3 Tips to Build the Best Home Theater You Can
Everything you know to build a home theater for your Miami, Florida, home that maximizes movie and music enjoyment
Your home theater isn’t just where you kick back to watch your favorite flicks; it’s the focal point of your home entertainment experience. A home theater should be designed to make enjoying whatever media you’re in the mood for with ease and with maximum performance. Luckily, we’re experts at designing and installing home theaters at IQ Automation, and today we’ll give you some tips to create the best, most immersive home theater experience possible.
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YOUR SCREEN
Generally, a 4K UHD TV or projector and screen is the display you want for your home theater. There are a few 8K displays that have hit the market recently, but right now there’s very little in the way of native 8K video content. You’re better off waiting to buy an 8K display for now.
As is the case with most products, however, not all 4K TVs or projectors are created equal. For starters, you want a display that uses High-Dynamic Range imaging, or HDR. HDR gives you a richer color palette than TVs that don’t have it, creating greater color contrast and a more lifelike image.
Another feature to pay attention to is the screen refresh rate. Put simply, a higher refresh rate means less motion blur, which is great for watching content like live sports on your home theater. You’ll see high-end 4K displays with refresh rates up to 240 Hz (meaning the on-screen image updates itself 240 times per second).
We’d also strongly suggest you choose an OLED 4K TV. Unlike LCDs or standard LED displays, every pixel on an OLED TV display is lit individually. This may seem trivial, but this type of lighting greatly helps separate brighter and darker tones within an image on screen, giving you a true black background color for a more detailed and lifelike picture.
SOUND
There used to be one significant advantage movie theaters had over home systems: sound quality. Now, however, you can use Dolby Atmos, the same system found in many theater chains.
The difference between Atmos and other surround sound systems is the immersion factor. In a standard surround sound setup, you place speakers throughout the room, including center, left, right and rear channels.
That’s not the way Dolby Atmos works; instead, the system renders every sound on the soundtrack (meaning all the sound in a piece of content, not the musical score) as an individual audio object. These sound objects are then placed in a three-dimensional soundscape created by speakers placed throughout your home theater, including behind you and overhead. This technology immerses you in whatever you’re watching or listening to like nothing you’ve ever heard.
SYSTEM INTEGRATION
Smart home technology isn’t just for your home theater. These systems are meant to make life easier and more fun throughout your home. Therefore, it makes sense to connect your home theater to any other automation systems you have.
Two easy places to start with integrating your systems are whole-home audio and lighting control. If you connect your home theater to your home’s other speakers, you can listen to whatever’s playing in your home theater even if you get up to grab a snack from the kitchen. Similarly, a linked lighting control lets you control your TV and speakers while lowering the lights from one device, all with one button press.
If you’re ready to upgrade the way you watch movies and listen to music, now’s the time to call. Reach out to us today by calling (305) 910-2890, or check out our online contact page.