The Home Theater of the Mind

I have a confession: I didn’t really manage to buy my dream house. I got close! Closer than I ever could have imagined. It’s almost churlish to complain about anything. Views of gorgeous and spooky New England forest turning brilliant gold and red with the arrival or autumn? A beautifully renovated kitchen? Heated floors? Space for a dedicated home office? The towel bar by the shower even heats up, for crying out loud. I couldn’t really ask for more, could I?

And yet… the living room.  With all those views. The fireplace. The spacious open-plan flow into the dining area and kitchen. It’s beautiful. Maybe even stylish.

But totally lousy for a home theater system.

I’ll be sitting there, the fresh air blowing through the patio doors to the deck. The rattle of leaves fluttering down to the floor. Dogs blissfully asleep by the hearth, hummingbirds fluttering around outside the window. I’ll think, “Just look at those screen reflections. I need blackout curtains.”

Leaning back on the couch with a dog nestling herself against my chest I’ll look up toward the vaulted timbered ceiling, and start tracing paths for speaker wire. “Need to get some height channels up there. Where the hell am I supposed to put the rears?” In my heart, I already know the answer. There’s really only one position that would be perfect for them: the dining room table and the kitchen counter. It’d look like crap but oh, how it would sound.

I could, if I pressed, make a rational argument for a great home theater setup. For the amount of time a lot of us spend listening to music or watching TV, it’s probably one of the best places to commit a little more money and effort. There’s evidence that a lot of us already spend too much time with headphones and earbuds, so maybe it’s even healthy to have an engaging, capable system that isn’t blasting your eardrums at point-blank. Besides, this is one of the few places where you can avoid the short lifespans and planned obsolescence of most electronics. A good set of speakers will work with an amplifier built forty years ago and they’ll work with one built forty years from today. You’ll never wake up one day to find your wired speakers have gotten bricked by an update, or are now useless because they can’t connect to wifi.

On the other hand, sometimes I think real reason I love this stuff is nostalgia. My parents remodeled our home while I was in high school. In that process my room shrank quite a bit, under the theory that I was going to be in college soon anyway and they needed a bit more space. The results was a home that never quite felt like mine again, more like a sublet. In fact, the only thing I really liked about the new house was the home theater they built almost by accident in the basement.

See, my parents are in many ways more suggestible than I am and they made a dangerous mistake during the remodeling process. They visited The Little Guys, a home theater store in Chicagoland that had some of the most grating ads on Chicago sports radio. Rapid-fire recitations of equipment, promotional sales, and installation services would be interrupted by a guy with a broad, exaggerated Chicago accent huffing, “Tha LEEDLE GUYZ” into a microphone every ten seconds of the ad spot before the ad mercifully concluded and you’d go back to listening to a group of ex-Bears players exploring the outer limits of despair and delusion.

The ads must have worked, though, because it was the only place my parents could think of when they wanted to find home theater experts. Over the course of an afternoon, a salesman convinced them they needed a 55-inch 1080i Mitsubishi television at a time when that was the absolute cutting edge and there was precious little HD content to show on it. 

Then he got them to buy a huge Klipsch 5.1 sound system built around a pair of RF-5 floorstanders that would probably have broken the foundations of the house if it had ever gone past 30% of its max volume. My parents installed the system downstairs… and then mostly used it for movies on Friday nights and sports on weekend afternoons. They found the system fussy to use, and they didn’t like the bunker-like vibe of the home theater room as much as they thought they would. It wasn’t long before there was a small TV upstairs so they did not have to choose between watching sports or seeing the sun. I thought they were fools for this at the time, but I understand the dilemma better now. 

There’s a risk in creating a space dedicated to the singular purpose of a hobby: as much as you might love that hobby, that space will also isolate you. That has some abstract appeal:  we all need space to get away and have time to ourselves. But a lot of us probably need less of it than we think, and after a few hours spent in our personal Fortresses of Solitude, we will be eager to return to the chatter and chores that comprise life in the rest of the home.

However, I’m not sure this is an argument against investing in those personal spaces. I often find that having the ability to retreat obviates the need to actually do so. Choosing to spend time with your family is a joy. Being unable to spend time away from them can be a portal to hell. So don’t let anyone tell you that you won’t get use out of that home theater, game room, or workshop. Everyone is going to benefit from their existence, even if they’re only in use a fraction of the time.