Holman and George Lucas’s company for movie standards).  Of course the distance you sit from your screen and its size will also translate into your viewing angle.

Augmented reality (AR) has been picking up steam as of late. What is augmented reality? Download Pokémon Go and it will become crystal clear. This app has 20 million users in the U.S. alone, littering the streets with players on the search for all manner of wild Pokémon and Pokéstops, guiding you to that Pikachu or Magikarp hiding around the next corner.

In a nutshell, augmented (supplemented) reality games and applications take computer-generated sensory input such as sound, video, graphics or GPS data and augment a live direct or indirect view of a physical, real-world environment. In the case of Pokémon, GPS is used to lead users on a Pokémon-finding adventure.

Thanks to the weird and wonderful realities of General Relativity, if we were in a theoretical interstellar rocket ship exploring the galaxy, some kooky things would start to happen as we approached the speed of light. The amount of fuel and energy required to reach 95 percent of light speed would pale in comparison to that required to accelerate from 95 to 99 percent of light speed. And that amount would be positively dwarfed by the amount of fuel and energy it would take to accelerate from 99 percent to 99.9 percent of light speed. And to reach 100 percent would, as far as we know based on the laws of physics, be impossible since it would require an infinite amount of energy and fuel.

Mind you, those physical principles aren’t at all the same as the ones that govern speaker design, but there is nonetheless a rough analogy to be made here: if you have a speaker that’s close to perfect to begin with, redesigning it with the goal of getting closer to genuine perfection requires a staggering amount of time and energy—and money.

Control4^® InfinityEdge^TM In-Wall Touch Screen 5″

Control4^® In-Wall Touch Screens are a stylish way to add total-home control that’s always there when you need it. These Ethernet/WiFi Touch Screens are ideal for areas of your home such as the kitchen or
living room, where convenient system monitoring and control are important.

Elegant design, intercom and full connectivity priced for every room of the house.

Paradigm’s Stylus 370-SM outdoor speakers are not only sleek and stylish, but they are incredibly versatile as well. Each speaker is equipped with a 6 1/2 inch mid/bass driver and two tweeters facing in opposite directions. This provides stereo imaging while only using one speaker in small outdoor applications, but the speaker can also be run mono and will allow listeners to hear more high end that would normally be lost due to the unidirectional nature of higher frequencies. Outdoor environments can be very difficult acoustically, but with careful placement, a small number of these will fill your outdoor environment with high quality sound for all to enjoy. The cabinets are weather, water, and UV resistant, making these speakers ideal for use on the patio, around the pool, in the sauna, or just about anywhere you can run a wire.

Crestron MTX-3

Isys™ 2.8″ Handheld Wireless Touchpanel featuring infiNET EX™ Technology

Provides a remarkable handheld remote featuring a brilliant 2.8″ touchscreen, ultra-reliable infiNET EX™ wireless performance, incredible battery life, and Instant-Waking™ behavior.

The MTX-3 Handheld Wireless Touchpanel from Crestron® delivers an exceptional remote control for home theater, home automation, and AV presentation, marrying style and ergonomics with rock-solid wireless performance and extensive customizability. Its sleek form factor is easy to hold, with large tactile pushbuttons, electroluminescent backlighting, and a fully customizable color touchscreen for a wireless control solution that’s both intuitive and fun to use.

Featuring 2-way wireless communications, the MTX-3 offers seamless interaction with AV and environmental systems, providing true feedback of all your settings, and displaying metadata information for all your digital media. Whether watching TV, choosing a movie or music title, adjusting room temperature and lighting, or checking the security system, the MTX-3 affords a user experience only Crestron can deliver.

Click here to view color and finish options

Sivoia® QS Wireless cellular shades offer incredible value at an affordable price, backed by the quality of the Lutron brand. Featuring patent-pending Triathlon™ power technology that provides a 3 year battery life, you will enjoy years of constant operation without worrying about battery replacement. And, because they operate via a remote, you can adjust them from anywhere in the room. Control options include, Pico® Wireless Controls, seeTouch® QS Wireless keypads, GRAFIK Eye® QS Wireless, RadioRA® 2 and HomeWorks® QS.

Download Cellular Shade Brochure (PDF, 5 MB)
Download Sivoia QS Wireless Cellular FAQ (PDF, 711 KB)

One might think that the only important factor in a projection system is the projector, and while its true that the final output can only be as good as its source, once you’re passing an HD picture through an excellent projector, the next largest factor that will determine your overall picture quality is the surface that the image is displayed on.