Custom Home Theater Design: Be Flexible, Be Happier

One of the more fun things about home electronics is how the market and technology is always changing; and nowhere is this more apparent than in the world of custom home theater design, where it seems there’s a brilliant new product or technology every week, something that we all think would be a great addition to nearly any system.

The best way to take advantage of these ever-evolving new products is to maintain a certain amount of flexibility within your custom home theater design. This means being able to update individual components as it seems appropriate, rather than having to re-build an entire system from the ground up.

For example, if you’re setting up a system that has X number of wireless surround sound speakers as part of the rear and side speaker set-up, you don’t want to be sitting on a system that isn’t scalable to whatever Y number of speakers future formats will present. Or if you’re picking out a display, limiting yourself to lower resolutions — despite there being a seemingly limited number of media presented in the resolution currently — and specializing your entire home electronics suite to match that lower-resolution display means you’ve set an expiration date on your system from the moment you install it. And that means you’re wasting time, effort and — most importantly — money.

Try to incorporate components in your custom home theater design that are interchangeable, scalable and swappable, especially if you’re making decisions to go with less top-end components as a budgetary measure. You don’t want to be stuck down the line with an entire system built around its weakest link, only to find that replacing that link means replacing the entire system.

And use the best components you can, as soon as you can; you’ll have a better custom home theater design going forward, and you’ll be happier with what you have longer.