Gary Wasserson is the CEO of Wasserson Design, a premiere home system installer that serves clients in Philadelphia and the surrounding areas in Pennsylvania. In this article, the home technology expert explains what makes a home theater different than a regular living room or den.
People ask me all the time what makes a home theater any different from a living room with a flat panel TV and surround sound speakers. After all, they figure there can’t be much of a difference between watching a movie on their own TV and watching a movie in a custom home theater. Boy, are they wrong.
The difference between a home theater and a living room or den with a TV set up is as simple as the difference between watching a DVD at home compared to going to the movies. The home theaters we set up for people are of such a high quality that most of our clients end up preferring to stay at home and watch movies than going to the actual theater anymore.
A home theater, if done properly, will exceed the experience that you will have at a movie theater. Part of the reason for that is because not only is the quality better, but you are experiencing the movie in an environment that has been set up to your exact specifications and desires.
I personally have a home theater that is nice, but not overly extreme. My home theater is fairly medium in terms of what is available, and still my wife and I prefer now to watch movies at home rather than to go to the theater. In fact, we are often disappointed in the quality of the picture and the quality of the sound when we go to a typical movie theater now, since we have such a better quality with our own home system.
What my wife and I find ourselves doing now is actually waiting for the movies we want to see to come out on DVD or Blu-ray, or we will stream them through the Internet straight to our home theater, so we can watch them at home instead of paying more money to watch a film at a theater.
The only area where most home theaters can’t compete with movie theaters is with the popcorn—and my wife and I have even now got ourselves a machine that provides a solution to that. So with the popcorn situation solved, there really is little reason to ever watch a movie in a regular movie theater again.
