Perth-WRX.com - theatre room roof projector wiring ideas ?

Hello,
Here is my info for what its worth!
1. mounting the projector on the ceiling will be a disaster with a suspended slab :) Take a look at the brackets next time in hardly normal I havent seen a good one yet. With a gyprock ceiling you can mount on the joists and come through the ceiling, and make it look as neat as possible but with a suspended slab you would have to fix direct and the mount would need some sort of cover not to look ugly. Alternatively fixing it direct to the ceiling may require a lot of lens shift and messes a lot with the optics.
[URL=http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y151/viskoe/HT/roofmount.jpg][IMG]http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y151/viskoe/HT/th_roofmount.jpg[/IMG][/URL]

2. In a perfect world you would put the projector in another room and shine it through a hole in the wall like the cinemas! that solves the problems of fan noise and light leakage from the air vents of the projector. However placing it behind you on bookshelf or wall unit will probably be your best option because it solves a number of problems.

3. By placing the projector behind the viewing seats you are not distracted by the unit while watching a movie, by placing it in a wall unit/bookcase it removes the need for video and power cable being routed through the ceiling.
connections that need to be made from the AV equipment can be made easily by placing the equipment along side each other on same book case.
This means decisions about video cable (vga/dvi/hdmi/component) can be ignored during the building stage. If you install only a DVI cable you will be forced to chose a projector that has this interface. (any roof mounted projector should also have a s-video or composite connection installed for old videos, play stations etc)

4. The shape of your room limits the layout and seating arrangements, the position of the door and location of the window limits this install , the room could do with being 2 meters deeper from front to back, but we dont live in an ideal world!

5. By placing bookcases or wallunit across backwall you will have provided spaces for rear speakers (you cannot use ceiling mounted rears in this install)
You can aslo easily add a center rear and also mount this in the book case easily without having to run new conduit etc should you decide to go from 5.1 to 6.1 system.

6. Get your builder to install power points in this room, 2 double GPO's on rear wall for equipment and projector, and 2 more points 1 on either side of the screen, in the corner for the powered sub woofers, you will need two points if you go down the 2 sub woofer path!, get them on a seperate circuit if you can, might help with the glitches on digital tv if the fridge starts up etc and generates spikes and electrical noise . Also get the electrician to provide a TV point at the back of the room for your set top box near your AV equipment, dont forget if you want foxtel and a CAT 5 or 6 UTP point could be good here also oh and a phone point I think for foxtel or ICE guide system. make sure he installs them up near where you want the equipment.

7. Dont forget your lighting so you can see the controls in the dark! and maybe some dimmerable ones above the seats so you can have a little light should you need it (so you can read the paper when your stuck with the movie the wife has picked out!)

8. Get you electrician to run some decent figure eight cable for your speakers and make sure that it will all fit in the conduit, withs some spare room in the conduit.
You will need front left,right,center, sub1 sub 2 so five pairs in total from the rear of the room to the front. get 2 gpo wall boxes installed side by side in the location of the triangular cavity these should be covered with the plates that already have the speaker plugs fitted to them ( each plate should have 3 pairs of speaker plugs available from Jaycar/altronics)
you will need one at each point where the speaker cables terminate, Get the cable installed along with the conduit and then at the front of the room you would have one plate in the center with the speaker conenction for the center speaker and to the left and right of the screen you should have 1 plate with terminatrion for left front speaker and sub woofer (4 speaker plugs on one plate) and the same for the right side.
This way using some made up leads with plugs yoou can easily connect up your system neatly.

9. Seating: Idealy sit about 1.5 times the screen width. so for 80 inch screen you would place your seating about 2.65 m back, this would give a viewing angle of 36 degrees which is really the top limit for cinema. Ideally 26 to 36 degrees. To get this you could decrease the screen size :( or move seat back. But then sitting against the back wall is not ideal for quality sound. Hence the reason I think you need two more meters in the middle of the room.

10. Room . Get a decent blockout curtian for the window and try and get the door to open out in this case it might give you enough space to get a decent couch in, as the doors would not encroach into the room.
Go for some dark carpet to reduce light reflections and aslo paint the wall with the screen a dark colour to increase the picture contrast, you could also do the ceiling a dark colour but most people dont.

11. Finally, plan and plan you might find that you want to go LCD or plasma so you have to throw everything out and start again so try and make your mistakes on paper rather than concrete! think hard and I am sure you will get to the best option.

[URL=http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y151/viskoe/HT/theaterroom.jpg][IMG]http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y151/viskoe/HT/th_theaterroom.jpg[/IMG][/URL]

[URL=http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y151/viskoe/HT/theater2.jpg][IMG]http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y151/viskoe/HT/th_theater2.jpg[/IMG][/URL]

Hope it helps some
Rgds
Emil