A Guide to Media Room Design and Ideas for your New Jersey Home
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Imagine a family room that doubles as an entertainment hub for the whole family. Bravo AV of New Jersey has plenty of ideas and experience when it comes to custom media room designs. You can easily get a high functioning room with the ability to adapt to your family’s lifestyle. Get the power of the latest technology, coupled with ease of use and great aesthetics.
A media room is a multi-purpose room designed to watch picture perfect movies and shows using the latest technological advances. Bravo AV’s goal is to complement your lifestyle by demystifying media rooms and delivering to you:
The Best Picture
The Greatest Sound
The Most Comfortable Environment
There are three major factors that influence a media room: video quality, audio quality and aesthetics. Are you interested in having the latest and greatest television technology? Do you enjoy listening to beautifully reproduced music? Do you want your home to be picture perfect?
A good media room combines electronic components and room design to form a multi-functional room in which TV and movie watching take place, in addition to other activities. The components of a home theater plan are as follows:
Display device: Television can be mounted to the wall for more space. Receiver: Receives sound and video signals from source devices and transmits them to your speakers at TV respectively. Speakers: Devices for audio playback, to “surround” you with sound. Depending on the size of your room, usually 5 to 7 speakers will be placed throughout the room. Subwoofer: Another speaker for bass, explosions and sound effects Sources: Devices that provide audio and video signals to your theater system. Blu-Ray players, cable boxes, satellite receivers, video games and digital media servers are some examples. Remote Control Solution: The “user interface” to the AV system. Simple to use solutions work for everyone in the family, and reduce the number of remotes. Wire and Cables: To connect everything and send signals to the speakers – with setup, these can be hidden so they are not out in the open Surge Protection: Help to protect your electronics from damaging electrical disturbances such as lightning, power surges, brownouts, blackouts, and other dangerous signals. Power Conditioning: Cleans all noise and interference from the line to provide clean, pure power to your system for an enhanced viewing and listening experience. Seating: Customize your perfect chair with the right size, color, firmness and style for your viewing pleasure. Acoustics: Control sound within the room to maximize the experience. This involves the listener in the movie soundtrack and transports them to the action. Lighting: BravoAV offers automatic lighting control solutions for your media room or the whole house. Imagine lights that dim when you press “play” on your remote! HVAC: Heating Ventilation and Air Conditioning. Your remote control communicates with your thermostat.
Planning
Here are some questions to ask yourself when considering installing a media room:
What is your vision for this room?
What is the size of your room?
How far away will you sit from the TV?
Where do you want the equipment located (or hidden)?
Do you want automated shades or automated lighting control?
What is your budget?
What is your time frame?
Bravo AV of New Jersey will help you design a media room that looks as good as it sounds. With our custom cabinet crafters, interior design consultation and nearly limitless options available, you and your family will be sitting in your own multi-purpose media room in no time!
Definitions
TV: The most popular TV is a LCD with LED back-lighting, typically in sizes ranging from 40 to 100 inches. Receiver: An electronic component that “receives” audio (sound) and video (picture) signals from source devices and transmits these sounds to your speaker surround sound system. One can think of a receiver as a traffic cop. Through it you select what source you wish to listen and watch and the receiver directs it appropriately. Preamplifier & Amplifier Combo: Same as receiver, but can be provided in two components rather than one for a higher fidelity. Speakers: Also known as loudspeakers, are devices for audio playback. Typically a media room has at least 5 speakers: Left, Center, Right, and two side-surround speakers. In some larger theaters two additional rear speakers are added on the back wall. In components and speaker systems, a channel is a separate audio signal path – the ones most commonly found in an AV system are as follows: Center Channel: The center speaker in a media room setup carries the primary amount of information and all the dialogue. Ideally, center speakers are placed within one or two feet above or below the horizontal plane of the left and right speakers and above or below the display device, unless placed behind a perforated screen. Left Channel: The left speaker carries the left audio channel information. Right Channel: The right speaker carries the right audio channel information. Side Surround Speakers: Speakers located beside the listener that reproduce the surround sound channels of surround-sound-encoded audio programs. Rear Surround Speakers: Speakers located behind the listener that reproduce the surround sound channels of surround-sound-encoded audio programs. Subwoofer: A loudspeaker dedicated to producing bass (sound with low frequencies.) Subwoofers typically add that shake and rumble to your media room. Sources: Source components are devices that provide audio and video signals to your media room. Great examples are:
Blu-ray player
Cable Boxes or Satellite Receivers (DirecTV or Dish Network)
Video games: Xbox 360, PS3 and Wii, etc.
PCs
Digital media servers – Imagine having all your favorite music and movies at your fingertips
Family Camcorder
CD’s
Remote Control Solution: This is the “user interface” to the AV system. At Bravo AV we design simple to use remote control solutions from Savant Systems for everyone in the family. No more will you have a coffee table full of various remote controls. No longer will you have to call your children to turn the TV on. Wire and Cables: Wire and cables connect the entire system together. Examples of wire & cables necessary to outfit a complete media room would be: Speaker Wire connects the speakers to the amplifier (a minimum thickness of 14 gauge copper wire is recommended) Coax or RG6 Wire is typically used for Cable TV, DSS. CAT-5/6 Wire: Category-5 is a communications wire used for many applications. Networking, telephones, infrared communications and keypad communications are some basic examples of the many uses of cat-5. RGB Wire: Cabling for getting higher quality video signals (such as component & high definition to the display device. RGB wire can have anywhere from 3 to 6 wires inside one cable. HDMI Cable: (High Definition Multimedia Interface) sends both audio & video on one digital cable. HDMI also supports the highest quality video available on the market today. For more information on wire and cable see Bravos AV’s:
Theater Connectivity Diagram
Classification of Low Voltage Network Wire and
Structured Wiring Approach.
Surge Protection: In today’s world electronics and electronic systems have become very expensive, even at the inexpensive level. Surge Protection helps to protect your expensive electronics from lightning, power surges, brownouts, blackouts, and many other possible dangerous signals that can come in through the electrical systems in your home. Power Conditioning: Modern electronics have become increasingly better at displaying very high levels of detail in video and audio images. Noise on your electrical system from appliances and various other devices plugged in throughout the home can easily become magnified through your media room system. Power conditioning takes the incoming electricity, cleans all noise and interference off the line and then provides clean pure power to your electronics systems for a much-improved viewing and listening experience. Seating: Chairs come in all sizes, colors, firmness and styles. Many chairs have motorized options and some have heaters. We also have custom cabinet craftspeople and interior design consultation available to help you design a media room that looks as good as it sounds. Acoustics: Acoustic treatments are used to control sound within the room to maximize the sonic experience. The goal is to have the listener involved in the movie’s soundtrack and transported into the experience. Lighting: Bravo AV can design automatic lighting control solutions for your media room or the whole house. Imagine the lights dim when you press “play” on your remote control. HVAC: Heating Ventilation and Air Conditioning. We can have your remote control communicate with your thermostat.
Bravo AV is proud to be an HTA (Home Technology Association) Certified Installation Firm and professional A/V experts. Tom Curnin, the owner of Bravo AV, is a CEDIA Professional Designer, a certified THX Level 1 home theater professional and a member of the Home Acoustic Alliance trained to Level II. You can contact Tom directly at (908) 953-0555 or through email at Tom@BravoAV.com.