Practicality vs perfection: why comfort must sometimes trump pixels for serious home cinema

For anyone serious about home cinema, a dedicated room is the dream.

Friends used to think my OLED TV and 5.1.2 Dolby Atmos system already made me a hardcore AV enthusiast, but the look on their faces when they see my modest-sized-but-still-cinema-like room for the first time is something to behold — even when everything is switched off.

It was a home extension project a few years ago that allowed me to fulfil that long-awaited dream, with a former single garage knocked down and rebuilt with AV in mind.

At 2.5 metres wide and 4.5 metres long, the room is cosy, only allowing for two people to sit side by side on recliners, but with an additional three-seat sofa and two judiciously placed bean bags, it is possible to squeeze in seven – though my teenage daughter somehow once made that eleven. I can only assume that some of her friends are bats and were comfortable hanging upside down.

A regretful omission

As an enthusiast, I naturally set myself a high bar for technical quality, but, inevitably, as my job involves words and not numbers, there was a considerable mismatch between the desired spec list of my home cinema room and the realistic budget.

The way around this was buying as much as possible second-hand and doing as much of the work myself as I could.

Choosing this path has its pros and cons (which I hope to cover in a future article), but it allows me to gain a system performance level that would otherwise have been out of reach.

While that’s all well and good, in the years since the room first became fully armed and operational, for all my careful planning, I realised that I had made one very significant error.

As “cool” as my room was, in the heat of summer, it simply wasn’t cool enough – and that’s because I hadn’t given any thought to air conditioning.

(500) Days of Summer

Aircon is important. Most of us can recall a cinema trip where the air conditioning wasn’t working, making it either too cold or uncomfortably hot. Not pleasant, and it makes focusing on what you’re watching much harder.

It’s no different at home. I recall one very warm summer night a couple of years ago watching a movie with sweat literally pouring down my face — not a pleasant experience.

This means that in the height of summer, I have a cinema room that is simply too hot to use, and it’s likely to get worse. The top five warmest summers on record in the UK have all occurred since 2000, and the hottest was this year.

The issue is that air conditioning is a sizeable investment.

As such, I have considered buying a portable unit as a short-term and more affordable fix. However, these still require an outside vent for the hose, and if I had one of those, I would already have thought about aircon and I wouldn’t be in this position in the first place.

Trailing the hose out of the window won’t work either, as during the day I need the blackout blind fully down, and at night the window needs to be closed, otherwise I disturb all the neighbours with the audio.

Bitrate vs BTU

So, rather than thinking about my home cinema's lumens, I’ve been forced to familiarise myself with concepts previously unfamiliar to me: specifically, BTU/s per hour.

These are British Thermal Units, and per hour, represent the rate at which an air conditioning unit can transfer energy out of a room.

Clearly, the higher the BTU rating, the more powerful the air conditioner. However, you don’t want to over-specify. Not only would it cost more, but the higher the BTU rating, the higher the noise level, which is something you of course want to minimise in a home cinema.

In addition, an over-specified unit could cool down the room too quickly. This might sound silly, but it means it could potentially “short cycle”, where it would shut off more frequently than necessary, putting more stress on the unit and leading to less consistent temperatures.

You therefore need to get the balance right.

Working the problem

What's required is an understanding how much heat your room potentially produces.

While many websites offer calculators for typical rooms, a dedicated home cinema is very much not typical.

You not only have to factor in room size and how well it’s insulated, but also the heat output of all your equipment and the maximum number of people watching.

The first steps to take are to measure your room’s volume (width, depth, and height) and then find out how much heat your equipment is putting out.

Your AI assistant of choice will be able to help you out here. I told Gemini the room dimensions, listed the exact model number of my equipment (projector, receiver, and amplifier), and the number of seats, and asked it to recommend suitable air conditioning units.

Of course, a professional AC installer can also advise you on all of this, but they're not all experts in home cinema so may not factor in the correct heat output figures for all your kit.

Naturally, any decent professional home cinema installer would be all over that sort of thing, but again, if you had gone that route, aircon would already be in place.

Besides, isn't the 'figure it out for yourself' element part of the fun?

Keep cool

What this all means is that, while I might fancy spending my limited funds on one of the current best projectors, it probably makes more sense to direct my budget to a dull, but important box on the wall.

If you’re in the process of putting a system together or upgrading, don’t underestimate the importance of keeping cool. Air conditioning should always be factored into your project, even if it means having to make concessions elsewhere to keep within budget.

While you may have to compromise somewhere, at least you’ll actually be able to enjoy your system, whatever the weather.

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