The Best Home Theater You've Never Heard Of

Photograph by John B. Carnett Photograph by John B. Carnett

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Dept.: Assembly Required
Tech: Front-projection home theater

Retail: $4,956

Street: $3,527 (H2.0 estimate)

Time: 5 hours




Movie buffs looking to build a home theater typically have four choices: traditional CRT sets, LCD displays, plasma screens and hulking rear-projection units. Some are five-digit expensive, some so heavy that it takes three linebackers to carry them into the house, and some lose brightness from any viewpoint but a small sweet spot directly in front. Even the most gigantic offer an image no bigger than about 6 feet diagonally.


But conspicuously absent from this list of usual suspects is a semisecret but spectacular setup with a vastly bigger display that is often higher-resolution and less expensive than the plug-and-play boxes. It's called front projection. I installed one in our bedroom, and the projected image is 8 feet diagonally and better than the local multiplex. Best of all, I'm in the theater business for under $5,000. Tickets $5 before 6 p.m., popcorn on demand.


These systems are built around powerful digital projectors of the kind originally developed to blast out PowerPoints but now optimized for home-theater use with display chips capable of HDTV quality.


So why doesn't everybody have one? Because it's not plug-and-play. Setting up one of these systems requires a little carpentry (projectors are typically hung from the ceiling) and a little understanding of such things as why a trio of red, green and blue video jacks are labeled Y, Pb(CB) and Pr(CR). Oh, and a spouse who can tolerate some inevitably exposed wiring.


The Denon AVR-2803 receiver I used for my setup had 18 speaker posts--plus another 90 jacks, receptacles, connectors and terminals. So it's not surprising that at first pass I wound up with rear-speaker sound out of the fronts and nothing out of the rears. ("They're not rears," the tech rep told me when I phoned, desperate. "They're surrounds.")


While a video nerd could do it in an hour, the whole setup took me closer to 25. But when I finally slid in a DVD and got a bright, sharp picture in place of the infuriating no-signal box, and magnificent sound where there had been but squawks, it was an epiphany. Hobbits were bigger than life-size, I could practically feel Seabiscuit underneath me, and Salma Hayek in Frida was ... well, let's just say it was worth all the effort.