Preplanning may seem like an obvious notion, but the excitement of building a home theater brings with it the impatience to enjoy the fruits of your labors. You can save time, aggravation, and costly mistakes by taking a little time to plan how your equipment will work/grow in your room, weighing room design decisions, and evaluating equipment for your home theater.

Speakers
Speakers are perhaps the most frustrating item for people to place and setup. Knowing the best locations for your speakers before you buy can greatly aid speaker purchases and room design decisions.

5.1
The ideal for a 5.1 surround system is three main front speakers (Left, Center, Right) symmetrically located with the center located dead center and the left and right speakers flanking the TV with a few feet of space around the speakers. Surround speaker sound best located like the front left and right but in the back of the room.  If you’re using dipole surrounds their location is best suited 6-7 feet up to the left and right of your seated position. The subwoofer can be placed in any location where it sounds best from the seated positions.

7.1
This has same main setup for the front three speakers and subwoofer, but with two extra surround speakers. The ideal position for the surrounds is to the side 6-7 feet up with dipoles, with two more speakers in the rear

For the front speakers a symmetrical design is needed, but you also need enough room is around the left and right speakers for them to create an enveloping sound field.

Surround speakers are the most difficult to find a location for and run wire to. Surround speakers often get placed as an after thought to wherever it’s convenient to run speaker cable. This reckless abandon can cost you in the type of speakers you can get, which way they can be positioned, and the sound field the speakers can produce.

If you don’t leave enough room you could be forced to buy speakers that are too small to handle your room’s size, or you’ll need to buy more expensive small speakers that are capable of handling loud volumes.

The best thing to do is figure out a couple of different options for speakers with careful consideration of where you can place them in your room and what you’re audio tastes are. After listing your options/concerns, go speakers shopping to figure out what the price ranges are for the different solutions you’ve listed, and find speakers that meet the needs of your room’s size, and your personal audio tastes.

Spending time planning your speaker placement, size and kind can prevent you from making mistakes, needing to re-run speaker wire, move furniture into undesirable locations, or worse... live with a sound system that doesn’t work well for you due to placement issues or forced speakers purchases.

Now the above solution listed the ideal locations, which may not work for every type of room. The key is to try a few different location with speaker wire just running in out in the open so you can find a location that works best for your room and sound preferences.

(See speaker setup for more information)

TVs
Where you place your TV can impact seating, speaker placement, and cable runs.  TVs usually aren’t difficult for people to place, as most people usually know where they want the TV to be when they first glance at a room.

If you think symmetrically, as in a TV belongs in the center of a wall, you’re on the right track. If you want to place the TV in a corner of a room you’re in for a nightmare setup for speakers, equipment, and seating.

The ideal place for a TV is centered on a wall with seating that’s centered across from it with the vertical center of the TV screen placed at your seated eye-level. That placement allows for symmetrical setup of left and right speakers with the center channel above or below the TV. Centered TV placement also generally offers more options for home theater furniture, and make the TV screen look bigger.

Projectors
Projectors are relatively cheap nowadays costing about the same price as a good flat screen, but getting it all connected and finding a screen can run up the cost fast.

Projectors offer the truest movie experience due to the immense screen size they provide, but without preplanning you could end up with a pretty crappy setup. Projectors are usually ceiling mounted above or just behind your sitting location, or in the back of the room on a rack 5-7 feet high.

Projectors perform best when horizontally centered with the screen as well.  Some projectors offer image-altering capabilities that allow for a placement along the side of a room, but that image manipulation usually comes at the cost of sharpness, brightness and color uniformity, and should only be done if absolutely necessary.

Major costs to take into account for a projector:

• Electrical connection for ceiling mounted projectors
• Long video cable runs to the back of the room or to the ceiling
• The price of a good screen or the time and know-how to build one yourself

Hot tip: I save on long cable runs at Monoprice.com (Note: this is not an advertisement). There’s just simply no place I’ve found that offers cable length that long that are cheap and reliable. For my projector I needed a 40-foot HDMI cable along with a 40-foot Component Cable. The HDMI cost about $90 and the component cable $14!!! That’s crazy good pricing!

Seating
The ideal seating location is 2.5 times your screen width away from your TV and centered.  Single chairs and couches usually provide the most flexible seating position options, while L shaped couches tend to run up to close to the front of the room.  L couches can constrain not only the amount of viable seating locations, but also impact the performance of equipment in the front of your home theater.

Depending on the role of your room, a dedicated home theater or a living room with a home theater in it, you may need to make compromises to fit the room’s other functions.

Equipment Racks and Furniture
It’s actually easier to start with an empty room an add furniture as needed compared to trying to squeeze a home theater into a fully furnished room.  Furniture that fits or looks perfect in a certain location may need to be moved to get home theater equipment in the needed location. A room full of furniture will likely limit your equipment and setup options forcing you to comprise on your home theater’s performance.

Existing furniture can absolutely kill placement of all the equipment that makes a home theater and can really limit you for options. A great example is trying to put a 16x9 widescreen TV into furniture made with 4:3 square TVs in mind. Your screen size options may be limited and a lot of volume is wasted behind the screen.

In some cases you may need to get rid of furniture that requires you to make too many compromises out of your home theater.

Summary
With a little preplanning you can make better decisions as to how your home theater will come together and will likely save you money and time in long run. Preplanning can also not only ensure you get the most out of your home theater equipment, but it can ensure you get the right home theater for you.