About Home Theater Guides
Answers you can check, and a planner that checks them in your own room.
Home Theater Guides helps people fit a TV and a sound system into a real room: the living room, the bedroom, the basement. Most advice on the subject is either a rule of thumb repeated without a source or an opinion on a forum. We try to do better on both counts.
What we make
- Room Studio, a free 3D planner. Draw your room, add real furniture and TVs at their makers’ published sizes, and it checks the viewing angle, mounting height, sightlines, glare, speaker placement, bass and echo for every seat.
- Guides that answer the question first, show the numbers behind the answer, and open Room Studio set up for that question.
- Calculators for one question at a time, using the same rules as the studio.
- Research, like our test of the common rules of thumb in 1,000 simulated rooms, and a database of TV dimensions from manufacturers’ specification pages.
How we work
- Every number has a source. Standards (SMPTE, ITU, CEDIA/CTA, the building codes), manufacturers’ manuals and spec sheets, lab measurements and published research. Each page lists its sources, and our full source list says what we use each one for.
- We label what kind of evidence it is. A standard, a manufacturer’s advice, a measurement and a rule of thumb are different things, and when sources disagree we say so rather than averaging them.
- We say when something isn’t published. If we can’t find a reliable figure (we found no published measurements of temperatures above fireplaces, for example), we say so and tell you how to measure it yourself instead of inventing one.
- We show our models’ limits. Room Studio’s checks are estimates from published geometry and acoustics; how Room Studio works explains what each one computes and what it leaves out.
- We correct mistakes. If you find one, tell us; we fix it and update the page date.
How we make money
Room Studio and the guides are free. In future we may earn commissions from retailer links on some pages; when we do, those links are marked and explained on our affiliate disclosure page. No manufacturer pays for coverage or placement, and commissions never decide what we recommend.
Privacy, in one line
Rooms you draw in Room Studio stay in your browser; we don’t have accounts and don’t receive your room unless you share a link. Details are in our privacy policy.
Questions or corrections: hello@hometheaterguides.com.