Relax – Tips for Better Home Theater Seating Design

The home theater seating design plays a very important role towards achieving a great home theater experience. It is necessary to have a good seating layout in the home theater design keeping in mind that a home theater is the place where we sit to relax and enjoy watching movies. If the seating layout is not right, it would be difficult for us to enjoy the movies. In this article we would illustrate the basic principles behind setting up an effective home theater seating arrangement.

Firstly, we should take the room space into consideration. The effective space required to setup a home theater room is determined by the number of seats that we want to set in conjunction with the size of the High definition TV installed in the room. The size of the TV screen will determine the viewing distance required between the big screen wall and the optimum viewing range. It is very important to maintain an optimum viewing range for the comfort of the eyes. The optimum screen to seating position distance set by the Society of Motion pictures and Television Engineers should be 2D where D stands for the screen width. The 2D viewing distance corresponds to 30 degrees horizontal angle view and 15 degrees vertical angle view.

While planning our home theater seating design we should ensure that all parts of the screen are easily visible by all viewers around. If there is a single row of seats, all the viewers would have an unobstructed view of the whole screen. But if the seating layout consists of multiple rows, the use of risers of a suitable height may be required for better viewing. The optimum height should be around 12 inches per row. We need to set the seat layout between adjacent rows in such a way that people can see between the seats in front of them.

Another innovation in the home theater seating design would be to install the adjacent rows along a radius of an arc whose center coincides with the center of the screen width. This would help reducing excessive twisting of the head to see the screen for the viewers sitting at extreme ends of the row.

In addition to this, selection of conventional household sofas is probably the cheapest and may prove economical. But whatever seating layout we adopt for our home theater seats, it is very important to keep in mind the basic layout principles as discussed above.