Installing Your Dream Home Theater This School Year

Ready or not, here comes the school year! Once the kids are out of the house and back in class, it might be time to finally remolding your home. Updating any room can be a wonderful way to entertain your creative side, spend time together with your family, and add value to your home. All of us have things we’d LIKE to do but, out of respect for our wallets, we have to take baby steps towards our dream home. Dreams are important but realistic goals get the job done! When you are ready to begin updating your home for the Fall, make sure that you have clear goals so that you can make forward progress, instead of creating more work or costing an unnecessary amount of money.

One of the easiest ways to make a quick change in your home is to update your home theater. This can quickly make your home look more modern. Plus, what’s better that watching your favorite TV shows or movies with your kids when they come back from school? If you want to upgrade your home theater, here are some easy changes you can make to achieve your goal.

First, you can change your TV for a projector! TVs are great but if you want epic entertainment what you need in your life is a projector. There are many choices when it comes to screens but size is the most important. While a projector gives you much more control over the scale of your shows and movies, keep in mind that every projector creates limited light amount. When the image is bigger, the overall brightness is lower. Alternatively, if you would like to keep things “old school,” a flat screen television is always a good idea.

Second, installing surround sound to your TV or projector can take your viewing experience from average to extraordinary. Surround sound is a technique used for enriching the sound quality by adding additional audio channels from speakers that surround you in a 360° radius. Don’t underestimate the power of incredible audio! Imagine being able to watch a movie and listen exactly what is happening all around you. When you setup your surround sound properly, you can immerse yourself into whatever you’re watching.

Adding theater seating can make a dramatic change to your home if your goal is a visual change. If you are interested in replacing your couch with actual theatre seating, there are some things you might want to keep in mind. For example, there is such a thing as too many seats! Cuddling under a blanket is off the table if you fill your home theater exclusively with individual seats.

If you are aiming for an individual cinema experience, make sure each is as good as all the others. In term of video and audio performance, it is hard to setup a “no bad seats” situation. This is because you need to put seats away from the surround speakers and the walls. If you have seats too close to the walls they end up with the heavy bass behind them. If the seats are too close to the surround system, you will be uncomfortable with the loud sounds and there will be nothing you could do about it.

Lastly, a great finishing touch comes when you add a light control system and a universal remote.

A lighting control system may seem overly fancy but it can make a huge difference. Good quality lighting can make a huge impact on the way your home looks, as well as your home theater experience. In case you do not already know, installing light controls in your home gives you the ability to regulate the level and quality of light in any given space for specific situations. You can have a bright, beautiful room while chatting, a low light to calm everyone in at night, and a dim setting that keeps you from running into things during a film without compromising the visual quality of the movie.

Controlling light properly will not only enhance the experience but it also helps you save energy by using light when and where it is needed most. In your average home, most light controls are a simple on/off switch, rather than a dimmer. This means that whether it's the middle of the day or it's nighttime, your lightning is the exactly the same. Through dimming, you can control the quantity of light to fit specific tasks, moods, or situations. This not only will help you improve experiences, but it will also save wasted energy in the process.

If what you are looking for is simplicity, a universal control could make a big difference. Right now, in your living room, you likely have a lot of appliances, each one with its own remote control. Not only does this create clutter but it also gets confusing and frustrating! A properly setup universal remote can allow you to have the functions of that handful of remotes in one ready-to-go package.

Customizing your home theater can help improve your home’s look and encourage your family to spent time together on your own terms. All of the above projects are wonderful opportunities for your family to set things up their way. However, if you are not do-it-yourselfers, there are plenty of wonderful options around San Antonio, Texas that can help you upgrade your home this Fall. Mimi’s Audio & Video helps install home theater systems, mount flat screen TVs, and setup surround sound systems.

6 Stunning Home Theater Trends

What’s better than watching your favorite movies of all time in your home theater? Nothing! At home, you can treat yourself with your preferred food choices and you can watch all the movies you want in your pajamas! Back in the day, a trip to the movies was a fancy event that people dressed up to attend. Now, however, no one wants to wear a tie to see the latest Avengers movie! Even though movie theaters have dramatically changed towards the home-like scenery for their customers to experience, it’s still not the same as if you were watching a movie at home.

When it comes to comfort, you can’t beat watching a movie in your own home, your own way. Whether you are a dedicated do-it-yourselfer or you call in companies like Mimi’s Audio & Video for support, you can make your home theater dreams come true.

If you’re interested in investing a home theater for you and the whole family to enjoy, here are six stunning trends you should consider when thinking of decoration ideas.

1. Multiple Screens

Including multiple screens can mean two or more flat-panel TVs on the same wall. You can have a flat-panel TV for casual purposes and by having multiple screens you can use them for everyday viewing that gets covered by a larger front-projection screen for movies and major events. Screens on various walls in a room appear to be a popular arrangement that function as party or entertainment spaces. Why have so many screens? Nowadays, our video choices are so vast that people often don’t want to be restricted to just one option in a room.

2. Hybrid Space

Whether you have a home theater, media room, game room, it doesn’t matter much what you call it as long as it includes a sound system and a display device. A popular trend rising in the home theater market is the hybrid approach of incorporating more traditional furniture such as a sofa and chaise lounge seating. Why do others move to this change? Simple, people want home theater multipurpose rooms. However, multipurpose media rooms need access to a wide variety of content such streaming media devices, which are perfect for providing content. Instead of seeing Blu-ray players or high-end movie servers, there are a lot of Apple TVs and Roku players going into these family media rooms.

3. Social Networking

In today’s technological world, smartphones and tablets are not only being used to change channels and control the volume of our home theaters, they’re acting as secondary viewing screens. It’s easy to say that social media is the reason smartphone and tablet markets have become successful. Not to mention, sports likely accounts for much of the live tweeting in the home theater. Smart TVs from Panasonic include social networking features such as Facebook and Twitter. Nothing would be more interesting to see than having your own social posts being displayed on your Smart TV. Seeing anything on a bigger screen is always going to be seen as more intriguing than compared to looking at something on the size of your mobile screen device. 

4. Networking Media

Many underestimate about the quality of their home network when it comes to planning their home theater, instead they should think about where their content is coming from. There is at least 25 percent of homes that have an internet-connected Blu-ray player in home theaters. If you add dedicated streaming devices, smart TVs and networked gaming consoles, it’s safe to say that the internet is the most popular source for most people’s entertainment. Streaming content may not provide high-quality such as Blu-ray players or CDs, but it’s bound to improve. You see it yourself in other homes that networks are getting pushed to their limits, in versatility and reach. It’s obvious that having a home network is crucial to have if you want to own a quality home theater. Wireless is not good enough to stream video, therefore people rather install networked sources such as Apple TVs.

5. Floorstanding, Soundbar Speakers

People are starting a trend of using floorstanding and bookshelf speakers rather than in-wall speakers. Even though in-wall speakers hide all of the equipment, floorstanding and surface-mounted on-wall speakers produce the clearest audio. Some may have an opinion about soundbars being known for looks rather than sound, but today’s best soundbars approach the quality of full-range speakers and can be easily integrated into the home. Bluetooth, wireless subwoofers, built-in audio processing and one-remote operation are becoming attractive systems for people looking to upgrade to instead of sticking with their poor-sounding TV speakers. Improving your quality of sound can help you and the rest of the family enjoy your favorite movies and shows.

6. Value

It may seem odd to call this a trend, but the price of home theater products has dropped significantly while features and performance continue to improve. Companies that produce projectors such as Epson, Mitsubishi and JVC offer very good 3D projectors at half the cost of comparable projectors years ago. If you want to speak about high-end, companies such as DPI and SIM2 offer technologies that eliminate the need for additional expenses of anamorphic lenses for viewing superwide CinemaScope movie formats. Imagine having a front-projection theater system with little or no worries about the cost of such installation.