This year we moved into a new home and I had the opportunity to extend the apartment by a hobby room in the basement. This lead to the project idea that has been realized some weeks ago: the Dark Star theater, basically and integrated experience for watching movies and enjoying the collection.
Enjoy the video tour:
Some high quality shots of the finalized room:
The equipment:
- Room size: 7.5m (24.5 feet) x 4.5m (14.7 feet) , height: 2.20m. 7.2. feet
- Projector: Sony VPL-VW570ES (VW695ES) 4K projector
- Speaker: 7.2 system with
- Sonance R1 reference line for front & side surround (in wall)
- Piega AP 1.2 for back surround,
- 2 x Paradigm Defiance V12 subwoofer
- Receiver: Marantz SR-7013 9.2
- Screen: Screen Innovation Zero Edge Pro Slate 1.2, 133" , Cinemascope 21:9
- Lighting
- RGB led bars around the side and front covers, fully integrated and addressable with C4
- Starceiling: Infinity star ceiling panels 6 x 1m2 , MiniLED800 light source DMX adressable of Starscape UK
- DALI Spots for collection and room integrated with C4
- Home automation with Control 4 EA5 Controller, Neeo remote, Wall panel
- Cabinets: Custom Moducases DF 60 with 70cm height, DF150 and DF130 with 70cm height, half shelves with acrylic glass, custom top board
- Room heating: Carpet floor on top of concrete helps, to heat up room i have a black Infrared heating panel
Some interesting side notes:
- project duration was affected by corona, but here some timeframes:
- Planning & Concept: 1.5 months of me doing sketches and having them refined with the home theater builder
- Preparation of construction (prepping woods & materials): 2 weeks
- interior room work to transform the conrete room into a home theater: 6 days
- Waiting time for components: 2 months in some areas due to the pandemic
- Programming C4 and integration of lighting & devices: 2 days
- Setting up cabinets: 14 hours with a 30mins break
- Enjoying the room: Forever. 😊
- Atmos: We thought about this but with this room height we're unsure if it would pay off - maybe an extra later on
- Room prep during basement construction: cable trenches / channels were integrated in the construction phase into the concrete to route cables from central Network access all around the room - allowing to hide any cables and have direct access where required. On all room corners power outlets were added to have short distances to enable lighting and to be flexible.
- Budget: you can compare it to a premium BMW / Audi car, since i'm highly unskilled i could not do carpenter work by myself and had to get professional services in which is def. not cheap here in Switzerland. So I rather focused my time in actually getting money in on my real job to get this financed.
- Control4: We integrated 2 lighting circuits - DMX & DALI with special drivers that are fully integrated now into the EA5 controller, pretty cool and also my C4 specialist learned quite a bit on this
- StarCeiling: don't underestimate the RGB effect on stars...it might look cheesy on photos, but in reality with all the other ambient lights it's amazing to have red & purple stars. 😊
To end the post I'd like to some images of the progress coming from an empty basement concrete:
Concept phase with 3D sketches:
Construction:
Result:
