Three Reasons a Dedicated Home Theater Will Improve Life

To a home theater enthusiast, creating and owning a dedicated home theater is the dream. A room, whose function is solely to watch movies and TV (and maybe to play video games), is the ultimate. But for most people, this is a huge waste of space in homes that are often starved for more room. How do you justify giving up a whole room for just watching TV? We’ve got three reasons that creating and owning a dedicated home theater can make your life better.

Lowers Noise Pollution

I don’t know about you, but I been in homes where the TV is on nearly 24/7. There is one in the kitchen, one in the living room, and they are both tuned to the owner’s favorite news station and playing continuously. It’s fine if it is your home and you are alone, but try to have a conversation? Forget about it! You can’t hear yourself think in that environment.

Now, we have phones and tablets and computers that can all play content in any room. But separating the TV into its own room eliminates that source of noise. It creates a space where, if someone wants to watch TV, it doesn’t disrupt everyone else. While the TV may be loud in the home theater, it doesn’t have to overtake everything that is happening in the kitchen, dining room, and other living spaces.

Separates TV Time and Family Time

When you have a dedicated home theater, the rest of the house is for everything else. When you have people over for dinner, and you want to separate the adults and the kids, you can tell the kids to go put on a movie while the adults sip their wine and talk. When you are having dinner with your family, there is nothing else in the room that might distract from that time together.

In our home, dinner time is sacrosanct. We all sit down together and eat. It’s a time to talk, share stories about your day, and for your 14-year-old to roll their eyes at everything you say. When I was growing up, my mother tried to do the same thing. But there was a problem. We ate at 5 pm and Star Trek reruns started at 5 pm. She fought it for a while but my siblings and father eventually won out. We watched Star Trek during dinner. Not every dinner, but many of them.

With no TV in our kitchen or living spaces, when we are anywhere but the home theater, there is no distraction from the time we are spending together. Again, there are computers and phones, but the lack of a TV is a huge plus.

Makes Watching TV an Experience

Going into your home theater should be an experience. It is dedicated for a reason! In our home, when our pediatricians ask us about our children’s screen time, we can rarely say that watch more than an hour or two a day. That’s because going into the home theater is an event! People announce it.

We should be intentional about our screen time. It should be a deal. With a dedicated home theater, it is. We all sit down together and watch. Sure, sometimes the kids (or the adults) will watch something by themselves. But the vast majority of the time we are doing it together. Having a dedicated room not only frees up the rest of the house for other activities and interactions, but also makes watching TV an experience. It makes it special.

Conclusion

There are a lot of reasons to want a dedicated home theater. Sure, it is easier to place your subwoofers, you can buy smaller speakers, and you have an easier time setting up a full Atmos system. But it can also improve the quality of your life in the rest of your home. Creating a space for your TV and then eliminating TVs from the rest of your home frees up the rest of the house for other activities. In our home, we’ve found that eliminating the distraction of the TV from the living spaces encourages conversations and interaction between family members.