Any Home Theater Suggestions?

[RoboCop2001]

Hello everyone, I've been reading this Forum for months now and have gotten several great ideas from the information that floats this site. I guess it's time for me to throw my name in the hat for any creative suggestions or ideas any of you may have.

A couple of months ago my wife and I decided that we were going to make some additions to our home. One of those additions is building a home theater. We finally got the OK from the HOA and have obtained all the permits and have hired the contractor. We are now in the designing phase with the architect.

The room that will be built is located on the ground floor and will measure approximately (interior measurement)13 feet wide by 26 feet deep with a 9 foot ceiling. The size of the addition is our only limitation. We can't go any larger and I can't see why we would want to go any smaller. Approximately 13 feet into the room we are planning to have the floor drop to allow a stadium type sitting arrangement. We don't yet know oh much of a drop we should go with. There will be no windows built into the addition and the only entrance will be from a single door (or double doors, we haven't decided) from the rest of the house. Lighting will be supplied from nine 6 inch recessed lights arranged in three rows of three with three seperate dimming sliders to control seperately the front row, middle row and rear row of lights. The floor will be carpeted and the walls will be drywall with a material of sound dampening applied behind. The ceiling will be sound dampened as well. At this time we are going with a beige color for the carpet and walls. The ceiling will be white. The room will have a dedicated air conditioning system.

The furniture is planned to be a set of Berkline model 090 straight arm theater seats. One row of three seats covered in beige leather with PowerRecline and ButtKickers. This will be the back row (elevated row) seating. The front row (lower row) will be a Berkline sofa with end recline and covered in beige leather to match the model 090 seats.

We have decided to go Blu-Ray (that's was a no brainer), 1080p with 7.1 surround sound utilizing all HDMI hook ups.

Equipment: Here is what we are looking at. Blu-Ray player will be Sony Playstation 3 80gb player. This is the only item that we have purchased so far (pre-sale from BestBuy). We plan to add a dedicated Blu-Ray player once the technology surpasses what the PS3 has to offer. This will plug into an A/V receiver, right now we are looking at the Pioneer Elite VSX-82 TSX receiver. Video image will come from a Mitsubishi HC5000 (white case) LCD HD Projector. We will utilize a Sanus model VMPR1 ceiling mount. Video image will display on a Optoma 120 inch Grey Wolf II fixed screen model DF-GWII9120F. Audio will come from sets of ceiling and wall mounted SpeakerCraft speakers. AIM8THREEs for the front, center, and rear speakers. MT THREEs for the side speakers. The subwoofer will be our JBL SB12 powered sub woofer that we are currently using in our den. We will replace the sub woofer if this one is inadiquite.

At this point all connection will be via HDMI and will utilize the best shielded cable and speakerwire we can find. We haven't looked into the surge protectors yet.

I plan to post images of before, during, and after project stages.

Any way, what are your thoughts...what suggestions do you have? Is there anything you would do different? Is there anything we haven't thought about?

All constructive criticism and suggestion welcome.