windows in home theatre consturctions

stevec,

I think a large window along the side wall of a home theatre is a great idea. This allows the room to change from a home theatre to a lounge area when required. A large window with lots of light is great in such a situation.

When used as a home theatre, pull across a large thick curtain. This will block out the light and provide a large sound absorbing medium to you get that cinema effect.

Go for it.

Cheers,
Casa

P.S. Matt, what do you think?

Hi Steve.

These are 2 very important areas for a home theatre (mentioned in yours and Casa's post) - controlling the light and the sonic properties of the room.

As far as light goes, if you're going to run a projector in your theatre, and you want to be able to enjoy it at times when it's not dark outside (AFL Grand Final anyone?), you will need the ability to darken the room. Ambient (or worse, direct) light is the natural enemy of the front projection system - it destroys the brightness and contrast of the image being projected onto your screen. Get decent, thick, block-out curtains for any window in this room.

If you're using a plasma or LCD panel instead of a projector this is not as critical.

For sound, if you have a bare room with 4 bare parallel walls and a bare floorboard floor, all of these hard flat surfaces will reflect a lot of the sound in this room all over the place. This has a dramatic effect on the quality of the sound heard from the sound system in this room - it muddies up a lot of the sonic imaging (telling sounds on the left from sounds on the right, etc.), it can make everything sound a bit bright (too much treble - higher frequencies), create standing waves, etc. - all negative. Ideally, all you really want to hear is the sound coming directly from your speakers.

If you care about the quality of the sound in your theatre, especially if you have made a substantial investment in the sound system, then you should (really, really should) go to a bit of trouble to reduce the amount of hard, flat, reflective surfaces in this room. Carpet, curtains and soft furnishings are an excellent start to cut this down - the softer the surface the less it will reflect sound. Notice how the walls in your local movie cinema have soft, padded walls and/or curtains on pretty much every surface they can cover (not that most home owners are expected to go to quite those lengths, although Matt and I know of some who have...).

Casa's on the money.

Fairly big store room, not sure if you can get away with that can you?