In 1990 my wife and I bought our current house which had been built in 1965 by a Hollywood expatriate who moved to Rochester to work in the Motion Picture division of Eastman Kodak. He custom built the house and included a two story sub-basement that was 25' by 35' and no supporting pillars. As I understand it, he intended to photograph a movie in this room, and it came complete with observation windows and a 600 amp electrical service independent of the rest of the house. Because of financing issues the movie was never made.
When we saw the house in 1990, it was in some disrepair and was part of an estate sale. However, I was particularly attracted to the possibilities of that room. Home theater technology available in the early '90's precluded taking advantage of the room size because of the prohibitive cost and inadequate lumens (Faroudja + CRT). By the end of the decade digital projection began to establish itself as an acceptable competitor to CRT, and it seemed time to initiate a theater project. But finding someone with experience to design an ambitious theater proved to be a difficult undertaking. About the same time AVS Forum appeared on the scene, and it was there I came across Dennis Erskine's name. After contacting a couple of his clients, I became assured that this was indeed the time to start.
I made life difficult for Dennis by requesting that he incorporate slide projection capability into the theater. The fact that I had a lot of height with which to work probably made this easier than it might have been. He in turn surprised me by suggesting a fourteen foot wide screen -- bigger than I would have thought reasonable and at the outer edge of anything mentioned on the Forum. For the next several months I pondered his plans and used the time to look for a contractor (this was not going to be a DIY project!), to retrofit home run wiring for all the telephone and A/V wiring in the house, and to assemble most of the audio equipment -- a lot of it from internet auction sites.
With a contractor in hand by the end of 2001, I started searching for low cost sources of some of the materials: Guilford of Maine fabric for the walls, polyester batting underneath, stage curtains, fiber optic starfield ceiling stuff, low voltage cables, etc. To my surprise I found the best prices for some of these things along with superior service within a few miles of home. (E-retail is not always the best nor most convenient choice.) I also decided -- based on Dennis' recommendation -- to use Wallmate to attach fabric to the walls. Although an expensive product, I felt it would be cheaper in the long run by minimizing the time required for the contractor's people to learn the alternative furring strip technique. My wife and I also preferred a vertical application of the fabric instead of the more usual horizontal runs, and Wallmate made this much easier. The contractor asked that I arrange for all the low voltage work since an A/V install was outside his experience. I decided to do all that myself and chose Fiber Optic Systems for the starfield ceiling since they appeared to have best custom-designed DIY package, and I used Canare cables and termination from Markertek for all my interconnects, some of which ended up being ~75' long. Speaker cable was Liberty UltraCapTHX 12 gauge.
Construction commenced in March, 2002, and continued into early fall. We faced an early disappointment when the town building inspector insisted on a third method of egress. The two existing or about-to-be existing exit paths went through other parts of the house, and this was deemed inadequate. So we had to put a small doorway in the block wall of the theater room and create a small tunnel through a crawl space to a second door in the outer block wall of the house's foundation. A second frustration occurred when the seven tons of sand destined to fill the proscenium and temporarily stored in our driveway got saturated with water during a week of constant rain. Attempting to dry it out before moving it to the theater turned out to be a herculean task in a city known for its cloudiness. After getting 3-4 tons dry over a couple of weekends, my wife and I gave up, and we opted for bagged play sand to make up the rest.
Completion took much longer than anticipated due to the unique nature of theater construction (compared to conventional home construction). Contractor cost was about 1.6X of estimate. When the carpenters departed, I began several weekends of crawling in the space above the ceiling and inserting ~ 575 strands of 1 mm fiber optic cable in holes pre-drilled from the other side of the ceiling. After that was complete I ordered the two curtains -- a black Guilford of Maine under curtain for masking and use with CD playback and a burgundy polyester velour over curtain. Then I proceeded to assemble the 22' long dual Makita tracks and design a method to raise them to the 13' high ceiling (they're fairly flimsy) and firmly mount them. With considerable help from Dennis, a problem with electrical communication between the two tracks was eventually solved and found to be due to a faulty contact closure device. Once the curtains were installed, I tackled a ground loop hum problem which had been nagging me for some time. I was reluctant to install the screen until I had verified that the electronic components behind the screen (two subs and an amp) were not involved. Somewhat by accident I discovered that, in fact, those components were the cause, and I eliminated the problem by installing a Jensen isolation transformer at the right and left inputs to the main three-channel amplifier. The screen could then finally come out of the protective tube it had been in for many months and put in place. Thanks to clever packaging and construction by Stewart Filmscreen, the two of us were easily able to install the screen in spite of its size.
September, 2004 -- A nearby lightning strike this month took out some electrical equipment and various electronic components in spite of surge protection on all the theater circuits. Because the Proceed AVP processor appeared to be among the pieces damaged, I took the opportunity to replace it with the Lexicon MC-12 version 4 and am awaiting repair of the front speaker amplifier and one the sub amplifiers to check it out and EQ the room. Thanks to Jason at AVS for helping with the conversion.
December, 2004 -- All equipment has been brought back to working order except for some miscellaneous communications/display issues with one Aerial sub that I've chosen not to further repair. Testing and EQ'ing indicated that I had poorly chosen crossover points which I remedied. I did not perceive a significant change in audio quality solely as a result of EQ'ing, however; it was pretty good to start with! I do prefer two channel music rather than the Lex's Logic 7 version. That was a bit of a surprise. In any event, we're back to enjoying movies and music, thanks also to State Farm!
November, 2009 -- After several generations of technology had passed by, the theater was finally upgraded to full HD status with the purchase of a JVC RS35 DILA projector and Blu-Ray and HD-DVD players. The improvement was substantial.
