Home theaters are pretty darn cool. When you have a whole room in your home dedicated to watching movies and TV shows, you can keep yourself busy for a really long time. However, before you get to watching your favorite classics, you need to buy all of the home theater equipment, plus you need to have the home theater room to begin with, and yes, that means spending a decent amount of cash.
Sure, you can set up a recliner in a room in front of a TV, but that is not really a true home theater. For some good home theater advice, you might want to check out ultimatehomecentre.com. However, if you want to build your own home theater, you probably want to know roughly how much it is going to cost you. Now, it’s a bit hard to give you an exact figure here, but we will do our best to take all of the essentials and basics into account to provide you with a rough price estimate of building a home theater.
1. Acoustic Treatments
One of the most overlooked aspects which people seem to forget when building a home theater is to do acoustic treatments on the room to make it ideal for movie listening. You need to be able to hear the dialogue in a movie, all of the little sounds, and so much more. You don’t want to miss anything, and you won’t if you have decent speakers.
The point here is that you might have spent a ton of cash on speakers, but if the room has not been properly treated and designed for acoustics, you won’t be able to hear everything with ultimate clarity. It really depends on your budget and the extent of the acoustic treatments you want to perform, but for this, you can spend anywhere from $500 for basic paneling, all the way up to $30,000, depending on the size of the room and the level of soundproofing you are looking for.
2. Seating
Another key aspect to keep in mind for any good home theater room is the seating. Now, once again, this is going to depend on the size of the room you are working with. You might be looking to fit 2, 4, 6, or 8 people in there at most. If you have an average size house, 8 or 10 people is about as high as you will be able to go.
Now, seating can come in at a pretty big price, especially if you go for the nice stuff. Yes, you can find some basic recliners for a couple hundred bucks, maybe $300 or $400 at most, but you can also get much nicer seats, ones that come with drink holders and more. At the most, you might be looking at up to $1,000 for each seat that you are looking to put in your home theater.
3. The Display
The next big ticket item which is going to cost you a fair amount of money when it comes to building your own home theater is the display. Now, here you can choose to go with a straight-up TV, or you can choose to go with a projector too.
Projectors are usually recommended for a home theater, as the good ones have great visual quality, plus they can provide you with an image much larger than televisions. You can find some basic projector systems for a little under $2,000, but there are also high-quality options that can run you as high as $4,000 or more.
4. The Audio System
Something else you will want to invest a decent amount of money on when it comes to building your own home theater from scratch is a great surround-sound audio system. Here you want to go with a multi-piece setup, preferably something with several subwoofers to get that awesome bass sound.
If you really want the best of the best, you will need to get subwoofers, front and center channel speakers, and the side and rear speakers too. All in all, you are looking at between $1,500 and $2,500 for all of that put together. Yes, you can go with cheaper products, but when it comes down to it, the audio for a home theater is super important, so you don’t want to cheap out here. It’s well worth the investment.
Conclusion
As you can see, providing you with an exact figure is difficult because it all depends on the quality and size of the home theater you are looking to create. There are quite a ton of options for a low budget home theatre setup, but that could mean that you will compromise on some features that you want. At the least, you are looking at around $5,000, but this can easily reach $40,000 or even $50,000 depending on how elaborate the setup is.