You just finished setting up your new home theater. While you built it exactly the way you wanted, hindsight is always 20-20; the home theater you created is amazing, but after using it for a while, you start to feel it could use some improvement. Maybe you’re thinking of adding some gadgets and accessories to your new home theater reclining chairs, or maybe you’re starting to take note of the acoustics in the room and want to play around with those. This article is here to give you some tips to help make your home theater that much better. From seating to sound, these 3 tips will make sure that your theater reaches its full potential and will blow your audience away.
Go Luxury & High-Tech with Your Home Theater’s Seating
One thing that will improve your home theater a lot is the right seating. While it sounds cheesy to say, it’s true. The seating you choose for your movie room is key to an enjoyable movie-watching experience, so you’ll want to choose seating that will make you feel the most comfortable. If you are not comfortable during the movie, even a great movie won’t be fun to sit through—you’ll be too busy constantly being reminded of your back and neck’s existence to enjoy the movie thoroughly. The solution? Make sure you get multimedia furniture pieces that are designed to provide max comfort for long periods of time.
Let’s start with the material. Whether or not you choose an entertainment room couch with microfiber cushions or a home theater chair with leather upholstery is ultimately up to you, after all, the preferred softness and firmness of something is a personal choice. Keep in mind that while fabric upholstery is supremely soft out of the box, some seating can get a little lumpy over time. On the other hand, seating made from leather is a little stiff out of the box, but it eventually softens and contours to the person sitting in it over time.
And you aren’t limited to rows of stadium-style, elevated rows of seating you see in traditional movie theaters either. Although, we will always love that classic look, a lot of modern home cinemas might only have a media room recliner that seat 2 or individual entertainment room chairs that seat 3. There just isn’t a strong demand for rows upon rows of seating in the typical home theater room. However, depending on the situation, sometimes your entertainment room needs to have more than one use, though. If you choose to do home theater sectionals, sofas, chaise lounges, or other alternatives to a single recliner, you can have all the luxurious comfort of home theater seating but with the looks, feel and use of living room furniture. You could have a row of media room chairs that curve slightly with a theater loveseat sitting next to them, and it would still feel like a setup reminiscent of a living area.
Don’t get us wrong – most couches are comfy, but not for extended periods of time. And they’re often not designed with the ergonomics of sitting in mind. Without a dedicated set of controls to recline the seat in different positions, a regular old couch or a low-tech recliner just isn’t going to do the trick for every single person. If you try to watch a long film like Lawrence of Arabia in one sitting on a regular couch, you will need to get up and move. But if you buy a home theater couch like the Tuscany from Valencia, you will be comfortable the whole time because these chairs are meant to be sat in for a long time, so they’re built with supporting the back and relieving pressure points in mind. Not only is our home cinema seating made with luxury materials, but we take into consideration how our chairs can provide the best lumbar support possible for our customers and make the movie-viewing experience wholly enjoyable.
So, how are our home theater chairs designed to provide you with max comfort throughout the whole film? They are made of comfortable materials like Nappa leather, which is soft and supple on the skin. You can also choose to have the leather along the back and cushion perforated for breathability. Most theater seats also have adjustable lumbar support, a powered headrest, and motorized recliner so you can adjust yourself and be in the optimal position. Since it’s all motorized, you can adjust it mid-movie without needing to get up and move, ensuring you stay glued to the movie screen. Now that you know what your experience could be like, and you’ve gotten ideas on what theater room seating to buy, what are you waiting for?
Control the Lighting in Your Home Movie Room
Another big thing that can make your home theater that much better is controlling your lighting. You can do this by installing dimmers, or by using Bluetooth-controlled systems. We like Bluetooth because it means never having to leave your super-comfy movie chair to change the light settings in the room. Everyone knows a big part of the movies is the lighting, and sometimes the complete lack of it. Maybe you don’t want to view that movie in total darkness, but you’re going to want to be able to dim the lights at the very least to both create the ambiance and also to make sure as little of the image on the screen is distorted by external sources of light as possible.
Being able to control how much light is in your home theater will improve you experience tenfold. The easiest way to do this is to ensure your home theater is in a room that isn’t bombarded by natural light. While there are steps you can take to eradicate all natural light from your theater room that we’ll talk about below, if you have no windows (which is a great thing about basement home theaters), you can control all the light in your home theater using switches or remotes without having to get up from that reclining, leather-upholstered cinema room chair that you just sunk into. Talk about convenient! Making it so that your lights dim and will give your home theater that authentic movie-theater feel. You can even train the kids to know it’s time to stop being rowdy when the lights dim and the movie starts.
But what if your home theater is exposed to natural light? Then the solution is to cover up the source of the natural light. You can use furnishings for a home theater like thick blinds or blackout curtains to make sure that no light gets through. If you can afford it, getting smart blinds could make your home theater that much more luxurious—and again, you wouldn’t have to even leave your seat to control them. The main takeaway is that being able to control your lighting will make your theater that much more immersive, because it allows the high-def projector and high-clarity screen to be fully-appreciated without light intrusion.
Add Sound-Absorbing Materials in Your Home Theater for Crystal-Clear Sound
Reverberation (or reverb) is a persistence of sound after the sound is produced; simply put, it’s sound bouncing off of other surfaces, and boy can it go unchecked in home theaters. Since the ear typically hears the latest sound signal that it receives and if your home theater has a lot of reverb, you will hear the reverberated noise. Your speakers could be creating amazing sound but if there’s reverb, your speaker quality will seem lack luster. If you’re sitting around the old entertainment room sectional, and you notice that the sound on the movie you’re playing sounds off, there’s likely a cause, and there’s a good chance it could have to do with the acoustics in your home theater.
No need to worry, there are ways to prevent this from happening. All you need to do is make these hard surfaces soft. How? One affordable solution is to put drapes up on your walls, which is a fun nod to classic movie theaters. In fact, if you’ve chosen velour for your media room’s seating, heavy velvet or velour curtains are the perfect complement to create an almost opulent, old-high-society look in your home theater. Theater room seating with fabric cushions—whether it’s velour, microfiber, or another impossibly-soft material—can help absorb some of those soundwaves that are bouncing around. If you’re committed to leather seating, try bringing out some blankets and throws to use. Even plush area rugs can be impactful décor for a home theater when you’re trying to tinker with the acoustics.
Another soundproofing option is to put up sound-absorbing acoustic panels on key parts of your walls and ceiling. This will ensure that the sound in your home theater is always top quality. The acoustic panels work the same as utilizing fabrics and absorb some of that excess sound, creating crisper audio and a more enjoyable experience. Not to mention that, with designer styles of these sound bafflers, you can leave them exposed to complement a Euro-mod style of theater seating.
Bonus Tip: Accessorize Your Home Theater & its Seating
Maybe one or two of the things you noticed about your home theater’s shortcomings are little inconveniences. Where is the tablet that serves as the command center for the movie room supposed to sit? Tired of eating straight from your lap? Or maybe you’re tired of holding your wine glass through an entire movie because there is no such thing as an armrest cup holder for a stemmed glass. It really is the little things that when fixed, lead to a cohesive and uninterrupted viewing. Thankfully, in today’s day and age, there are an immense amount of add-ons for entertainment room seating out there to make your time spent in the home theater as convenient as you want it to be.
Consider home theater accessories like tablet holders, wine caddies and tray tables. Or additional pieces of furniture to put in a home theater like a wine fridge and an old-timey popcorn popper. And consider additional features to your movie room furniture, like bass shaker seats and ambient LED lighting. While small tweaks, they can really add up and increase your enjoyment of the space. Much of the time, the devil really is in the details.
Even adding functionality to your theater seating down the line is possible with accessories. Take bass shakers, for example: the transducers are attached to the back of your seating and are ultimately hooked up to the amp. Whenever you’re watching a movie that goes heavy on the bass, the shakers do just that, and emit a strong rumble, creating more immersion in the movie. Theater seating equipped with bass shakers might not have initially been on the list for your home theater, but trust us when we say they take the experience of having a theater to a whole new level.
A couple small additions and adjustments around the room can make a big difference in the quality of your home theater; you’ll be comfier and more immersed in your movies, and you’ll be able to make the most of all that fancy audiovisual tech you installed.