|
Written by Cyril Jaquier
|
|
Saturday, 02 October 2004 |
During the last weeks of September, my brother and I decided to build our own cinema at home. I'm not a great movie fan but I always enjoy watching a good one. My brother is more motivated ! So the idea came from him. Let's see how we manage this work...
The room First let's talk about the room. In the basement of our house, we have a room which is mainly used for family dinner, beers with friends and playing. It is quite large, about 4.1m x 6m. The ideal room to install our home cinema. Two walls are made of concrete and the others are made of wood. There is only 2 small windows. We will not have many difficulties to make the room completely dark. Take a look at the picture (there is rather a lot of disorder... Do not look at it ;-). In order to feel like a "real" cinema, we have decided to put dark curtains. Let's see how we do that...
The curtains The best solution is to build a box which contains some electric and mechanical stuff. Indeed we decide to put spot lights and motorized curtains. Yeah, that will really look good :-) So we buy wood, screws, tissus and all the needed things at the DIY shop. You must not be afraid of the sewing machine, it is not so complicated ;-) For the motorization, I use an old "tourne-broche" (a motor used to turn the roasts). It has a lot of strength but make a loud noise. A small cord moves in the curtain rod and open or close the curtains. See the pictures for more details.
| The curtain rod with the small cord in it. |  |
 | The motor and pulley used to move the cord. |
| Noisy but so essential... |  |
 | The box from side to side. |
Now we need a screen to watch our movies (we also need a projector, look at the technical section)...
The screen A good screen is very important to have a good image. But good screens are also very expensive. As our budget is rather limited, we decide to build our own home-made screen. We make a wooden frame and buy real screen cloth. There is a lot of different screen types (low gain/high gain) and we think that a good screen is necessary to take the best from the video projector. A simple white cloth is cheaper but why spend money on a projector when the screen is bad ? We have not yet received the screen (ordered on Internet) but it should soon arrive. We are thinking about how to fix the frame on the wall. Maybe by suspending it to the ceiling.
| The screen is about 2.5m x 1.4m. (16:9 ratio)
|
The sound For the sound system, we choose a Denon AVR-2105. It is a 7.1 amplifier (7 x 90W) with a nice auto-setup function. Just plug a special mic in and run the tests. The system sets automatically the delay, the volume and phase of each speaker. The speakers are from Focal/JMLab, a french mark. The central is a Chorus CC700S. We choose 2 Chorus 707s for the front speakers and 2 smaller Chorus 706s for the rear ones. For the moment, we do not choose a subwoofer (our budget is too small...). The Denon will take place in the cupboard (see the picture) which stand in the back of the room. We do nice looking loudspeaker feet using wood and metal tubes.
The pictureWe have not yet buy a video projector but we plan to get an Infocus ScreenPlay 4805. It is a DLP video projector with a native 16:9 matrix. It will probably be fix to the ceiling.
To be continued and improved...
|
|
Last Updated ( Sunday, 03 October 2004 )
|