The idea of ​​creating a home theater with your own hands is very tempting. Especially if you do not have the funds to buy it, but there are hands that can work wonders. Suppose you already have certain skills and craftsmanship for assembling a home theater, but where can I get a diagram and at least a superficial assembly guide that would serve as a kind of cheat sheet? The answer is here. We will consider how to make a home theater with your own hands and at the same time not go broke on the details.
Home theater: concept and description
From the point of view of household appliances, a home cinema is a kind of connecting element that combines speakers, a TV, a projector, etc. into a single whole. It contains input and output ports through which peripherals are connected. The complete set of home theaters, which are produced from the conveyor, can be very diverse: with acoustics, with a DVD player, a projector or without them. One way or another, you can purchase additional equipment with all the necessary functions to almost any home theater.
There is also another interpretation of this phrase. Thanks to the inventive Japanese who invented the mini-system, a home-made home theater means a device consisting of a cardboard box and a multimedia device. Therefore, in the domestic Internet space, there are more and more questions about how to make a home theater do-it-yourself from a phone and a box. To determine which of the devices you want to make, we will consider several possible options.
What do you need to create a home theater?
To make a home theater do-it-yourself in its classic sense, you need to decide on a complete set. The simplest and most uncomplicated system should consist of the following elements:
- devices for watching movies (TV / projector);
- devices for reproducing sound (speaker system);
- signal source.
Naturally, all these devices are simply impossible to assemble manually. Of course, if you are an unrecognized genius in the assembly of household appliances, then everything is possible for you. But for the average user, you will need some components that you still have to buy. Let's not get ahead of ourselves and consider all the elements of a home theater in order.
TV or projector?
To decide how to make a home theater with your own hands, you need to select the device through which the image will be projected. There are only two options: a TV or a projector. If the task is to bring the cinema atmosphere closer to home conditions, then, of course, you should stop your choice on the projector. On the other hand, a TV with a wide diagonal is available in almost every home, so why buy or make other appliances? To make it easier for you to make a choice, we present the advantages and disadvantages of both devices.
Projector: advantages and disadvantages
It is impossible to imagine what would have happened if the cinema had shown films through huge TVs. Probably, the atmosphere of watching a movie in a specially equipped room would be completely ruined, and rare visits to the cinema would completely lose all meaning.
Home Projector Benefits:
- compactness;
- the size of the projected image is limited only by the size of the wall on which the image will be displayed;
- high image quality;
- due to reflected light, the load on the organs of vision is reduced.
Frankly speaking, this equipment has its drawbacks, which are more in number than advantages. Therefore, the practicality of this device can be called into question.
Disadvantages:
- for high-quality transmission of the picture, it is necessary that there is absolute darkness in the room;
- low image clarity when watching some TV channels due to their poor broadcast quality;
- it is impossible to watch video without audio equipment;
- in projectors you need to regularly change the lamps;
- in DLP projectors on white areas of the image you can see the scattering of light (rainbow);
- in comparison with the new generation TVs, there is a small viewing angle, low brightness and contrast of the projected picture.
Given that there are really enough shortcomings in projectors, they are installed only by people who have personal affection for this equipment, or avid cinema fans.
All the pros and cons of installing a TV
It’s much easier to assemble a home theater with your own hands when you already have a modern wide-diagonal TV at home. In addition to this factor, there are a number of special advantages of the TV over the projector:
- high-quality, bright, contrast and clear image;
- the lighting in the room does not affect the quality of the picture;
- You can watch movies without a speaker;
- ease and simplicity of setup and management;
- durability.
There are no comments on the functionality of the TV. With their direct purpose, modern devices do just fine. But there are other aspects in which they lose to projectors:
- wide-diagonal TVs - an expensive pleasure;
- greater load on the visual apparatus compared to the projector;
- the TV screen takes up a lot of space;
- TV size limitation
- limited viewing angles.
It is also worth choosing equipment based on what it will be used for. If you plan to build a home theater with your own hands to watch TV shows, then you should stop your choice on a TV. And if a home theater is mainly used to watch movies from satellite television or from Blu-ray media, it is more advisable to purchase or make a projector.
How to make a projector do it yourself?
Here is a step-by-step instruction on how to make a home theater with your own hands out of the box and magnifier. In fact, the projector is a fairly straightforward device that is very easy to make yourself. To do this, you will need:
- shoe box;
- magnification with a tenfold increase;
- stationery knife;
- pencil;
- insulating tape;
- clip;
- the device from which the image will be emitted (smartphone).
After all the necessary materials have been prepared, you can proceed directly to the assembly itself. It includes the following steps:
- Cut a hole for the magnifier in the shoe box. It should be centered exactly. To determine where the center point is, you need to connect the corners of the plane diagonally. The intersection point of two lines is the center of symmetry of the rectangle.
- We install the magnifying glass in the hole made and fasten it with electrical tape.
- We make a stand for a mobile phone. To do this, you can use a regular paper clip or the remaining pieces of cardboard.
- We are looking for a place to install the projector. Remember that when working with a projector, the room must be in absolute darkness. It is also worth considering that the picture will be supplied from the smartphone, so choose a place for the projector, next to which there is a power outlet.
- Download a special application on your smartphone that allows you to manually flip the image. If this is not done, the projected image will be displayed upside down on the surface.
- We make a hole for the cable from the charger.
As you can see, making a home theater with your own hands from a phone and an ordinary cardboard box is quite simple. There is no need to spend money on expensive equipment, components and stuff to recreate the atmosphere of a cinema at home. If you want to improve the quality of the projected image, it is better to use a tablet or laptop as a source of image supply. The problem can only arise with finding a suitable lens size, since the display of these devices is much larger than the screen of a smartphone.
Acoustic system
When old and long-forgotten speakers gather dust at home, why not use them to create a home theater speaker system? Many do not know how to make a good 5.1 home theater with their own hands (we are talking about sound) from old wooden speakers, since they need to be adapted for a modern digital output.
To begin with, the device that needs to connect an acoustic system must have an optical or coaxial output. It can be a TV, a digital tuner, etc. If there is one, then you need to prepare the appropriate cable for it. For coaxial output, this is an RCA cable with a resistance of 75 Ohms, for optical - an optical fiber cable. Then examine the back of your speaker system. On it you should see 6 speaker outputs (2 to the front, 2 to the rear, subwoofer, center speaker) and 3 3.5 mm jacks. To connect a digital device with an old speaker, you need an audio decoder.
What is an audio decoder?
This is a device designed to convert digital sound to analog. As a rule, there are three outputs on the front panel of the device: optical, coaxial and USB. It is clear that on this side there is a connection between the decoder and the TV, tuner, and so on. On the rear panel there are six outputs to the speakers of the speaker system and video output to the TV. Sometimes the coaxial output may not be located on the front panel of the audio decoder, but on the back.
The process of connecting the speaker system can be summarized in a few simple steps:
- We connect the sound source to the audio decoder using a fiber optic cable through the corresponding output.
- Using six RCA cables, we connect the decoder to the speaker system.
- We choose the remote control that comes with the audio decoder, the desired input (optical, coaxial or USB).
- We test the speaker system and enjoy high-quality sound.
The old speaker system can work for many years to come. Moreover, the sound quality in it is much better than in Chinese plastic speakers. Therefore, the age of some electrical appliances is not a reason to drag them to a landfill.
Home theater from a computer
If you can make a home theater from a smartphone, then you can build a whole entertainment center from a computer. A home PC allows you to combine a game console, a music center and a satellite receiver. If you decide to make a home theater from a computer with your own hands, then you should be prepared for the fact that this is not so simple. First you need to collect all the necessary accessories that will be needed to modify the PC:
- Personal Computer;
- TV tuner cards;
- Linux distribution
- software.
The following is a quick guide on how to make your own home theater. At home, you can create a media center from a computer only with the help of special software, for example TiVo or MythTV. Paid software (TiVo) is much easier to install, but then you will have to pay for a subscription and additional features of the program, if necessary. Free software will allow the user to significantly save on the re-equipment of their personal computer, but to install it, you will have to work a little.
Walkthrough for converting PCs to home theater:
- First you need to purchase and install a TV tuner, taking into account the performance of the processor. For example, for processors of 2006 with a power of 600 MHz, it is worth choosing a single TV tuner of the Hauppauge PVR-150 model.
- If in addition to the practical application of a PC, its aesthetics is still important, then it is worthwhile to additionally purchase a housing for the future home theater. Special enclosures for HTPC (Home Theater Computer) are available for sale.
- Next, configure the BIOS. In its configurations, you need to set a timeout for the system in standby mode. In the future, this will save energy and extend the life of your PC.
- Download and install the Linux distribution. For example, Ubuntu. It can be found on the Web and downloaded for free.
- We reboot the system and make sure that Ubuntu recognizes the installed TV tuner.
- We install the full MythTV software package, strictly following the installation recommendations.
- We set the autonomous launch of MythTV when the system is turned on.
Thus, you can simply and quickly assemble your own home theater. Photo, video, audio files will now be displayed without problems on a large screen, creating a movie theater atmosphere at home.
DIY mini-cinema
If you have not found a suitable way how to assemble your own home theater, then we offer you the simplest and most original option. This method can even be given its name - a home-made movie theater for the lazy. To build it you will need:
- cardboard box;
- smartphone;
- four screws;
- two rubber bands for money;
- scissors;
- Scotch.
As you can see from the set of items, this method allows you to make a home theater with your own hands out of the box. The assembly process, as a rule, takes no more than five minutes and includes the following steps:
- Glue the edges of the box with tape.
- At the bottom of the box, cut a window for a smartphone. To do this, attach the smartphone to the center of the box and circle it with a simple pencil. Then cut a hole along the contour with scissors or a clerical knife.
- Cut a semicircle with a radius of about 20 cm from the bottom of one of the sides of the box.
- From the pieces of cardboard, make a window frame for the smartphone on the inside of the box.
- On the reverse side, screw in four self-tapping screws and fix the smartphone with rubber bands so that it fits snugly against the frame.
The home mini-cinema is ready to use. This amusing invention was invented by enterprising Japanese people who are famous for their extraordinary thinking. Therefore, if you could not make the projector out of the box, you can use it for this device. Especially when you already know how to make a home theater with your own hands without a magnifying glass. You can use it anytime, anywhere. But it’s better, of course, not to get carried away, because after all we are not in Japan. In our country, not many will be able to appreciate such a homemade device. Therefore, do not lie in the park with a box on your head - they will not understand.