Welcome to my Home Theater - The Escape

Nine months in the making, "The Escape" is a labor of love, sweat and tears.  If you'd like to see a pictorial description of the construction of the theater, check out the Construction Pages.  I'd like to thank Dennis Erskine for his design and guidance, My wife, Sharon for moral support (not to mention letting me spend all this money to tear a hole in the house and build this thing), my Dad for help with the fabric as well as a good set of ears to bounce construction ideas off of, and, of course, Michael for all of his "help".

The columns are typical of a DE theater.  They are both decorative and functional.  The rear columns hide the side surrounds (AT 370THX dipoles).  I treated the bottoms of mine with birch panels and stained and finished them.

The walls are a combination of poly batting and Johns-Manville TheaterShield+ covered by an acoustically transparent fabric from Guilford of Maine.

The lighting is a combination of Ardee downlights, wall sconces from Expo (a fancy Home Depot) and Seagull "ambiance" lighting which is concealed in a tray built in the soffit and reflects off of a 45 degree angled portion of the ceiling providing a warm  "glow" during movie viewing.

The whole system is controlled by a Lutron Grafik Eye 3106 and is operated from the remote control with appropriate light settings enacted when play, pause and stop are engaged on the movie.

The Projector is a Dwin HD-700 firing onto a 103.5" diagonal 1.85:1 (16x9) screen custom made by Stewart Filmscreen. 

The forward wall is a stage with a radius front and three layers of walls -- a proscenium wall which holds the left and right speakers (behind the fabric so that they are invisible), a screen wall which is just framing covered with a black, acoustically transparent fabric and contains the center channel as well as the screen, and, finally, the actual back wall of the room.  All front wall surfaces and the cavities created by the multiple walls are treated with TS+ to eliminate reflections. 

I have to hand it to Dennis here -- the acoustics in the room are amazing.  We hear music and sounds in movies that we never knew existed before as well as crystal clear dialog without having to "jump" on the remote when loud scenes come up.

The seating is a combination of chairs and a couch (as you can obviously see in the above picture).  The chairs are the Ekornes "Stressless" recliners (very comfy) and the couch is a relatively cheap Natuzzi (its main qualification being it was small enough to get in the room).

The rear of the theater has a small equipment room and a counter with a built-in refrigerator.  The equipment room allows very easy access to the rear of the equipment (hence the name) as well as concealing the wiring panel for the whole house network, phone and satellite systems.  As you can see, I'm still working on a few things and I haven't decided yet whether to put a real "movie theater" popcorn machine in there or just a microwave.

I also need some sort of system for DVD case storage.  My player holds 300 discs so they're all in there at once but I'd like to have the cases out so people can peruse the boxes in search of a suitable feature.  The stack of cases on the right there are just the ones I haven't watched yet!

And now for the "Tim Allen Tool-time" portion of our presentation (ooh, ooh, ooh)...

The equipment rack (a Middle Atlantic slim 5) is just to your right as you enter the theater.  Housed within it are the following (from top):

Furman power conditioner and light module

AudioControl Ten Series III EQ (rear surrounds)

AudioControl THX Bijou EQ (other five channels + sub)

Pioneer Elite DV-F07 301 DVD changer

Lexicon DC-2 DD DTS surround processor

Dwin Transcanner variable line multiplier

ADC SoundShaper spectrum analyzer

QSC Model 1200 Amp (bridged to 150w mono for tactile transducers)

Lexicon NT212 2 channel amp (rear surounds)

Lexicon NT 512 5 channel amp (all other channels besides LFE)

And we close with the entry which sports the poster "marquee".  Okay, I know I just spent a king's ransom on the inside of the room, but I couldn't bring myself to lay out $650+ for a "real" backlit movie marquee.

I got a frame at a local craft store for $30.

Thanks for visiting and, if you've made it all the way to the end of this site and you're ever in the Houston area, look me up and we can watch a movie.