Home theatres do require a lot of equipment, so its good to have an understanding that there is a bit of cost involved prior to approaching a professional installer for a consultation. Typically having a whole dedicated room for it is a good start, so often its home owners that would look for a service like this. Typically our customers ask us what can you do for $10K and what for $15K. $10K would be a minimum for a good quality installation and $20K installations would produce a really high grade result.
From here the next step is deciding what you would like to achieve, and typically the result people are looking for is a full cinematic experience, its got to feel impressive, not just like watching TV with surround sound.
As we touched on previously, to achieve this impressive cinematic experience a good projector would start around $2500 and go up to $4500-5000 for a higher grade one. Adding a good quality screen is another couple of thousand, and receiver with speakers another couple. Investing in this and doing it properly will produce a great result.
Using cheaper equipment just doesn’t produce the quality result, and is a waste of money. Components might not work well together, and might not sound good. You can spend $5000 getting a lot of equipment on sale and not get great results. Unbalanced audio, can become just noisy when watching a movie or just TV. When it is possible to spend even $5000 on less equipment but get a higher grade system with smooth and tuned installation that will work much better and will be worth the money. Everything will work seamlessly as a complete package, keeping things simple but also unlocking all the needed features in the electronics.
Installation itself has also other implications. Even things like terminating and routing the cables, keeping equipment neat and tidy will affect the longevity and ease of servicing down the track. For example you can just wire the speakers into the terminals, but we like to use a special banana connectors on the ends of wires that plug nice and neatly and they can’t short out. They might cost $10 a connector, but if you are spending $10-20K on a home theatre, these little differences go a long way.
The value of spending money on a home theatre is in your perception as a customer – if you enjoy the outcome, and get the immersive cinematic experience you wanted. And thats what we enjoy to provide, we know where its worth spending a bit more and where spending more won’t make that much difference, so we optimise the outcome. When you turn it on you got to go “Wow!”. The detail in the surround sound and object based sound from Dolby Atmos – feel like they invigorates and stimulates your movie experience. And the aim is to get an even better experience that going to the movies, some movie theatres can have an unbalanced sound. When in a well-installed home theatre you can feel the whole room.