Today, we’re super excited to show you a near-field home theater that we recently installed in a relatively compact bonus room. While we have many home theater showcases, the majority of them cover homes with dedicated theater rooms. The reality is that many people don’t have that kind of extra space available, but still want to create a cinematic experience in their homes. In this showcase, we’re going to show you how you can put a terrific theater in a more compact space, such as a bonus room, living room, or larger bedroom. Check out the full video where we take a look at what the space looked like before we started installing, a full time-lapse of the install, and then we’ll demo a few clips to see how well it performs.
Home Theater Video - Projector or TV?
We worked with the homeowner and extensively weighed the pros and cons of a projection theater versus one of our larger top-of-the-line Sony TVs. Due to the size of the room, the viewing distance, and in order to maximize the homeowner's budget, a Sony KD-85X91J 85” Full LED Array 4K Television was chosen. The A91J series of televisions have a much higher brightness level compared to other televisions in a similar price range. To ensure a cinema-like experience, we needed the contrast that the A91J provides and really good motion flow. The KD-85X91J provides a better pop with HDR, and selecting a television over a front-projection system allows us to focus the budget on the audio.
Home Theater Speakers & Audio Components
This is a full 5.1.2 setup and because of the compact nature of the room, we wanted to use on-wall speakers to free up space rather than in-room box speakers. We used Heco on-walls which provide terrific performance for the price. In particular, the Fluctus tweeter in these gives us wide dispersion to fully cover the seats as you can see in our home theater design tool. We used the Heco Ambient 44F 2-Way Dual 5” On-Wall Speakers for the front left, right, and center, and then used the Heco Ambient 22F On-Wall Speakers for the surrounds. They both utilize 5” midrange drivers with forward-firing ports so we can get real power and bass that you typically don’t get with an on-wall speaker. If you want to learn more about Heco speakers, we have an entire Heco comparison & review detailing the various models available.
An Integra DRX 4.3 9.2-Channel 4K Network A/V Receiver was chosen to provide high-performance audio and allows them to take advantage of Dolby Atmos and every major surround sound format for watching movies, tv, and gaming. This has 100 watts per channel of super clean sound. You have to be very careful when looking at specs as oftentimes, cheap receivers or processors will quote super high watts per channel but those watts are either at high distortion rates or at peak delivery. You usually get what you pay for. Integra uses very robust power supplies along with large capacitors so you can go from extremely quiet to virtually instant impact scenes. The Integra also has great digital-to-analog converters to bring full uncompressed sound throughout the room. The final advantage of using the Integra is how well designed it is for control systems. We’ll touch on this a bit later.
The other cool thing in this room is that we have two MartinLogan IC6 in-ceiling atmos speakers providing full 3 dimension spatial effects. The Integra also upscales non-atmos content to take advantage of the entire set of speakers in the room. If you are doing this yourself, make sure that you angle your atmos speaker toward the primary listening position. Our home theater tool will actually show you exactly where to put the speaker in the room depending on whether you have 2, 4, or 6 atmos speakers.
To fill out the sound side, we are using an SVS SB-3000 subwoofer. This is a super powerful 13” subwoofer with 800 watts of continuous power but able to surpass 2,500 peak watts during explosions and other high-impact scenes. We corner-loaded the room by placing it in the back right corner next to the rack. The SVS subs are super high excursion which means they can really move an enormous amount of air and get down to 18hz, so a subsonic level that you will feel. But they do this while starting and stopping on a dime which is what makes them so great. This cleaned up the front of the room and then we utilized the SVS app to calibrate the sub for the room.
We then used the AccuEQ calibration system on the Integra to calibrate the entire system of speakers. This system conducts two measurements — one is to set speaker levels and the second sets the distances and crossover points. Once we had the SVS dialed in, the AccuEQ then blended all of the speakers together into one cohesive surround sound system. If you want to learn more about Integra receivers and AccuEQ, check out our full comparison & overview of the Integra DRX series.
