How To Choose Theater Seating For Your Home

By Author: Ahmed Muhsin
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You could be in a theater watching the best movie ever made on the biggest, highest definition, most all-round amazing screen in the world, surrounded by the most mind-blowing advanced sound system ever engineered but if your seat is crummy, you're still not going to have much fun.

While seating might seem like it's on the boring, low-tech end of the movie theater experience, bad seating can quickly ruin the show in a way that no amount of THX Sound or 3-D Imax aliens can ever fix. So if you wouldn't put up with bad seats at the cinema, there's no excuse to settle for mediocrity when it comes to choosing the right seating for your own painstakingly crafted home theater.

This is a great time build a home theater, as the options for decor and comfort are finally catching up to the cutting-edge options for home theater audio-visual entertainment.

Home theater seating can range from actual movie theater seats with beverage holders to more plush reclining club chairs and home theater loungers with footrests and built-in wireless bass audio.

Before you start searching for your ideal home theater seats, ...
... it's a good idea to go into things knowing the answers to a few key questions:

Who Is the Audience?

In other words, on average, how many people do you estimate will regularly gather in front of your silver screen? Do you see only you, your wife, and your kid using the room, or do you plan on inviting everybody from work over each week to watch House?

If you're not expecting much traffic, you'll probably want to plan on enough seating to accommodate your family, with one or two additional options for guests. But if you want the home theater to be party central, you might want to look into going the extra mile and installing actual movie theater type rows of grouped seats featuring things like cup holders and oversized armrests.

Theater-style seating for the home is growing in popularity and becoming more affordable to boot. And if don't want to commit to installing rows of intractable chairs across your entire home theater, you still have options. You can go with an assortment of theater-style single chairs. This lets you arrange the seats in rows for the total theater experience, and then easily space them around the room like easy chairs when the movie is over.

Are You Being Realistic?

If you're leaning towards the big, entertain-the-whole-neighborhood kind of seating arrangement, you'll need to take a long, hard look at your home theater room before you buy any chairs. Are you being realistic? It's easy to get swept up in excited expectations but it's essential that you make sure you're not overestimating how many people you can comfortably seat. This is especially true if you're planning to go with floor-mounted rows of seats. Once you've got this figured, it's back to the fun stuff.

How Much Time Do You Spend in Front of the Screen?

When you attend a movies at a theater, you're to spend 90 to 120 minutes in the chair, a few times a month. But when you're enjoying your new home theater, it's likely that you'll wind up spending a lot more time seated in front of that screen for things like TV nights, DVD marathons, or maybe hours of video game action.

So while you might be leaning towards the coolest-looking theater-style seats you can find, ask yourself if they'll be able to deliver the level of comfort you need. You might be overlooking some of the basic comforts of home, such as extending footrests, reclining backrests and more. Fortunately, many dealers do offer variations of theater-style searing that can recline and swivel while still featuring things like cupholders.

Do You Have Kids?

Young kids can be murder on furniture without even trying. They sometimes tend to stay in constant motion, climbing over, kicking, and even haphazardly rearranging furniture during the course of a DVD. And the younger the kids, higher the chance of things like spilled food and drinks. If this sounds like your family, you might want to substitute any delicate high-end decor choices, like a leather couch, with more durable alternatives.

Remember, this is a home theater-one of the coolest things a person can own--so your kids are likely to spending a lot of time in there. Even the most well behaved children can innocently cause a lot of damage over time, and a theater filled with marred leather furniture or stained satin cushions can really kill the decors' whole vibe.

Better to plan ahead and go with a durable decor that will still look great in five years.

Don't Forget to Have Fun

At the end of the day, you built the home theater for fun, so don't forget to enjoy yourself or even go a little nuts. If you like the idea of a recliner with a built-in fridge, go for it. Remember, you'll be spending most of your home theater time in those seats, so make them your own.
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