★Residential · Service

Luxury Home Theater · Kansas City.

A dedicated cinema is a room built inside a room. IntegrateIT designs and builds dedicated home cinemas across the Kansas City metro from Overland Park, Kansas. The parts that make one are almost all construction: a decoupled, sealed shell so the film stays in the room; an acoustic design with a measured target rather than a panel order; seating laid out to sight lines before it is laid out to a furniture plan; a screen and a projector chosen against each other; and every piece of equipment out of sight and out of earshot. Then a calibration that ends the project. Control4 Platinum Dealer with a Control4 Certified Showroom, Crestron Elite Partner, Lutron Certified Installer, CEDIA member. Phone (913) 804-7575 or office@integrateit.tech.

This page is about the room. If you are still choosing a company rather than designing a cinema, the nine things worth demanding in writing and the seven questions to ask every bidder are on our home theater page, which is the better place to start.

What “dedicated” buys that money alone does not

The difference between a dedicated cinema and an expensive media room is not the equipment list. It is that the room has one job, so nothing in it has to be negotiated with daylight, with a furniture plan, with sight lines to the kitchen, or with a ceiling that belongs to the rest of the house. That single fact is what unlocks the things you cannot retrofit later: a floor plan sized to the screen rather than the reverse, a riser for the second row, light that goes all the way to nothing, a ceiling we designed instead of one we inherited, and acoustic treatment that is part of the architecture rather than hidden behind it.

It is also why this project is mostly construction. By the time the boxes arrive, the result has already been decided by the framing, the ceiling assembly, the door, the riser and the electrical. A room where all of that was done right and the equipment is merely good will outperform a room with a spectacular equipment list and none of it — every time, and not by a small margin. That is the single most useful thing we can tell anyone at the start of this conversation.

Isolation: keeping the film in the room

Sound leaves a theater two ways — through structure, and through gaps — and both are solved during framing rather than afterwards. In a Kansas City basement the joist ceiling is the main path, because it transmits directly into the kitchen or family room above; the fix is decoupling it, with resilient channel or isolation clips and hat channel, a second layer of drywall with damping compound between the layers, and no unplanned penetrations through the assembly. Poured concrete walls, which most of these basements have, are already an excellent boundary and do a great deal of this work for free.

The door is the other half, and it is the one that quietly undoes the ceiling. A hollow door with a gap beneath it will leak more than the entire assembly you just paid for, so a dedicated room gets a solid-core door with a full perimeter seal. After that: ducts lined and routed so the supply is not a speaking tube between rooms; the mechanical room kept behind a wall and a door so the furnace and the sump pump are not part of the soundtrack; and the equipment rack in a ventilated closet on its own circuit, never in the theater, where its fans would set the room’s noise floor.

Isolation and acoustics are different problems that get confused constantly: isolation is about what the neighbours and the bedroom above hear, acoustics is about what you hear. The room gets a CEDIA RP-22 §4.2.3 acoustic design with an RT60 target of 0.30–0.45 seconds at 500 Hz, predicted before the build and validated with a sweep after it. The full method — first-reflection absorption, corner traps, rear diffusion and the ratio between them — is on our theater acoustic treatment page.

Seating tiers and sight lines

We set the main seat before anything else, because the screen size, the speaker angles, the riser and the eventual calibration are all referenced to it. Then the rows are laid out so that nobody in the second row is watching over a head, which in practice means a rise of roughly seven to twelve inches for the back row, worked against the real seat height and the screen centre using CEDIA RP-22 §3.2 geometry rather than taken from a table.

The riser is also the element that fights a basement ceiling hardest, which is why it is settled early: every inch of rise is an inch of headroom the back row gives up, and the overhead speaker layer still has to live above and outside the seating. It gets built solid rather than hollow, and it carries its wiring, its step lighting and any tactile transducers inside it rather than beside it. Row spacing, seat width, and whether the front row is recliners or a sofa are design decisions made with you and the interior designer — the geometry is ours, the furniture is a conversation.

Screen, projection and the audio layout

The screen and the projector are one decision, made after the room. The room sets the largest screen the sight lines and the wall will carry; the screen sets the throw distance and how much light the projector has to deliver; the screen material sets what the calibration is working against. Doing these in the wrong order is how a room ends up with a projector chosen from a review and a screen that does not suit it.

In a dedicated room the default is a perforated acoustically transparent screen with the centre channel directly behind the picture, so dialogue comes from the mouths on screen instead of from below the frame. We carry and install Stewart Filmscreen for the screen and Sony and JVC laser projection for the light, specified by room rather than by brochure. Masking is the detail most often left out and the one that most makes a room feel like a cinema: a wide cinema-ratio screen with panels that close in for standard-ratio material, so there is never a grey band beside the picture.

The audio layout is drawn from the seating outward in the same way — bed channels at ear height, subwoofers placed by measurement rather than by cabinetry, and an overhead layer sized to the ceiling the room can actually give. How those layouts are chosen, and why six overhead channels in a room that can only place four properly is a downgrade, is on our Dolby Atmos page.

For the source and the processing, two relationships are worth stating precisely because the words are not interchangeable. We are an authorized Kaleidescape dealer for the Kansas City metro — Kaleidescape is sold only through custom-installation dealers, and it is the source that hands a reference room the lossless soundtrack rather than a compressed stream of it. And we carry and install Trinnov processors — a line we carry and install under distribution rather than one we hold our own dealer agreement on, so we do not describe ourselves as authorized for it. We specify it, install it, and calibrate the room around it.

Finishes, and everything you should not be able to see

In a finished cinema the only objects in the room are the screen and the seats. Everything else is either behind something or inside something. Acoustic panels become stretched-fabric wall systems built to the room’s dimensions, so the treatment is the wall finish rather than a set of rectangles hung on it. The front three speakers sit behind the screen. Surround and overhead speakers are in-wall and in-ceiling, trimmed and painted to disappear. The rack is in a ventilated closet on its own circuit, and the projector is in a hush box or a soffit where its fan is not part of the mix.

The lighting is a design element rather than a utility: step and riser lighting, sconces or cove, and a starlight fiber-optic ceiling where the design calls for one, all on a scene rather than on switches. We are a Lutron Certified Installer, and the last ten percent of the dimming curve is where a theater’s contrast lives — a room that can only dim to a glow is a room with a permanently grey black level. The scenes themselves run on the control processor with programming done in house, so one press starts the projector, drops the screen, closes the masking, sets the lighting and puts the processor in the right mode. A reference room operated with three remotes is a programming failure, and it is the failure we are most often called in to undo.

Where the display is a television rather than a projector, or where a second screen has to vanish into millwork, the concealment techniques are on our TV mounting and concealment page.

Working with the architect, the builder and the designer

On a room like this we are usually one of four parties, and joining late costs more than joining early — not in fees, but in what can still be changed. At the schematic stage the decisions still on the table are the ones that matter most: where the room sits relative to bedrooms, what the finished ceiling height will be after the mechanicals take their share, which direction the joists run, where the main trunk goes, whether there is a rack closet with ventilation and a dedicated circuit, and which walls get built differently from the rest of the basement. By framing, most of those have been answered by default.

So we issue coordination drawings rather than an equipment list, mark our devices on the architect’s sheets, and run rough-in on the builder’s schedule instead of after it. With the interior designer the conversation is the opposite one: how the room disappears — fabric, finish, trim, and where the sight lines land. We keep pages for each of those relationships: for architects, for builders and for designers. If the cinema is one room inside a larger whole-estate scope, that project shape is on our luxury home automation page.

One local note worth putting in the schedule early: Overland Park, Leawood, Olathe, Lenexa and Kansas City, Missouri each run their own building department, and somebody has to pull the electrical permit for the dedicated circuits. Your proposal should say who.

How the project runs, design to calibration

1. Site walk and measurement. Finished ceiling height, joist direction and depth, column locations, the trunk line, the panel and the path back to it. No drawing starts before this, because every number in the design depends on it.
2. Room design. Isolation assembly, acoustic design and RT60 target, seating and sight lines, screen size and projector, speaker layout, lighting and control — settled together, because each one constrains the others. You see the room before it exists rather than an equipment list.
3. Coordination. Drawings to the architect, builder, electrician and mechanical trades, with our devices marked on their sheets. Inclusions and exclusions printed side by side, so the framing, drywall, dedicated circuits, seating and permit are visibly in or visibly out.
4. Rough-in. Wiring, backing, speaker boxes, conduit, the rack closet and the dedicated circuits, on the builder’s schedule. This is the stage that cannot be redone later, so it is the stage we are strictest about.
5. Finish and treatment. Screen, projector, fabric wall system, trim, lighting, riser and seating. The room stops being a construction site and becomes a room.
6. Programming. Scenes written in house rather than assembled from defaults — one press to start the film, one to pause the room, one for the interval.
7. Calibration, from the seats. After the seating and the treatment are in: per-channel levels, distances and crossovers, subwoofer integration by measurement, then room correction on what is left; brightness, gamma, white balance, colour and the projector aligned to the screen. The detail is on our calibration page, and the settings are written down and left with you.
8. Handover and support. Documentation, a walkthrough with whoever actually uses the room, then a five-year workmanship warranty running from the final invoice, manufacturer warranties on the equipment, and our support for as long as you own the system.

The general version of that sequence, across every kind of project we run, is on how a project runs. We do not publish price bands for a cinema, because two rooms that look identical from the doorway can be very different projects; what moves the number is in what drives the cost of a home theater. We give a fixed price after a no-cost site walk, not a range by email — we cannot see your joists from here.

Common questions