Custom Home Screening Rooms

The performance goal of a home screening room is very simple. It should emulate the sound and picture of a Hollywood film dubbing stage where the movies you will be watching were mixed. (See Home Screening Room Design Protocol in Library).

Carl Tatz Design Screening Rooms fall into two categories. One is the dedicated room in which picture and sound parameters can be carefully controlled to maximize performance and the convertible room that changes into a screening room such as a living room or den. Although the dedicated room may be the ideal, many of the same performance guidelines we use in the dedicated room are shared by the convertible room and are often just as dramatic due to the hidden metamorphic effect.

There are two main criteria to be concerned with in designing a home screening room. One is performance and the other is appearance, both of which are 100% equally important. In a dedicated room the décor choices are endless and are solely dependent on the clients taste. Some people prefer classic while others prefer modern and yet others will want to use some sort of motif or make it blend with the style of the rest of the home.

How a room looks has a huge impact on the way it sounds. This is an awful thing for an acoustic designer to say but is absolutely true. The down side of this is of course that too many rooms allow interior design to take precedent, treating performance as the ugly stepchild, even though a great deal of money has been spent unnecessarily on expensive equipment. The client may be pleased at first but after the novelty wears off he may start to question the sound and picture quality. Is the screen too small? Is the sound boomy or lacking impact? Is it hard to understand the dialogue and does it seem disassociated from the picture? In short, am I getting a true cinematic experience? If then he should experience one of our rooms he will suddenly realize that what he has is a "sweet soda pop home theater" and what he wants is a "home screening room". When there is a gestalt of performance and decor, we create the "wow". All CTD Screening Rooms include the "wow" as its main component.

We can offer a complete turn-key solution calling on an amazing team of contractors, installers and artisans who have worked with us on other projects across the country and have proven their abilities in this specialized field. Although we work directly with the client, we are also comfortable offering our resources to their architect and interior designer.

 

What Customers Are Saying About Our Home Screening Rooms

"My family and I are huge sports fans with our son having his eye on a career in pro baseball. Carl was able to design a spectacular screening room in our large comfortable den using the entire existing wood paneling for the screen wall. Words cannot describe the look on our boy’s face when he watches a professional ballgame in HD on an eleven-foot wide screen with a sound system so immersive you’d swear you were at the stadium.

Prior to engaging CTD, we had been to all the shows and hi-fi stores but we have never seen or heard anything like this before or since."

Steven and Gay Eisen,
Nashville, TN

"A music industry friend told us about Carl Tatz when we were thinking about upgrading our living room "home theater". We now have a spectacular eleven-foot wide image in our Carl Tatz Design Screening Room that totally disappears with the push of a button. The sound, the picture… we can’t believe we have this incredible professional level amenity in our home. Carl has made the entire process a pleasure."

Tony and Lee,
Minneapolis, Minnesota

"Living in a high-rise condo overlooking the city, our expectations were fairly modest when we contacted CTD to help us with some sort of "home theater" set-up. Wow is the only word that comes to mind and we have to giggle every time we start to show a movie especially to our family and friends for the first time in our new Carl Tatz Design Screening Room. The picture is much larger than what the hi-fi guys told us we could have and the sound system is beyond belief. And, because of their analysis and isolation techniques, we still have friendly neighbors."

Jay and Marylou,
Boston, Massachusetts

"We hired Carl Tatz Design to design a screening room for our new home after doing months of extensive research on our own. Being in the building and remodeling business, we had many resources to help us evaluate who would do the best work and meet our needs. Carl impressed us right away with his experience and no nonsense, meat and potatoes approach that cut right through all the hi-fi hype. Our CTD Home Screening Room in reality is way beyond what anyone else even dared to promise. We continue to be blown away."

Brian and Brenda,
Miami, Florida

"Being in the broadcast and recording industry for many years, I am acutely aware of visual and sound production values. Carl Tatz has now designed three projects for us including a production facility in Nashville, a dedicated listening room in Beverly Hills and a home screening room in Malibu. Each time he has delivered far more than we had expected.

Originally we had planned on dedicating an unused room in our Malibu cliff home for what we thought would make a great home theater using high-end hi-fi speakers and a large plasma screen. Carl was able to clearly explain away several misconceptions and myths that had been fed to us so that we could get down to basics and design a really unique and spectacular screening room that addressed our specific needs.

He taught us that very expensive hi-fi speakers are not only unnecessary, but also inappropriate for a screening room. He also explained that a plasma screen is a great replacement for a TV but like looking at a postage stamp for cinema. And probably the two most important things that we learned were that we could have a much larger screen than we had been advised by others and that the place for speakers is behind the screen so that the sound is coming out of the picture instead of above or below. These two things, along with his acoustic knowledge and design sense, made all the difference. Although not inexpensive, we now know how much more we could have spent and not gotten the performance or value had we not chosen Carl Tatz Design. Brilliant design and execution!"

Jim And Deborah,
Malibu, CA