Three Must-Have Upgrades for Your Home Entertainment

With technology rapidly improving and becoming more affordable, a pandemic spreading throughout the world, and prices for theaters continuing to rise, a growing number of people are choosing to get more of their entertainment from home. While a simple television can provide you with the opportunity to enjoy shows and movies, some choose to go above and beyond and create a full-fledged home theater setup for the best experience. After all, high-quality sound, clear picture, and a controlled environment allow you to enjoy a piece of art to its fullest.

Many people start their home theater with a high-quality television or projector system and an expensive audio setup complete with receivers and surround-sound speaker systems. However, while these are unquestionably important, a lot of people actually overlook a number of upgrades to their home theater that could radically improve their viewing experience.

Fully-Adjustable Recessed Lighting

If you were to conduct a survey, the majority of people would probably say that the best way to watch a movie is in a completely dark room. However, this isn’t always practical or even feasible. A dark room is difficult to move around in, and that could be trouble for you or anyone else who needs to get up to use the restroom or refill their snack bowl. If you’re stuck with inadequate lighting that is tethered to an old-school switch, you won’t have the option to turn the lights on without getting out of your seat and stumbling around in the dark until you’re able to locate it.

This is one of the reasons we advise many home theater hobbyists to consider upgrading the lighting in their theater space to fully-adjustable recessed lighting. Thanks to LED technology, adjustable lights are more affordable and easier to install than you may have ever thought. Modern LED lights offer everything from dimmability to color adjustment, giving you the ability to change your lights to exactly how you want them. Likewise, when attached to a Wi-Fi enabled smart switch, you have the ability to turn your lights on and off with the touch of a button on your smartphone. No more getting up and stubbing your toe on a piece of furniture you couldn’t see!

Hidden Speaker Wiring

While wireless technology has radically improved in speed and capability, the average home theater system still requires hundreds or even thousands of feet of various wires to connect devices, controllers, and power to one another. If you have ever tried to configure even a remarkably simple home theater setup, you know how frustrating and difficult it can be to try and hide wiring out of sight or even just to organize it so it doesn’t look like a jumbled mess.

This gets even more difficult for speaker wiring, as speakers located behind you will need wires to reach them to provide both signal and power. Nobody wants to trip over these wires and risk damaging their speakers, nor does anyone want to have to stare at them when they run along the floor or the wall. For this reason, we recommend running them either through your wall or the attic. Our skilled team can assist you with running this line through your walls or attic with an out-of-sight, out-of-mind setup that looks great, works well, and keeps your expensive equipment protected. We can even assist with in-wall speaker installation for an even cleaner setup!

A High-Speed Wired Internet Connection

No form of media distribution has grown faster over the last five years than streaming. Consumers love having massive libraries of media available to them, and providers love being able to collect a consistent form of income in the form of a monthly subscription. Likewise, you never have to worry about damaging a physical media disc, like you would with a Blu-Ray or DVD disc. However, nobody likes to deal with what could be a fatal flaw of streaming: buffering.

The majority of streaming devices are set up to work on a wireless connection, but a wireless connection that is too slow or too bogged down with various connections will not be able to load the media you are watching at a rate that is fast enough for a seamless playback. There is, however, a solution: a wired internet connection. Running an ethernet cable from your streaming box to your router can eliminate the less-stable and slower wireless connection in favor of a solid wired connection. You’ll experience faster load times, less buffering, and you won’t even have a new wire to stare at with an internal installation from a member of our team!