Ideal Theater size?

[superchad]

Just for fun I want to know what folks think are good size for average HT set-up, I see many theaters from very small to pretty large and I understand you have to work with space you have but am all the same curious to know what others think is ideal or even average HT size.
As a side note I have had 2 dedicated rooms and a few living room compromises, my first room was
12X16 and current room is 14X24. In a perfect world I would think a room around 18X30 would be somewhere around my dream size, able to allow seating, easy movement, proper speaker and sub placement and built in equipment rack space.......thanks for playing along!

[mike c]

i think it's more of the proportion of the room dimensions than the total room size...

here are the golden ratios you should follow when designing a room from scratch:
1 : 1.14 : 1.39
1 : 1.28 : 1.54
1 : 1.6 : 2.33
H : W : D

[superchad]

My question had nothing to do with dimension but I understand its importance, my question was more of ideal or desired size for family, entertaining and general size.

[tonyvdb]

Including me we have 7 people in our house. When we watch a movie and have friends over we fit nicely 12 people in our theater space that is 15'x30'
I run a 7.1 system with fairly beefy system I have no trouble maintaining at least 105db (I've sent pink noise to all 7 .1 channels at 105db without a problem).
The larger the properly treated room, the harder the system will have to work to fill it.

[mike c]

sorry, I'd make it as small as necessary. enough to fit your seats, equipment, a little space for moving around, that's it.

the bigger your room, the more amp power you need, and the more subwoofer power you need.

[superchad]

Both are very valid post's and thats the conversation I wanted to have, hopefully others will chime in.

[eugovector]

It's all about working in the space that you have. Even if you're in the position to build, you have size constraints. In my opinion, bigger is always better (taking into account the ratios).

[lcaillo]

The bigger the room the better you can produce deep base, the better you can avoid acoustical problems, and the more likely you are to avoid installation issues with displays. Go as big as you can, like eugo says, with some attention to the dimensions. Need more power, bigger displays, etc? Of course. Is that a bad thing? This is supposed to be FUN!

[maikeldepotter]

lcaillo wrote:

The bigger the room the better you can produce deep base, the better you can avoid acoustical problems, and the more likely you are to avoid installation issues with displays. Go as big as you can, like eugo says, with some attention to the dimensions. Need more power, bigger displays, etc? Of course. Is that a bad thing? This is supposed to be FUN!

Agree.

The best room for avoiding acoustical problems is probably no room at all.... Especially the bass frequencys need a lot of "air" to breath. But also higher frequencys will benefit. I am sure some readers will have experimented with ouside viewing and listening and may confirm on this.

Back to the ideal room size I would suggest:

1. Take the biggest room in the house you can find that comes close to the ideal proportions, then,
2. Determine how big you want your cinema to be (screen size and number of seats),
3. Hang the screen in the middle of the room and position speakers and seats around it.

Just some thoughts...

Maikel.

[DougMac]

Using the ratio of 1 : 1.6 : 2.33, my 9 x15.5x18.5 HT comes pretty close to the ideal 9x14.4x20.97. I think ideal for me would be 12x20x28. It would be nice to seat 12 comfortably at close to the sweet spot. That size room would probably take an order of magnitude higher hardware; bigger projector, larger screen, several subs, big speakers, big amps.

We will rarely have more than six in the HT, with usually just us two with maybe two friends. The nice thing about the size we ended up with is that calculations work out pretty well. I've read ideal seating it 2/3 back in the room, which will be 12'. A good sized screen for that viewing distance is 8' wide, which is easy to construct using commonly available materials. I did some rough viewing tests in the empty space. I was origanally aiming for a 120" diagonal screen, but with my projector and my vision (20/15 corrected), I could see pixels. I zoomed in to the largest image where pixellation didn't bother me and measured. The width worked out to be: 8'!

The room volume is small enough to be filled with good sound with reasonable sized speakers and amps. I wish I could claim some deliberateness in choosing this size, but it was just the size of the unfinished area in the basement that was most logical for a HT.

Perhaps my needs or modest, or more likely I'm cheap. As much as I think we'll enjoy the HT, I can't justify in my mind spending tens of thousands of dollars on a HT. Given all that, looks like our HT will be an ideal size for us.

Doug