The Ultimate Home Theater
by: Brian Thomas

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What if you were given an unlimited budget for your home theater? You could select any product to go in it and price was no object. What would you choose? Here are TopTenREVIEWS’ picks for the ultimate home theater:

First we’ll start off with the projector. Why would you choose anything other than Sony’s QUALIA SRX-R110. It features an impressive 4096 x 2160 resolution. This is the same resolution as even the best premium digital movie theaters. 10,000 lumens and 2000:1 contrast ratio make this projector the next best thing to going out to the movies. Your home movies never looked so good!

For our speakers we have chosen Martin Logan Statement E2 speakers. These speakers have a frequency response of 18-22,000 Hz. This exceeds what the human ear can hear. Each speaker comes with a separate bass tower that houses 8 twelve inch subwoofers. We will need a total of 7 speakers for our home theater. This way, we can make sure the sound stays consistent all the way around. These speakers also weigh 2,000 pounds for the pair, so you had better make sure your floor can handle them!

Krell Evolution 400. Not only is this amplifier very expensive, you will need at least 5 of them for your home theater, as this amplifier can only power one channel. Change that number to 7 if you have a 7.1 surround system. This amplifier is capable of outputting 1600 watts at 2 ohms. It also comes with the standard 12 volt triggers.

It’s only fitting to add the best Blu-Ray disc player we could find. That honor goes to Goldmund Eidos 20 BD Blu-Ray player. It features the finest AS-Curator and magnetic damping. This provides the ultimate audio and video reproduction with the least amount of distortion.

Transparent Opus cables will do the duty of getting the signals from one piece of equipment to another. These hand made cables feature Transparent’s MM technology. This technology brings new levels of realism to music and soundtrack playback.

The Meridian 861 Reference surround processor is one of the best surround processors out there. It is capable of decoding all the most popular formats available, including Dolby Digital, THX EX and DTS ES. The Meridian 861 also has ample connections, including balanced outputs, unbalanced inputs, component video cards, and plenty others. It also features Meridian Room correction software. This allows the user to fine tune the performance based on the actual room being used, not just factory presets.

For our subwoofer, we have chosen the Eminent Technology Model 17. This subwoofer may look just like a common household fan, but assuredly, it isn’t. This subwoofer is able to reproduce bass down to 1 HZ, lower than any other subwoofer. While the human ear can’t hear anything that low, we can certainly feel it! It can almost literally shake your entire house off its foundation. It does require an amplifier capable of producing 200 watts at 8 ohms.

Control4’s Media Controller does the honors for the home theater control. This handy device will control all your home theater gear and then some. It will also control various other home automation functions, such as your home theater lights.

With a system this fancy, there needs to be a line doubler. The line doubler will effectively double the resolution of the signal being fed to it. This is especially important on projection systems, where the projected image is very large. This important duty is taken care of by the Snell & Wilcox line G2 Gold Interpolator.  This unit allows for full deinterlacing and line scaling of 480i sources in a single step, allowing for the best picture possible in your home theater.

This is the minimum required to get your home theater up and running.  There are other items that will need to be added such as a screen. We didn’t include a screen in this article since any screen we add, would be a custom built screen, making a price hard to determine.

Ready to start building your home theater? See TopTenREVIEWS' top ranked TVs and projectors .

Projector$123,900
Speakers$400,000
Amplifiers $80,000
Blu-ray Player
$16,900
Speaker Cables
$172,000
Preamplifier
$20,000
Subwoofer
$13,000
Remote Control System
$1,500
Line Doubler$42,500
Total
$869,800 
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