One truly awesome thing about the sweet home theater setup is that it, like movies, are a universal language.

It’s even spoken in Norway!  Want proof?  That’s okay, I can provide.  A guy by the name of Bjorn Kristensen set up his own sweet home theater setup in his two hundred twenty square foot garage.

This particular setup set him back twenty large, and includes the costs of construction and fresh components.  But here’s what he GOT for that twenty large–not only the pictured theater above, but also its contents, which include Infinity speakers, a Sony Blu-ray player and projector, plus a Yamaha receiver and DreamScreen one hundred and twenty inch screen.

I don’t care what language you speak–that’s sweet no matter where you hail from.  And for putting together a great theater setup that should serve him well until the next format change (and even then he’ll probably just have to swap out a couple components) he’s earned the title of sweet home theater setup.

No, you didn’t misread that.  But man, I was as shocked as you are now when I read about how a guy put together a complete home theater in his backyard for two hundred and fifty bucks.  And how he did it, now that’ll amaze you.

One day, while Ed Sweeting was talking to his seven year old girl about drive in movies, she asked a rather fateful question: “What’s a drive in?”.  Now, it’s not so hard to believe that she didn’t know.  There aren’t very many of them around any more.  But Ed wasn’t letting this old institution go down without a fight–he put one together in his backyard and he did it on the cheap.  Just two hundred and fifty bucks assembled a drive in in the backyard.

What does two hundred and fifty bucks buy you these days?  Not much, actually.  But thanks to some timely donations, eBay, and a little fixer-upper attitude, he managed to bring together a set of Yamaha speakers, an Eiki projector, a one hundred ten inch Stewart Filmscreen and an RCA DVD / VCR player.

Next thing you know, he had his backyard drive in.  And hopefully, his little seven year old is learning just how sweet a home theater setup can be.

Okay, so on the surface, five thousand bucks sounds like a lot of cash.  But if you break it down over the course of a year, you’re actually only talking about a hundred bucks a week.  And if you’re willing to put aside that kind of cash for that whole year, then you too can have a home theater setup like Mark Wiener’s.

When I read about this one I was pretty well surprised.  He mostly paid for electronics and furnishings, doing most of the construction work between himself and his father in law, which was probably a good bonding experience for the duo.

But that five grand went a pretty long way, putting up a Toshiba DVD, VCR and HD DVD player (though that one probably doesn’t see much use any more), a Panasonic Blu-ray player and 720p projector, KLH speakers and a B-tech ninety inch screen, and plenty else.

With some careful planning, you too can put in a really awesome home theater setup and without breaking the bank to do it.  That makes it, especially these days, doubly sweet.

You’ve got to hand to Ashok Kimar.  The guy’s a software programmer who’s been enamored with movies most of his life.  And he’s always been fond of the big screen, but he hasn’t had the opportunity to indulge that fondness until recently, when he bought a new house that had an extra room in it that made for a great home theater setup.

So he set out to get what amounts to a few basics in, with a plan to expand later.  To that end, you can see what he’s done–there aren’t any structures for most of his material.  A lot of it is simply sitting out in the open, waiting to be replaced with one part or another. He expresses his overall strategy like this:

“My goal for this home theater was to build my equipment slowly, get small components one by one, and to get the absolute best equipment in the midrange,” says Ashok. “In my opinion, after a certain price point, the law of diminishing returns kicks in, where you get only small improvements in quality for larger increments of money. That was the guiding principle behind all my purchases, from the receiver all the way down to the speaker cable.”

And replace he has.  Check out what he’s put in!  He’s got an Onkyo receiver and speakers, an Optoma projector, an Oppo DVD player and even a couple game systems in there.

It’s a pretty sweet home theater setup, if for no other reason than, in ten years, it’ll probably still be this sweet because he can easily adapt to changing trends.

Okay, so we’re really stretching the definition of “home theater” on this one, but it actually DOES apply if you use the term “theater” in its original sense of stage acting.  And even if it didn’t apply, it would still be entirely too cool to pass up.

Today we’re talking about the Halloween Park Haunted House, in honor of the holiday we just left behind.  I know a good portion of you are probably still sleeping off your nougat coma from two nights ago, so settle in with a cup of tea and check out this spectacular array of theatrical wonderment that’ll blow you away.

This may be the first ever interactive haunted house on the face of the earth.  Sure, we’ve all gone through spook houses and scream parks and whatnot in which you walk around and people in costume jump out of corners and the like, but Halloween Park, thanks to a series of contacts, motion sensors, and a computer system involving eight hundred lines of code, is a wholly different animal.  When you make contact with objects or areas in Halloween Park, there’s a tangible response.  Step somewhere and something jumps out.  Move a book and a hidden door opens.

It’s a positively amazing process that yields a really spooky show, and shows us all exactly the kind of thing we could be doing with OUR home theater setups if we wanted to take that kind of time.

So this guy by the name of Jeff bought a 1921 Georgian colonial house nine years ago, and it wasn’t exactly in the best shape when he got it.  Well, if you were eighty years old you probably wouldn’t be in the best shape either, so don’t laugh.

Anyway, Jeff set out to gut the house and renovate it to suit his needs.  Now, I know that this is how a lot of horror movies started, but for him it worked out just fine.  He added a new master suite, an exercise room, a guest suite…and of course, what we came here for, a sweet home theater setup.

He’s got plenty of awesome equipment in there, including fully TWELVE Acoustic Innovations Deco recliners (those red and pink things you see in the foreground), a Denon Blu-ray player, a JVC VHS deck, an Oppo DVD player, a Panasonic Blu-ray player, Klipsch speakers, a Sony projector and a monster screen from–where else?–Stewart Filmscreen.

For gutting most of his home and adding on like no tomorrow, Jeff’s definitely managed to add on a truly sweet home theater setup.

There’s a whole lot of people out there who crave the “drive in movie experience” of yore.  But Kevin Van wanted it so badly that he built one.  In his backyard.

He bought his first projector for inside the house, and it got him to thinking, why can’t I use this projector outdoors?   But that wasn’t the end of his quest to remake the drive in, no…only the beginning.   Get this–the guy went so far to restore the “drive in movie experience” that he bought and restored nine vintage drive in speakers, paying a hundred and ten bucks for the lot on eBay.

He put a concession area on his screened-in porch to keep the bugs out, and included a commercial-grade popcorn popper, a hot dog steamer, a nacho chip and cheese warmer and even a chili warmer.  He even built his own screen.

But he’s also got a bit of the twenty-first century hooked in as well–a Sharp projector, a Sony Prologic receiver, Pioneer amps (the vintage speakers on eBay?  Pioneers all.) plus some Bose and MTX speakers too.  Speakers are a big part of outdoor theater.

The sheer devotion to the medium definitely earns the appellation of sweet home theater setup, and hopefully, the heartburn from the chili will be mistaken for the warming love of home theater.

David Adey of Newfoundland may well be the poster child for building a home theater in the modular style.  I love the modular style.  I personally espouse it.  And when you consider how he did it, a little bit at a time, he shows exactly why I endorse this style of design.

A little at a time, a new piece here and there, and soon (well, in seven months) he had a home theater system.  And though it sounds like he spent a small fortune on this sweet home theater setup, he actually spent ten thousand dollars.

Now, that SOUNDS like a lot of money.  And objectively, on the surface, yes it is.  But think about this–he didn’t spend ten thousand dollars…he spent three hundred and fifty bucks a week. Every week. For seven months.  And that doesn’t sound nearly as bad.

What did he get for that cash, you ask?  How about a Yamaha receiver, Paradigm speakers, a Sanyo projector and a hundred and four inch projector screen, among others?

It’s a pretty sweet setup, and the fact that he built it a little at a time makes it all the sweeter.

Matthew Katz wants everyone to know that he did NOT build this sweet home theater setup in his backyard instead of planning his wedding.

He merely did it on his downtime.

And frankly, whether he did or he didn’t is immaterial for our purposes because man, did he ever do it up RIGHT.  Oh, sure, he doesn’t have a lot of fancy hardware in there–his goal was for 5.1 sound and at least a 480p picture, but considering that “cheap or free” was the goal of the day (a must when you’re neck deep in a wedding plan) and they built the whole thing for an astonishingly low seven hundred and forty bucks, I’d say he pulled it off nicely!

He’s got an eight by twenty FOOT screen in there, homemade, from some lumber and Dazian Trapeze Plus screen material.  Plus, he’s got an Onkyo home theater in a box system, an Epson projector and a Sony DVD player.  You put all these together and what do you got?  A basic, outdoor, and totally sweet home theater setup.

Matthew Katz’s sweet home theater setup is a lesson to us all that you don’t need thousands of dollars and all the latest and greatest products to make a home theater special. All you really need is a will to do the job and a love of movies.  Oh, and a little help from your friends.

Steve Mize is a man who feels much the same way I do about the movies.  Growing up, we both regarded them the same way, as a special treat.  See, we didn’t have Netflix back when I was a kid.  We didn’t have hundreds of cable channels.  We had some, yeah, but not that many. Cartoon Network was still a gleam in Ted Turner’s eye.  One of my earliest movie memories is my father packing me in his old pickup truck and the two of us driving a town over to catch Robocop 2 at the local small movie house while my mother was at bingo.  Needless to say, I went to bed late that night, and it was fantastic.

Steve Mize brought this same kind of emotion into his home theater setup.  He built his theater around a ticket stand, concession area (I love theaters that remember the concession stand) and a “walk of fame” featuring stars of the past, like Hepburn and Bacall.

But it’s not all about the nostalgia, no sir.  There’s also some prime hardware in here too, like a JVC projector, Pioneer blu-ray player, Screen Research hundred and ten inch screen, and the ability to play almost every format ever released.  He’s got an HD DVD and a VCR in there, as well as a straight Denon DVD.

Steve Mize’s home theater setup brings the best of the past and present together, and must therefore always be called sweet.

When a chef and a drummer decide to set up a home theater in their basement, and the drummer takes care of all the details and watches their young son whilst the chef is at work (just in case you’re wondering, the lady in this scenario is the chef) you can get some pretty amazing things out of it.

Naturally, considering a musician was handling the setup on this one, the biggest point in the entire setup was the audio, and he went sufficiently all out setting up the audio.  In fact, the audio portion of this setup was SO good, that he describes how he was listening to a Radiohead song, and while listening, he heard a bell that he had never heard before.  If you’ve listened to any Radiohead recently, you know how hard it can be to catch one detail like that.

And he’s got plenty of choice components in here too–stuff like a JVC projector, a Stewart filmscreen, and a speaker combination of Triangle and Cambridge SoundWorks speakers.

It’s an amazing setup, made all the more amazing by the fact that he built it while watching his young son.

You’ve got to love anyone who means to tackle the project of building a home theater on a budget.  It takes a lot of restraint, not to mention discipline and sheer grit not to go hog wild and blow every nickel you’ve got on a gigantic plasma TV or the finest speakers or anything like that.

And for Stephen Hopkins, restraint was the order of the day.

He put together his sweet home theater setup for under five thousand dollars.  That’s right, an entire home theater setup for the cost of a fairly low end used car.  How did he do it, you ask?  Simple–by careful shopping, haggling, and loads of scratch and dent, refurbished, and B-stock merchandise.

And it’s not like he just threw an old nineteen inch TV in a room with a couch and called it good.  No sir!  He’s got some pretty prime equipment in here.  Sure, he had some stuff on hand already, and that got thrown into the mix, but he also brought in other stuff.  He’s got an Onkyo receiver, a Samsung Blu-ray player, and a hundred-inch projector screen, part of that scratch and dent I mentioned.

So when you look to set up your own home theater setup, spare a thought for Stephen Hopkins, who showed us the way.

Home theater buffs, you’d best brace yourselves RIGHT NOW because I’m about to lay a metric ton of amazing on you today.

Seems that the crew out at Office Max got nice and proactive about their upcoming Black Friday shopping deals.  Just for a bit of background, Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving, the biggest shopping day of the year, so named because that’s the day the stores go “in the black”, or show a profit.  The deals are positively MONSTROUS.  Check this out!

If you’ve got a home theater PC, then you can get a terabyte external hard drive for it for about eighty bucks.  A half-terabyte, five hundred gigs, will run you a relatively bad deal at sixty bucks.  Seriously, why spend sixty for a half-terabyte when you can double it for twenty bucks more?

If you’d rather watch your movies on DVD, you can get a Memorex seven inch widescreen portable DVD player for just under thirty bucks.

And if there’s something else you’re after, well, the deals don’t stop there.  I was just talking about the deals that mean something to US.  So don’t eat too much turkey Thanksgiving Day, because you’re going to want to be fresh and rested for Black Friday.

You read that headline right, folks–if you ever wanted one of the home theater setups of major sports figures and celebrities and such, you’ve got the opportunity right now.

Bret Saberhagen, who’s put his gated Calabasas home up for sale at a whopping three and a quarter million dollars, wanted to move closer to the ocean.  But what he’s left behind is a minor miracle in and of itself.

Not only does it have some really choice accoutrements like a wine cellar that seats twelve (how do you seat people in a wine cellar?  Do you have a table down there too?  Man, I’m wildly out of frame in my architectural design theory.) and more bathrooms than bedrooms (five bed, six bath), but what we’re here to talk about is the audio visual hardware.

There’s a lot to love about this setup, and if you’ve got the urge to go three and a half million into debt, well, you can have it too.  And I’ll bet you could even haggle a bit, what with the way the economy is and all.

Now, a sports figure like Saberhagen, you may not be surprised to know that he’s got a sports bar in there too.  And it’s got FIVE big screen TVs.  But that’s not where the AV joy ends, no sir–he’s also got a full on home theater, and though they weren’t terribly specific with the real estate listing, it can be ascertained from the photo that there’s a projector and matching screen in there, along with speakers and what looks like Berkline chairs.

There are still some theaters out there–I personally know of one not too far from my very doorstep–that incorporate a game room into the lobby. And now, a home theater setup does the same thing.

Dino Theo is a man who knows what he wants, and when it comes to home theater, what he wants is everything.  The picture at right is a shot of the lobby of the home theater he built, and yes, those are slot machines and pinball games.

But it’s not all fun and games down in Dino’s theater, it’s also fun and MOVIES.  To that end, he’s got plenty of theatrical hardware involved in this setup too, including Rocket speakers, a Draper ninety six inch projection screen, and a Panasonic projector.

Pinball machines rebuilt by hand, an arcade machine emulator with tons of games, and plenty of choice hardware to view the greatest in movie fare.  Dino Theo’s got one sweet home theater setup here, make no mistake about that.

So the Los Angeles Times took a run at the somewhat flagging DVD market to make a few breathless suggestions that, somehow, this was the beginning of the end for the DVD format.

Okay, sure.  Let’s make one thing clear right off the top.  Chances are, DVD is something of a doomed media.  But this doom is fairly off in the far flung future.  Right now, there are three essential aspects to media delivery: digital distribution, that is, distribution with no disc; Blu-ray, distribution on Blu-ray disc; and DVD, distribution on straight DVD disc.

Digital distribution is a fantasy until the basic internet infrastructure of the United States is sufficiently upgraded to allow ordinary citizens access to the internet in their homes without usage limits or low speeds.  That’s a good chunk of the country mostly out of the game right now, and no studio in its right mind will focus on a distribution strategy that excises major portions of the market.

Blu-ray is gaining ground as a distribution medium, as it should, but is still in its earliest stages.  Remember, the forum wars between Blu-ray and HD DVD were barely ended back in 2008.  Players are still pricey, and with a hamstrung global economy there’s not a whole lot of room for new purchases.  But like I said, it’s gaining ground, but slower than normal.

DVD is still the top distribution strategy, because it encompasses the widest portion of the market and thus, the most potential business.

The Los Angeles Times can say what it wants, but to ignore DVD is done strictly at one’s own risk.

Mark Wiest is a guy who loves his home theater.  And so, one day, when he set out to convert his living room into a home theater, he got the surprise of a lifetime from his wife, who said, when he asked her about doing the conversion, said, and I quote here: “Sure”.

Fellas in the audience, especially MARRIED fellas in the audience, you know how unusual that reaction is from the ladies.

So Mark set out to make the theater, taking over bits of the living room and the dining room, sealing up windows with wood siding and performing a host of structural modifications to make his home theater dream a reality.  And he stocked it with a host of excellent components–a partial listing reads like a who’s who of home theater gear manufacturers: it includes three different kinds of amps including a Buttkicker, M&K speakers, a one hundred inch Stewart filmscreen and a Sony VPL-VW100 front projector.

The sheer amount of time, energy, money and prime components that went into this paid off, as Mark Wiest’s home theater setup is absolutely sweet.

One of my favorite old Bloom County strips featured an evening of television around Bloom County, in which the TV invited viewers to purchase a collection of sixties classics.  Their pitch included the line “Who could ever forget such timeless classics as “Freaking In The Purple Haze With A Flying Hippo”?”

And today’s sweet home theater setup profile invites you to do exactly that, only without the hippo.

The biggest feature of this room is clearly the sheer amount of purple, which was one of the owner’s high school colors.  But it’s not just purple that packs ‘em in on this theater, no sir–it’s also the great hardware.  There are Klipsch speakers, Berkline seats, a Da-Lite screen of indeterminate size and a JVC projector.

By the time you connect all these critical points together, you reach one inexorable conclusion: if it looks like a sweet home theater setup and watches like one too, then you know full well it has to be one sweet home theater setup.

Setting up a home theater system is an art in its own right. The problem is that not all are gifted with the talent to come up with an efficient home theater system. Even if they do, you can be assured that home theater setups may be lacking as far as maximizing what they can for their current roster of equipment. Beamax aims to make sure that consumers can get the best out of their home theater peripherals with the launch of the Buyers’ Guide to Discreet Home Cinema.

The Buyers’ Guide is a plain-English explanation of the technology. Its step-by-step approach sets out the options available to homeowners for each of the major elements of a home cinema, with an explanation of what each piece of equipment does and how it works. This is a highly recommended guide especially for reference and home theater setup suggestions. You can get the guide here.

(Source) Press

What you’re looking at just might be one of the sweetest home theaters we’ve offered up yet.  How do I figure, you might be wondering–well, simple.  This room you’re looking at used to have two standard-size windows…and a BAY WINDOW.

Now, chances are, your eyebrow has just arched a bit.  Trying to cover up one of those little architectural wonders is no easy task, and when you factor in two REGULAR windows besides, well, the whole mess just got even worse.  This room you’re looking at, as a matter of fact, started life as a home office before becoming a home theater.

Aside from the structural issues this beauty posed, there were also plenty of issues surrounding the equipment side of things.  You’ll notice that that hardware is pretty much built in–the Vidikron Vision Model 85 projector, the Stewart Filmscreen CinemaScope hundred and eight inch screen, and more–so that was no small task.

Permits aplenty were required for this–California building codes are a nightmarish maze of horror and fury that would make Al-Hazred wet himself–and when you consider all that adversity overcome to make it, this is definitely a sweet home theater setup.