If you enjoy watching movies, you may have considered installing a home movie theatre in your home so that you can watch them in even more comfort. It’s a great idea if you have the space such as a spare room or perhaps an outside room in your garden, for example. You might even want to turn your garage into a home cinema. If you do want to do this, here are some hints and tips on how to get it right. 

Your initial thoughts might be to put the screen up high so that everyone can see it no matter where they are in the room, but that won’t be a good idea in the long term. The human neck isn’t made to be kept at a tilted angle for hours on end, and if your screen is up high, that’s how you’ll need to sit. This will give you pain in the neck and shoulders. So when you are positioning your screen, it’s best to put it where your gaze automatically rests – that is, not too high and not too low. The centre of the screen should be roughly three to five feet from the floor, depending on the height of the room and where your seating is. 

Many people don’t like how speakers look – they don’t match any of the furniture or other décor, and they can detract from the rest of the room. This means that the speakers can be hidden away in cabinets or behind curtains or anywhere else that they won’t be noticed. The problem with this is that hiding them will reduce the sound that you can hear from them, which isn’t the point of having them at all. Your speakers should be on display, so take some time to find ones that you like the look of, and you’ll get the benefit of their use much more. Look at the stand-mount loudspeakers from Signals Hi-Fi, for example, and there’s no way you would want to hide them away. 

The sun is a wonderful thing, but not when you’re trying to watch a movie in comfort in your own home cinema. Before you install your screen, check out where the sun is going to be shining at different times of the day, and never place the screen where the light is going to impact it. If there is no way to get away from the sun in the room you have chosen, you will need to install blackout blinds or curtains. 

To really make the most of your movie theatre, it’s a good idea to have a library of movies on a dedicated laptop that you can call upon and stream onto your screen or projector when you want to. This saves keeping a lot of DVDs in the room and gives you more space. You may have an old laptop that you’re no longer using, and this can be ideal as long as you wipe the hard drive first to ensure that you have all the space you need. Over time you can build up your library so that you have hundreds or even thousands of movies at your fingertips. Of course, you can use the aforementioned streaming services, but if you want some more obscure movies or have some favourites that you can’t stream, you’ll still need to set up a library – plus, it’s fun to keep adding to it.