El Blogo Del Juan

I’ve always been a sucker for new hobbies, radio controlled cars, paintball, guitar/music, golf, baseball, programming are just a few examples I’ve actively pursued. There have always been some hobbies that I am amused by but will likely never follow through on. Model Trains, Lego models, woodworking a la New Yankee Workshop, computer animation are all things that are super interesting to me but will likely never be realized. Some hobbies I’ve stuck with and some have faded into the past. Despite not having any time to do the things I do now I’ve been thinking lately about how cool it would be to build a home theater. Of course I would love to have a home theater but half the fun would be designing and building it.

I don’t have the space or money to build one so I am firmly in the “design” phase at the moment. The thing that really got me thinking about this is this site where someone built a Pirates of the Caribbean theme. The theme is obviously cheesy so I don’t think I would go for a specific theme but I do like some of the details like the recesses arches and the nice double doors leading into it. The chairs he picked seem pretty standard and I haven’t decided if I would prefer recliners or nice couches. Maybe a combination…

So here are my thoughts on the whole idea of a home theater:

• I’m not going to use it all the time. I won’t watch TV there. I could see some benefit of having the ability to watch a cable movie channel down there but the majority of the time it is going to be a dvd or movie from some sort of online source.
• It has to have the ability to smell like popcorn.
• Projector, I can’t imagine giant Plasma/LCDs coming down to a price soon enough that I could afford one big enough for a room I would call a home theater.
• It has to have uber surround sound. I have never had a place where I could turn up the sound and watch a movie loud so I have never had even
  crappy surround sound. I would really like full surround with one of the acoustically transparent screens so the center channel is behind the screen.
• It has to have a candy counter. Some of the things people do like fake ticket counters and such are cheesy but a stocked candy counter and popcorn machine is functional and awesome.
• It should be dramatically lit and also have dimmer switches.
• It should have a piece of furniture that faces the screen so you can eat a meal somewhere other than in a chair.
• It has to have an air exchanger of some sort. An entirely interior room with no windows in the basement is going to get stuffy.

So that is essentially a brain dump of features. I will probably add more features and do more things like this essentially just for a record if I ever do build it. I often think like this in unordered lists so more feature lists will be incoming. Probably next will be features of a house in general.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 6th, 2008 at 11:32 pm and is filed under Home Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.