mtn328
Member
Someone just posted a first dedicated theater build that goes against the grain: 7.1.4 layout, Marantz Cinema 30 running it, and instead of a screen and projector the front of the room is a 115-inch TCL RGB TV. Ground speakers are Infinity Beta, ceiling channels are 8-inch KEF in-ceilings, gear stacked in a Salamander Chicago 245. Two rows of seating, walls still waiting on paint.
The detail I keep coming back to is that the ceiling tiles were individually painted flat black while the drop ceiling grid was left white. With a projector that white grid is a reflector you would eventually come to hate, and most people painting a ceiling black are doing it to stop bounce off the screen. In a TV room the calculus changes completely. Flat black up top is now about the room feeling like a cinema rather than about protecting contrast, and leaving the grid white keeps the whole thing looking deliberate instead of like a cave. That only works because there is no projector.
That is the trade with a very large TV as the front of a dedicated room. You lose the sheer size per dollar you get from a projector and screen, and you gain black level and brightness that no projector in a light-controlled room touches, plus you stop caring about the walls, the ceiling and the door.
Mixing Infinity on the floor with KEF overhead is the choice I would want to hear before copying. Height channels are the ones people say timbre matching matters least for, and I have never fully believed that. Anyone running deliberately mismatched heights and happy with it?
The detail I keep coming back to is that the ceiling tiles were individually painted flat black while the drop ceiling grid was left white. With a projector that white grid is a reflector you would eventually come to hate, and most people painting a ceiling black are doing it to stop bounce off the screen. In a TV room the calculus changes completely. Flat black up top is now about the room feeling like a cinema rather than about protecting contrast, and leaving the grid white keeps the whole thing looking deliberate instead of like a cave. That only works because there is no projector.
That is the trade with a very large TV as the front of a dedicated room. You lose the sheer size per dollar you get from a projector and screen, and you gain black level and brightness that no projector in a light-controlled room touches, plus you stop caring about the walls, the ceiling and the door.
Mixing Infinity on the floor with KEF overhead is the choice I would want to hear before copying. Height channels are the ones people say timbre matching matters least for, and I have never fully believed that. Anyone running deliberately mismatched heights and happy with it?
