Our home theater started out as an unfinished basement room with dimensions of 14 by 18 by 9 feet. The room is rectangular, with three doors and no windows. Audio problems are inherently more difficult to solve than video problems. Fortunately, the room dimensions are friendly to acoustic resonances. Since the theater would be right under the great room of the house, the main goal was to decouple the theater from the rest of the house as best as possible.
The annual Williamson County Parade of Homes in midstate Tennessee is an opportunity for Williamson residents to display the genteel aesthetics that characterize the affluent side of the South. But it's also a chance for a little bit of neighborly, good-ole-boy one-upmanship. Last year, for instance, one of the mega homes along the route had its own rock-climbing wall off the patio; another had an indoor driving range.
Maybe it's because one of the owners is an avid comic-book collector. Maybe it's because the owners are the parents of not one but two sets of twins—both under three years of age. Or maybe it's because the room is so perfectly balanced, technically equipped, and ideally soundproofed as to offer a uniquely singular feeling of audio/video perfection. Whatever the reasoning, the term Fortress of Solitude aptly describes this home theater in Greenwich, Connecticut.
This home in California was built around a single multi-purpose room that houses both the home theater and living room area. Off to one side are the dining room and kitchen.
In our ongoing run-up to our 10th anniversary in early 2005, Michael Fremer looks at his experiences working on the soundtrack to the groundbreaking movie Tron. This article was first published in our Fall 1997 issue. We've made a few edits to account for changes since then (particularly in the references to laserdiscs!), but MF's description of the creation of an early-1980s soundtrack is as fascinating, interesting, and pertinent as ever. Modern digital techniques have revolutionized the film-sound business, but a good soundtrack is still a good soundtrack.
Lawrence, Kansas, about an hour's drive west of Kansas City, is an
unlikely spot to start a loudspeaker company. But it's the home of
Kansas University, and in 1979, former KU students Gayle Martin
Sanders and Ron Logan Sutherland (now you know the origin of the
MartinLogan name) teamed up to design and build electrostatic
speakers.