Basic Home Theater Room Layout Designs for Home Theater Seating

You’ve converted your basement to a media room or you’ve dedicated a room to be specifically used as a media room. You are about to purchase home theater seating for this room but how do you decide the basic layout of the seats? How many rows of seats based on the room space? How far should they be from the screen?
Commercial theater seating designers try to deliver the motion picture and the associated sound track to the movie goers with the minimum of distortion and obstruction. In order to achieve this goal, the seating design plays an important role. The same principles that these professionals use can be applied to your own home theater seating. The primary concern, especially for rooms specifically dedicated to theater seating, is the overall size of the room so you can figure out things like number of seats, number of rows, as well as distance from the actual screen.
Wide-screen television sets with high-resolution content look much better than regular sets. Many choose to have the largest television screen possible which they can afford for their home theater room. This approach may be one of the biggest mistakes when purchasing a big screen television set. If you sit too close to the screen, you will be distracted by being more aware of those tiny pixels and for CRT-based television sets, horizontal scan lines. Sit too far away from the screen and the impact will be missing.
For high-definition wide-screen television sets the ideal viewing distance is between 1.5 and 3 times the screen’s diagonal measurement. Anything closer or further will cause a loss of quality. For a 55 inch wide screen TV, the minimum viewing distance is 6.9 feet and the maximum is 12.8 feet. For a 60 inch wide screen TV, the minimum viewing distance is 7.5 feet and the maximum is 15 feet. And for a 65 inch wide screen TV, the minimum viewing distance is 8.1 feet and the maximum is 16.2 feet. Now that you know this, you can determine the correct screen size as well as the number of rows of theater seats accordingly.
According to the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) the recommended guidelines for the ideal horizontal viewing angle is 30 degrees and it seems to be the acceptable measure by many as standard. At angles of more than 30 degrees the colors start to fade. Based on this information you can figure out the overall number of seats each row will have for the optimal viewing angle. However, allow adequate room for either side of the theater room for an isle so that you and others can safely get in and out of your seats. You also don’t want to overdo the theater room with too many seats for each row which will never be used. If you are going to have more than 1 row of seating, 42 inches would be the recommended distance between rows.
The overall number of theater seats in combination with the size of the screen, you can determine the space required to house your new home theater seating setup. Money is in short supply in this tough economy, so make sure to purchase the appropriate seating so that you, your family, and your guests can enjoy the latest motion picture in comfort.