Home Theater Room Acoustics and Lighting Issues - Part 2
Enhancing Home Theater Lighting

Correct home theater lighting plays a crucial role in setting the right atmosphere for your home theater. In this second part of our article, we discuss lighting requirements, lighting control systems, as well as give practical tips to help you enhance your home theater room lighting.

Introduction: Many would surely agree that for the best movie experience in the home theater, viewing should take place either in total darkness, or under very low ambient light, i.e. either with the lights switched off, or significantly dimmed.

Further more, door and windows should be closed, and shades down, to cut on both any external light and noise.

This is where the use of a home theater lighting / appliance control system that controls the different lights and appliances in your room - dimmers, motorized drapes and projection screens, projector ceiling lifts, etc., can become pivotal in integrating the various elements of your home theater in a totally unique and creative manner.

Room Lighting - Lightproofing and Enhancing Lighting

As already indicated in our introduction, light plays a critical role in the home theater. Too much ambient light in the room, as well as outside natural light coming from windows, can create glare on direct-view displays and washed-out images in the case of projection systems. In particular, projection systems would ideally require total darkness for the best image quality.

Choosing an appropriate color scheme for the walls, ceiling, and overall decor for your home theater room, can do a lot to help you enhance your home theater lighting.

This especially applies when it comes to a front projection setup. The requirement here is to avoid having light from the projected image itself being reflected by the walls and ceiling back onto the image. This would eventually reduce the overall image quality as a result of a reduced image contrast. Particular attention should be given to the ceiling - use a dark non-reflective color; go for black if your big screen size is such that the upper part of your home theater screen is close to the ceiling.

Due consideration should therefore be given to the overall home theater lighting at an early stage of your home theater room design. Fortunately, room lighting is relatively easier to control than room acoustics - through the use of black-out material, the use of dark colored paint, dimmers, drapes, and if need be, a  lighting control system.

A home theater lighting control system can turn out to be a central feature in any home theater room, and is instrumental to create that much-desired ambience of a 'cinema-in-the-home'.

Further more, integrating Fiber optic and LED ceiling lights within your home theater lighting system, as well as the use of featured wall sconces specifically designed for the home theater (such as the one pictured above, available from HTmarket), can make light control, real fun.

Light Control Systems and 'X10'

Home Theater Lighting Control Systems can range from a simple wall mountable dimmer switch that allows you to control the brightness level of an individual light or a series of connected lights, to the more sophisticated yet substantially expensive programmable lighting control systems that can control multiple channels - thus providing individual control for the different lighting fixtures in the room.

These systems generally rely on the popular X10 Protocol to control the different lights. A single X10 transmitter can control up to 256 different devices. Among the prime advantage of X10 based systems is that they are extremely simple to install - this in view that to control the different lighting devices, they make use of either your existing electrical wiring to send information to small X10 receivers connected to your lighting fixtures, or wireless technology. This renders X10 based appliance/lighting control systems the perfect solution for retrofit.

It is estimated that X10 compatible products can be found in over 10 million American homes - mainly because of the many advantages that X10 based products have over other control solutions. Further more, being a standard protocol means that there are no compatibility issues between different X10 products - irrespective of brand.

Setting up an X10 based home theater lighting control system is pretty easy. These systems come in various forms, yet the two most common applications in the home theater are wired dimmer switches and outlet modules. You simply replace the standard switch with an X10 dimmer module when controlling lights. In the case of an appliance - say a motorized drape or projection screen, you replace the AC outlet with the respective X10 module and then connect your appliance through the X10 module, and it is all done!

Control is achieved through the use of an easy-to-install X10 controller. There are many relatively inexpensive products that do provide an interesting level of control from either a wall-mounted keypad or a remote control - like turning  on/off, brighten, dim, or otherwise control each of your light fixtures, as well as any other electrical appliance in your home theater room.

More sophisticated control is possible through the use of elaborated control modules that need not necessarily be very expensive. Price depends mainly on the maximum number of programming steps as well as the number of different programs (referred to as macros) that each controller can handle.

Just to get the idea, the X10 Macro controller with infrared remote control support shown here, is selling at amazon at under $100 (excluding the universal remote control); this one can handle up to 42 different macros, each with up to 48 different programming steps.

Macros can turn the whole process of home theater automation and home theater lighting really cool.

In reality, X10 Macro controllers give you the possibility to do a few elaborated home theater lighting tricks. But not only, since with the touch of a button, you can execute an entire sequence of X10 events. For example, you can program a 'pre-show mode' where certain lights in the room are on and set to accentuate some special features in your home theater - like a movie poster box and the bar area or the popcorn machine - if present. You can also program a 'viewing mode' which will close the drapes, gradually dim the lights to the desired level, and possibly open the curtain in front of your projection screen to start the show. In reality, what you can do is just limited by your imagination.

Less expensive controllers and starter kits are also available. A case in point is the IR-543 X10 Command Console by X10 Usa.

It does not provide macro support but at under $30, it gives you the possibility to use a universal remote control like the Logitech Harmony 880 RC, which can be used to control all your home entertainment gear, to control the various lights, close/open drapes, adjust temperature, etc., through the use of appropriate X10 dimmers, outlet modules and X10 thermostats.

If you would like to get a better understanding of X10 technology, we suggest you consider investing in one of these books: Easy X10 Projects For Creating A Smart Home, and How To Automate Both New and Existing Homes. The info contained in these practical books can serve as a useful asset when automating your home theater lighting. Another good book worth considering on X10 implementation is Latest Technology in Automated Home Control: System Design Manual by R.N. Bucceri.

Home Theater Lighting Control - Practical Guidelines

For the best possible results, take the following guidelines into account when planning your home theater lighting:

• Windows that let in bright sunlight should have easily adjustable blinds or curtains made from blackout material to reduce the light level in the room while eliminating any reflections off the screen.

• A room designed for front projection should enable viewing to take place in total darkness. This is the same as watching movies at the cinema. A black colored ceiling would do a lot towards enhancing your movie experience, while the use of solid core doors and windows will have a twofold function - reduce the sound transmission between adjacent rooms, as well as enable viewing to take place in total darkness.

• Big screen rear projection television systems tolerate a dimly lit room; for best results, your home theater lighting should be on dimmers.

• With direct-view systems, you can watch your TV with the lights on - but care should be taken with the positioning of your home theater lighting with respect to your TV screen to avoid glare. Special attention should be given to curved screen surfaces (the standard CRT TV). Direct-view systems featuring a flat panel screen such as all LCD, Plasma, and high-end CRT TV systems, are less susceptible to glare. 

• With the smaller size direct-view CRT displays - typical 34-inchs and under - it is recommended to use a low-level indirect light behind your direct-view display. This would help reduce eye fatigue that may arise when watching a relatively bright small picture in your field of view; this does not apply when it comes to bigger screen sizes.

• In a similar manner, with fixed-pixel type displays such as LCD and Plasma, low-level controlled background lighting will help improve the overall picture quality as if gives the black portions of the picture an even deeper look.

• For the ultimate in home theater lighting, all lighting should be on dimmers, preferably making use of centrally controlled dimmers coupled with a lighting control system - featuring the use of a remote control for a precise adjustment of the light level from your viewing position.

Conclusion:

It is all a question of paying attention to the little details when planning your home theater room design that will ultimately pay off to an enjoyable, home theater experience. 

As we have seen in this two-part article, home theater lighting and room acoustics performance are two in a series of basic issues which have to be take into account at the very early stage of your home theater room design.

The unfortunate thing is that while almost every home theater enthusiast would invest substantial effort in enhancing the room acoustical performance, yet many fail to understand the impact that correct home theater lighting have on movie viewing. The result is that many do not give the same attention to room lighting as they do to the room acoustics, and this, despite the fact that it takes less effort to come up with a functional home theater lighting solution than it takes to improve the sound in your room.

At the same time, keep in mind that you need to take a holistic approach; there is more to the world of home theater design than just sound and light - seating, equipment placement, decor, equipment protection, etc., should all form an integral part of your room design effort.

To discover more on home theater room design, we suggest that you go through the rest of the info contained in the series of home theater design articles appearing on our site.

return to Part 1: Home Theater Acoustics

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