What got you into home theater… what ignited your urge to want a home theater?

[perceval]

About 40 years ago.
I made friends with some clerks at our local hi-end shop. They introduced me to Thiel, even though there was no way I could afford them. I got hooked to good sound.

They also had a movie room, with the WOW! THX reel playing all the time. I must have seen it over 50 times in that place. I knew I wanted something somewhat similar.

It started a quest of good sound, and movie nights.
Ended up, at the time, with an Audiolab integrated, powering a set of Mission 700 series. The warmth of the Mission was the perfect companion to the analytical Audiolab.
A NAD CD player, a Sony DVD player and the Yamaha add-on, forgot the model, it had the decoding for 5.1 movie tracks, and a power unit for center and surrounds, and a mains plus sub out to connect to existing setup.

I also scored the biggest Sony CRT TV that would fit in our room at cost, with the help of a insurance friend, and built a DIY furniture to accommodate all of that.

And that was the start of a wonderful journey.... still ongoing with DIY speakers now.

 

[HiFi Dream]

My dad practiced the piano 1-3 hours a day and I played in Wisconsin youth symphony so I appreciated live music. We also went to the movies almost every weekend, the 17” black and white CRT had 4 channels and I was the remote. He had an awesome reel to reel player that sounded amazing. I always wondered if they could be combined and just knew that audio/video had to be better. My friends got a color TV and cable and that was amazing. We went to American TV and they had huge projection screens which we couldn’t afford. The excuse was we had to get a TV to fit the same cabinet the old one was in. . .

Flash frontward to college and I’m on foreign exchange going into the Sony Center in Berlin which was overwhelming and I saw projectors. We also experienced in a special room hidden away, black glass walls and ceiling with white neon in the corners dimly lighting the elevator, hall, and room, a high end stereo debuting a new format they invented that had as much info on the blue ray disc as a movie but it was just audio. It was so realistic my hair stood up. I asked how much the system was and he said it wasn’t for sale and it was all custom built. I asked him to guess and he thought it was about $150K and I started researching and saving from that day forward. I now that the biggest best stereo and video system I’ve ever seen or heard . Just watched the playoffs on it last night and the players are 1ft on the screen and the sound makes you feel like you’re there. It’s a great hobby!

 

[GarryH]

I started with 4-speaker stereo when I was in my early teens (1970)
It just grew from there, a TV and a 5.1 AVR, then 20 years ago, into a JVC projector with a 135" screen and 7.4.2 which I have now.

 

[blekenbleu]

I had been using Hafler matrix surround for listening to orchestral LPs, but
Hi-Fi VHS and specifically "GhostBusters" suddenly differentiated watching TV from watching movies at home.
This fairly quickly evolved to a dedicated room for laserdiscs suggested by "WideScreen Review" and 5.1 surround,
watching on a ProScan 16x9 CRT, then Pioneer Elite RPTV..
Those are long gone, but still use my Lexicon MC-1.

 

[BClarkeVA]

Listening to a surround sound (5.1) recording of a Phil Collins concert at a dealer. I had been into 2 channel hifi for years, vinyl and a pretty good system. The enveloping sound (and image on a 48 inch plasma screen) captivated me and I determined to have a similar capability at home.

 

[Mike Schramm]

I remember going to Suncoast as a kid (14 years old-ish) and wishing I could afford Laser Discs. However, all my family had was a 27" Magnavox and a mono Emerson VCR. Then, in 1999 I asked for a VHS copy of The Blair Witch Project for Christmas. Instead, my mom bought me a GE 1105P DVD player and The Blair Witch on DVD. That is when I really dove head first into home theater. The following Christmas brought a Sony HTIB, the SA-VE315. I was using an old hand-me-down AVR that couldn’t decode Dolby Digital. Finally, the following May I purchased a Sony STR-DE535 and I was off and running with a true Dolby Digital setup.

Around this same time I vividly remember going to Barrett's Home Theater and experiencing a demo of the Balrog in Lord of the Rings (YOU SHALL NOT PAAASSSSS!!!!). It completely blew me away. I'm sure that my current system now would put that system back then to shame, but in my head I will never reach the "incredible-ness" of that demo!

 

[Bob Rapoport]

Growing up in No. Hollywood, CA, I was surrounded by the best movie theaters in the world. From the Grauman's Chinese Theater to the Cinerama Dome, The Pantages, and the local neighborhood movie theaters, the Studios went out of their way to install the largest screens and biggest stereo sound systems available. I was exposed to the best theater experiences and began combining my early stereo systems with my TVs to replicate that experience at home in the 1960s. I think the Cinerama Dome was the first to use multichannel speakers to enhance the special effects in 1969's 2001; A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick.

In the 70's, Dynaco introduced a device called the QD-1 "quadapter" that could extract the ambience in a live stereo recording and play it back through two rear speakers using the front channel amplifier. It sounded natural and added realism to both movies and concerts at home. Then quad came along and added discrete rear channels and amplifiers but I preferred the QD-1, quad sounded gimmicky to me.

Surround sound took off when the first Dolby Pro Logic receivers came out in 1987. By 1980 I had the large Advent projector, the first truly big screen TV for viewing at home. It lasted me until I bought the Panasonic PT-AE1000U 1080p projector in 2006, the beginning of wide screen home cinema that was competitive with a movie theater.

All this time I was still using natural ambience extraction for my surround audio playback, I never adopted Pro Logic. I liked it so much I invented a successor model called the Chase Technologies HT-1 that upgraded the QD1 by adding a center channel (A+B) which won a patent and I manufactured and sold thousands of them for $99 each. You still see them on eBay today.

I adopted Dolby Digital and DTS Surround and graduated to Dolby TrueHD and DTS Master HD on Blu-ray for both movies and live concerts at home in 2009 and never looked back. By then I was running Final Electrotats in a 5.2 channel configuration with a 111" diagonal screen I had painted on the wall with 4 coats of Screen Goo, smooth as a babies butt and always flat.. Its been a journey.

 

[Bright Side HT]

For me it was Star Wars.
I saw Star Wars in the theater when I was 7 years old and while I don't really remember a lot about the "theater experience" I do remember wanting to recreate a Theater like experience at home for when I watched Star Wars. In the mid 80's Star Wars was on HBO and I was able to watch it many many times. At the same time I was going to see all the modern movies and wondering what it must have been like to see and hear Star Wars on the big screen. So in 1988, after I graduated High School and had about 3 or 4 jobs and a little more income I started fiddling around with the idea of creating a "Home Theater" in my bedroom at my parents house. At this time Home Theater wasn't really a thing. It really didn't exist except for the EXTREMELY rich so there was just as much of a fascination of whether I could put a "movie theater" in a bedroom as it was to actually do it and be able to watch the movies I loved the way they were meant to be seen. And here we are almost 40 years later and I'm still pushing to get the best and most out of a room that was never meant to be a movie theater for all the great movies from past, present and the future. Such a fun ride!

 

[Asere]

At an early age I would see my father listening to music on his turntable with his two vintage speakers that I have no recollection what they were. I think as I got older that is what started a passion for music and home theater. As a child I would watch lots of movies in stereo during the cable tv era, it was like an addiction, it was so bad I once overheard my parents saying that I may need to see a therapist lol. I do not have a dedicated room but I have it set up as if it were.

 

[Todd Anderson]

At an early age I would see my father listening to music on his turntable with his two vintage speakers that I have no recollection what they were. I think as I got older that is what started a passion for music and home theater. As a child I would watch lots of movies in stereo during the cable tv era, it was like an addiction, it was so bad I once overheard my parents saying that I may need to see a therapist lol. I do not have a dedicated room but I have it set up as if it were.

I think we all need therapy, @Asere . A therapist specializing in the technology FOMO and upgradeitis could make a killing!

 

[Todd Anderson]

Growing up in No. Hollywood, CA, I was surrounded by the best movie theaters in the world. From the Grauman's Chinese Theater to the Cinerama Dome, The Pantages, and the local neighborhood movie theaters, the Studios went out of their way to install the largest screens and biggest stereo sound systems available. I was exposed to the best theater experiences and began combining my early stereo systems with my TVs to replicate that experience at home in the 1960s. I think the Cinerama Dome was the first to use multichannel speakers to enhance the special effects in 1969's 2001; A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick.

In the 70's, Dynaco introduced a device called the QD-1 "quadapter" that could extract the ambience in a live stereo recording and play it back through two rear speakers using the front channel amplifier. It sounded natural and added realism to both movies and concerts at home. Then quad came along and added discrete rear channels and amplifiers but I preferred the QD-1, quad sounded gimmicky to me.

Surround sound took off when the first Dolby Pro Logic receivers came out in 1987. By 1980 I had the large Advent projector, the first truly big screen TV for viewing at home. It lasted me until I bought the Panasonic PT-AE1000U 1080p projector in 2006, the beginning of wide screen home cinema that was competitive with a movie theater.

View attachment 84105

All this time I was still using natural ambience extraction for my surround audio playback, I never adopted Pro Logic. I liked it so much I invented a successor model called the Chase Technologies HT-1 that upgraded the QD1 by adding a center channel (A+B) which won a patent and I manufactured and sold thousands of them for $99 each. You still see them on eBay today.

I adopted Dolby Digital and DTS Surround and graduated to Dolby TrueHD and DTS Master HD on Blu-ray for both movies and live concerts at home in 2009 and never looked back. By then I was running Final Electrotats in a 5.2 channel configuration with a 111" diagonal screen I had painted on the wall with 4 coats of Screen Goo, smooth as a babies butt and always flat.. Its been a journey.

View attachment 84106

Beautiful Bob!!! Great design. You can watch a flick, then run straight to pool. Love it!!!

 

[Todd Anderson]

for me, it started at a very early age. We’re talking 1980s. My parents had a Sony Trinitron TV… I can’t remember the size but it was probably a 19 inch. We also had a beta max and then a separate all in one stereo system that was compact.

Very rudimentary. But that was the first time I realized you could begin to have a movie theater experience at home, fast-forward many years, finally out of school, finally earning some money… I started pulling myself closer and closer to having some sort of dedicated room to home theater, but it was never much. Much like many enthusiasts it has taken a long time to get to a proper dedicated space.

But thinking back, it really was that Betamax, Trinitron, and a little mini stereo system that planted a seed in my head.

I probably shouldn't have used speech to text... didn't realize so many errors had been injected into my post.