Building a Moderately Priced HT - Painting and Finishing the Room

We built Reference System 2 in phases, and so we started by hanging the projector screen directly on the back wall (at this point the CinemaSITE was not yet ready for delivery). We quickly realized that painting the room would greatly improve the short-term enjoyment of the home theater, even before it was fully wired up and completed. The end result, however, was that the room needed quite a bit of touching up after completion of the wiring and crown molding installation.

After you finish the wiring, you'll want to test each cable for continuity and to make sure there are no shorts. There is nothing worse than closing up the job only to finds that a cable does not function correctly or that you impaled a wire with a nail. This is a fairly simple process, but one that could easily be overlooked by those impatient to get on with their room.

Painting the room should be done before you position and introduce any of the final equipment. It takes only a few hours for a couple of inexperienced people to do a medium sized room. We recommend a medium dark color that is not dramatically saturated. You do not want to colorize the picture on the projection screen, so avoid reds, blues or greens. Gray may be the best neutral color, but it is also extremely boring and will likely be met with some resistance from others in the household (you know who you are!) My favorite choice is the Behr Premium paint color we went with which I will call "ambiguous brown". This color is so vague I haven't found anyone who could adequately name it - and that works for me. It has hints of red, brown and burgundy with a neutral overtone. This paint color, or at least one very similar to it, will follow me to my grave and be in any theater room I construct. Use a completely flat paint. You do not want any shiny or reflective surfaces - at least not with a front projection system. I have also found that you get more mileage out of higher quality paints. The cheaper stuff is just watered down and you will likely end up using twice as much. Save yourself some time and spend a little extra up front.

Once we finished painting (or touching up in our case) we were able to caulk the crown molding to eliminate any seams or gaps. We then painted it white to match the trim found in the rest of our home. To be honest, the end result made us want to put crown molding throughout the entire house. It's a nice look and really helps to finish off a room.

Mounting the Projector

Projector mounts are quite possibly the most overpriced, underperforming products in the AV market today. I will even include esoteric audio cables in that statement. For example, this name brand projector mount costs over $350. It is essentially a couple of pieces of bent aluminum and some bolts. You would think, for this amount of money, that the projector mount would include basic cable management - or some method of running thicker cables through the pipe so as to hide their presence. You would also assume that the unit would come with the necessary mounting hardware to secure it to typical ceiling joists (it is a ceiling mount, after all). It doesn't… and what's more, neither do most of its competitors, though there are definitely less expensive mounts on the market. If you need some installation flexibility or you think you may upgrade, we recommend utilizing a painted C-channel system mounted to your ceiling joists to allow the projector mount to slide along and provide some amount of adjustment. If your projector has horizontal and vertical lens shift then the adjustability of the mount will be less of an issue for you.

For this particular system, we used a high ceiling mount so that the projector could hang below the ceiling fan - which we decided to keep in the room. This was a decision we made early on since we were also unable to dedicate a separate AC zone to the room. All in all, the mounting process was simple, just disappointing as the cables remained exposed along the pole and around the base of the mount.