PART THREE Movie room makeover

Richard Stevenson puts some vital finishing touches to his revamped home cinema, and considers the success or not of his project from start to finish

FOLLOWING A TEAR-DOWN and re-build process that had not been without hiccups (see HCC #334/ #335), I'd arrived at a room with a 7.2.4 audio system, 4K HDR projector, recliner seats and smart lighting. It even looked like a proper home cinema in its various shades of noir paint. So, time to fire up a movie?

Not quite. Before that were other considerations, mostly concerning sound treatment. At this stage I appeared to have created something with all the acoustic grace of a squash court.

It would have been even worse had I not already covered the old parquet floor with commercial carpet tiles. Why these? Because they are easier to lay than roll carpet, have a nice solid backing to protect the old floor and they make it a whole lot easier to move hardware around. A few spare tiles gives you insurance against accidental spillages too. At first I went with a deep grey-flecked design, but once I laid some I decided this wasn't dark enough. That was another day wasted fighting up the grey tiles and carpet tack glue.

Anyway, enough about carpets...

While yodelling in the room sounded awesome, the several acres of mirror-flat plasterboard were giving the space a reverb time you could measure in weeks. To be honest, this room had always had its sonic challenges due to its basic dimensions, but a combination of the original faux wall panelling acting as a diffuser, a couple of affordable corner bass traps, and several metric tonnes of general AV junk had made it sound, well... okay.