Like most of you who read Cinematical, I love movies. Thinking about them, reading about them and dreaming about them. But mostly, I just love watching them. Movies can take us to new worlds, introduce us to new characters and situations we've never encountered before, teach us, inspire us and entertain us – all while glued to the edge of our seat in a darkened room. But if you're also like me in another way, leaving the house to go see a film at the local multiplex is often a frustrating and unrewarding experience with ticket prices, parking, people on cell phones and crying children to contend with. So, what's a movie lover with some cash burning a hole in his pocket supposed to do?

Well, instead of braving the highways, fighting for parking, being abused by the price of tickets and popcorn and then having to watch your movie while some idiot breaks up with his girlfrieid via cell phone during the climactic chase sequence, you do what many people are doing these days: you put together your own screening room at home to watch movies. Last year, just in time for the holidays, I gave you some tips about essential home theater gifts for the film buff on your list. At that time, I made an effort to keep costs at a certain level or below so as not to put too much of a strain on people's already taxed holiday finances. This time, however, we're going to throw things like cost right out the window and flush with all that tax return dough, we're going to put together the "ultimate" home screening room without much thought to cost. So, with that in mind, let's get to it and spend some money!


Determine Your Budget & Make a List -- Obviously, you could spend almost as much money as you make in a year on high-end components and the rest of the things that would go into the ultimate home screening room. And even though we're not giving much thought to money this time, you should still consider where to allocate your funds and what general budget you want to hit -- just so you have a guideline. So, the first thing you should do is think about how much money you want to spend and what you want to spend it on. When putting together your screening room, there are a few essentials that every screening room needs to have in order to function at the level we want it to. As this list goes on, we'll get to them.
Find a Place to Put It – Living room, family room, unused bedroom or even better, a room dedicated to just screening movies is the best way to go. So, now that you have an idea of what to get from your list, you then need a place to put it. The room you are going to use will have a big influence on what kind of viewing device (TV, Projector, etc.) you end up getting. A larger room will be better able to support a projector while a smaller room would probably be better served by some sort of flat-screen TV.

However, as we are putting together the ultimate home screening room we're going to put our gear in a room large enough to accommodate an HD projector. That way, we're better able to get the "movie theater" experience at home. So, for our ultimate home screening room we're going to put everything in a large extra room that has few windows, is quiet and away from bedrooms and can accommodate our choice of projector.

Picture -- For that real "movie" experience, having a projector instead of a more traditional television is the way to go so that's what we are going to concentrate on here. For the ultimate in home screening room you will need one of the best projectors you can get. The one we're going to choose to make our home screening room look as good as possible is the 1080P VP11S1BL from Marantz. And, in addition to your projector, the screen you project your image on makes a huge difference as well. For our money, we're going to go with the CineW screen from Stewart Film Screen This screen is curved to help enhance viewing and is also in widescreen aspect ratio to better mimic an actual movie theater screen.

We're also going to need something to play both HD DVD and BluRay movies so that we can enjoy our screening room. For HD DVD playback, we're going to include the Toshiba HDXA2. For Blu Ray, you can go with something that has other benefits besides being a great Blu Ray DVD player – the Sony Playstation 3.

Even though the majority of our video sources in our home screening room are going to be HD, there may sometimes be a need to watch non High Def content. For that, we want to make sure we're using a device that can do the video conversion to HD for us that maximizes the look of whatever content we're viewing. To accomplish that, we're going to install a video processor and converter from Anthem called the AVM 50. This device will take any of our non-HD signals and convert them nicely for display on our HD projector.

Sound -- Anchoring your screening room is your choice of components to provide clear and clean sound. Although film is a visual medium, sound also plays a very important role in the total experience of a film. In a traditional movie theater, you are surrounded by sound coming from many different speakers. You will be following that guideline as much as possible here as well. There are many excellent surround sound receivers on the market but I always lean towards products from Denon. This time we're going to go for Denon's top-of-the-line receiver, the AVR 5805 CI, as the audio backbone for the system.

Now that we've squared away the receiver, we need to turn to something almost more important than your choice of receiver: speakers. There are many brands from which to choose but we're going to go with a set of speakers from a company called Triad. To set up our screening room correctly, we're going to need quite a few speakers. The speaker system for our ultimate home screening room will consist of the following:

Two InRoom Platinum LCR speakers for the front left and right channels. The InRoom Platinum Center for our center speaker which will carry the majority of our dialog during movies. Two pair of InRoom Silver two-way monitors for the left and right rears and the left and right mid speakers. And finally, two 18" Platinum PowerSub Subwoofers with sealed boxes and additional1000-Watt RackAmps to put out all the heart-pounding bass you can stand. This is, after all, our ultimate setup so let's shake the house a bit.

Finally in the audio department we need to consider power. Besides having a great receiver we also need to make sure all of our speakers get enough distortion-free and consistent power to make them sound as good as possible. To accomplish that we're going to need an amplifier and power processor. Again, as we are going for the top-of-the-line gear for our screening room, we're going to put in an amplifier from NAD called the M-25. This device procides clear power to drive all our speakers to their maximum performance level.

Other Content – As long as we're putting together this ultimate screening room we may occasionally want to use it for something other than watching movies (I know, hard to believe right?). Even though it is designed primarily as a movie screening venue, playing some cool video games or watching your favorite sports team dominate the competition can also be a great use for your screening room.

Keeping that in mind, we need to make sure and have a TV source and video games built into our screening room system. And as we've gone to all the trouble to make our setup all High Def, we want to make sure out TV source is as High Def as we can get it too. At the moment, I prefer the HD offerings from DirecTV. So, we need to add a DirecTV satellite system and an HD DVR to the mix. That way, we can not only watch High Def programming but record it as well for later playback.

Now that we've got the TV programming part handled, we can turn to our video gaming needs. As we are putting together the ultimate room, we're going to install both an Xbox 360 Elite and a Sony Playstation 3 for our gaming needs. That way, we can take advantage of all the latest next-gen games and also have the ability to play Blu Ray DVDs with our Playstation 3.

Seating – One of the most important aspects of any ultimate screening room is where you sit while enjoying your movies. When looking for seating to grace your screening room the temptation might be to go for something most like actual seats in a normal movie theater. However, when looking for seating I would advise following the guidelines set by people who take their comfort and enjoyment very seriously: movie studio executives.

Over the years I've been lucky enough to see a few movies in those small screening rooms at various studios that they usually reserve for people who make far more money than I do. Almost without exception these screening rooms have plush, comfortable seating you could almost curl up in and take a nap. They don't go for "normal" theater seats and neither should you for your ultimate screening room. Instead, seating from places such as Elite or Premiere will go a long way to ensure you are able to enjoy your movies in the most comfortable way possible.

Finishing Touches – Of course, no ultimate home screening room would be complete without some finishing touches to help make the experience as much like a real theater as possible. So, there are a couple more things we need to do to complete our task. First, you gotta have one of America's favorite snack foods: popcorn. No, that doesn't mean some that you make in your microwave. Instead, let's go all out and get a real popcorn maker from these guys to help set the mood. I can smell the butter already.

Next, we need some art to make our screening room look more authentic. No, not pictures of your kids or dog (although nice, I'm sure). Instead, we need something more cinematic: movie posters. Finding these treasures isn't hard. All you need to do is go to a site like this and get several posters – vintage and modern – to adorn the walls of your screening room. I'm partial to The Godfather, Touch of Evil, Chinatown and Star Wars myself.

So, there you have it. We've put together a kick-ass ultimate home screening room to enjoy some movies and the occasional TV show and video game at home. If you follow these guidelines and don't think too much about how much things cost, you will end up with a home screening room to rival some of the best ones at your local multiplex.

Tags: chris ullrich, ChrisUllrich, home theater, HomeTheater, screening room, ScreeningRoom