Sweet Home Theater Setup-The Budget Home Theater

Shawn Lyman, you, sir, are some kind of mad genius deserving of our every salute.

So I was reading this thing over at Electronic House, and I find myself laughing along with Shawn Lyman.  See, most people’s idea of a “budget home theater” starts at about five grand and works its way up from there.  Well, Shawn was looking for a temporary home theater system.  I say “temporary” because he was looking at moving eventually, and realized, hey, the next buyer may not want all of this stuff.  For a lot of people, including California building code folks, a “home theater” is a fancy way of saying “a set of speakers in a box and a plasma TV“.  But to some of us, folks like us, “home theater” is a huge and dedicated enterprise that can cost thousands.

And for Shawn, it did cost thousands.  Two of them, specifically.  Plus an extra three hundred bucks.  Shawn went modular with his hardware, installing removable risers to give a second row of stadium seating in his home theater.  He also went with some lower-cost components like the Onkyo box system, and he apparently already had an Optoma 720p projector ready to go. (Let that be a lesson to you, home theater buffs on a budget.  Recycle whereever possible.)

Some might scoff at his choice of 720p, but he’s got one critical point–at ten to fifteen feet away, no merely human eye can actually tell the difference, and he didn’t have much of a room in which to put it.  He actually hand-made his own screen, and says it looks better than it did when he had a “nice” pulldown screen.

So here’s to Shawn, who managed to make a home theater setup for what some of us might spend on a new computer.  Saving money is absolutely sweet, especially these days.