I have a friend who has a home theater in one of his upstairs rooms.
This thing is amazing:
65” screen
Booming stereo
theater seating complete with cup holders
The best part?
The room is on hydrolic jacks that moved the floor, bumped it and tilt all timed to the movie.
Even the seats have the ability bump, vibrated, etc timed perfectly to the movie.
Don’t know how much it cost but must have been $500k and he still pays a service fee to the company who installed it so they will take movies and program the room to be tuned to the movie.
Really nifty feature: You can’t hear it in the hall, the next room or even standing right under it in the kitchen.
They put down some kind of barrier that just plain stops the noise.
They played the last scene from Avatar. It was blasting real good when I left the room and then “poof”. Like a cloud as the door closed and I couldn’t hear it at all.
My favorite trick is to lay a 2x6 footer and header on a wall, and then when you use the 2x4 studs, make them interstitual. So, you have one set of 2x4’s for hanging the drywall (Quietrock) and another set of 2x4’s that the other room’s sheetrock mounts on.
Most people hang one wall on a 2x4, then hang sheetrock on the other side of the 2x4. Sound hits the theater walls, and the wall radiates the sound to the next wall - then they get mad when a movie plays and everyone else can hear it. This process doubles the cost of your 16 inch upright studs (a whopping $2/stud) - which is really a very effective and cheap way of doing this; it makes running speaker-wire and power much easier.
Other tricks is to use the adhesive foam that you use to weatherwise your doors/windows down each 2x4. Hang the sheetrock through the foam - the foam will help ‘deaden’ sound to the 2x4. And for $20 you can buy enough of this foam to do the entire room.
There are metal strips shaped like a ‘Z’ that you hang your ceiling from. This effectively makes the entire ceiling hang on a ‘spring’. Mysteriously, this stuff is called ‘Z-strip’. You run them across your ceiling rafters at a 90 degree angle, then mount your ceiling sheetrock to this stuff.
Solid core door. Run your heating and AC ductwork through 8 inch diameter pipes to the main distribution channel. The longer the better.
The only thing that I forgot to consider with my theater; was providing additional ventalation to the equipment room. I used a LCD HD projector to a 120 inch screen, 11.2 channel Yamaha receiver plus equipment - it’s amazing how much heat this equipment generates.
The part that is surprising; is how important that theater room becomes for family events. The adults would gather there to play Guitar Hero, watch movies, relax and chat and play games.
My next house will have an even larger theater room. This became THE room that people wanted to use. Grandkids loved coming to Grandpa’s house to see movies, the kids went there to visit.
And soundproofing was a key part of this phenomina.
It would take all that and smell-o-vision to watch Avatar again.