Saturday, October 10, 2020

Dark Star Theater by xenom0rph - new trophy & collection room incl. star ceiling

This year we moved into a new home and I had the opportunity to extend the apartment by a hobby room in the basement. This lead to the project idea that has been realized some weeks ago: the Dark Star theater, basically and integrated experience for watching movies and enjoying the collection.

Enjoy the video tour:



Some high quality shots of the finalized room:










The equipment:

  • Room size: 7.5m (24.5 feet) x 4.5m (14.7 feet) , height: 2.20m. 7.2. feet
  • Projector: Sony VPL-VW570ES (VW695ES) 4K projector
  • Speaker: 7.2 system with
    • Sonance R1 reference line for front & side surround (in wall)
    • Piega AP 1.2 for back surround,
    • 2 x Paradigm Defiance V12 subwoofer
  • Receiver: Marantz SR-7013 9.2
  • Screen: Screen Innovation Zero Edge Pro Slate 1.2, 133" , Cinemascope 21:9
  • Lighting
    • RGB led bars around the side and front covers, fully integrated and addressable with C4
    • Starceiling: Infinity star ceiling panels 6 x 1m2 , MiniLED800 light source DMX adressable of Starscape UK
    • DALI Spots for collection and room integrated with C4
  • Home automation with Control 4 EA5 Controller, Neeo remote, Wall panel
  • Cabinets: Custom Moducases DF 60 with 70cm height, DF150 and DF130 with 70cm height, half shelves with acrylic glass, custom top board
  • Room heating: Carpet floor on top of concrete helps, to heat up room i have a black Infrared heating panel

Some interesting side notes:

  • project duration was affected by corona, but here some timeframes:
    • Planning & Concept: 1.5 months of me doing sketches and having them refined with the home theater builder
    • Preparation of construction (prepping woods & materials): 2 weeks
    • interior room work to transform the conrete room into a home theater: 6 days
    • Waiting time for components: 2 months in some areas due to the pandemic
    • Programming C4 and integration of lighting & devices: 2 days
    • Setting up cabinets: 14 hours with a 30mins break
    • Enjoying the room: Forever. 😊
  • Atmos: We thought about this but with this room height we're unsure if it would pay off - maybe an extra later on
  • Room prep during basement construction: cable trenches / channels were integrated in the construction phase into the concrete to route cables from central Network access all around the room - allowing to hide any cables and have direct access where required. On all room corners power outlets were added to have short distances to enable lighting and to be flexible.
  • Budget: you can compare it to a premium BMW / Audi car, since i'm highly unskilled i could not do carpenter work by myself and had to get professional services in which is def. not cheap here in Switzerland. So I rather focused my time in actually getting money in on my real job to get this financed.
  • Control4: We integrated 2 lighting circuits - DMX & DALI with special drivers that are fully integrated now into the EA5 controller, pretty cool and also my C4 specialist learned quite a bit on this
  • StarCeiling: don't underestimate the RGB effect on stars...it might look cheesy on photos, but in reality with all the other ambient lights it's amazing to have red & purple stars. 😊

To end the post I'd like to some images of the progress coming from an empty basement concrete:

Concept phase with 3D sketches:








Construction:































Result: