Flooring Ideas for Home Theatres

Home theatres are rapidly gaining popularity for the home. Adding a home theatre comes with a host of considerations such as audio and video specifications based on room size, seating and décor. But before evening thinking about lights, camera, action – the home theatre flooring needs to be a top priority.

Questioning which flooring option works the best for a home theatre is a bit of a trick question, as there is really no one simple answer. While it does not appear to be an obvious thought, there is a big link between sound quality and flooring types. So if you are planning on investing significant money into your home theatre sound, then it is essential to level out the acoustical balance.

Reverberation is the sound that stays in the room after the source of the sound stops. Like in a movie if there is an explosion, the explosion sound slowly drifts away from the room. Sound rebounds off timber flooring easier and will travel further so a home theatre set up with hardwood flooring could easily turn a sound system that cost you big bucks into an audio catastrophe.

When sound waves spring freely off hard surfaces, you will also see a huge impact on the audio precision. Luxury vinyl or laminate flooring provides a slower sound decay and will have a booming quality – for example when you hear music in a gym – accessories such as rugs are very carefully placed to remove the worse of the reverb.

The best option and the most frequently used floor for a home theatre room is carpet. Carpet grips sound and will prevent excessive reverberation around the room. You can consider options such as the wall to wall carpeting or carpet tiles to improve sound clarity from the sound system as it travels through the room.

Although carpet is the best option for flooring your home theatre, there are still a few factors that must be considered to turn good into great sound. Acoustically speaking, the bass from the sound system can make carpet a poor choice if it is not correctly paired to the room’s set up. Bass frequencies travel low to the ground and carpet will help absorb these frequencies better. Subwoofers, traditionally speaking, sit on the floor so that the bass has a greater impact in the room, but if your floor doesn’t take to these frequencies easily it will result in poor sound clarity in the high frequencies.

We are all familiar with needing to keep the remote handy to move the volume up or down as the sound swells and drops on the television. With carpeted floors, you won’t miss important dialogue and won’t need to always have the remote on standby to modify the volume every time there is a dramatic moment in a movie or when the crowd goes wild in the footy.

If you have your heart set on a specific flooring that doesn’t easily come to mind as a flooring option for a home theatre room, you are best to either do some online research or consider talking to one of our flooring experts.

Ceramic tile however is not usually a recommended flooring consideration for the home theatre. This is because of the reverberation again. Adding rugs to the floors and acoustic tiles to the walls will be the best option for you to make the best of a bad situation if ceramic tiling is already placed in the room designated to be the home theatre.

If in doubt, carpet is the recommended option for your home theatre flooring. Carpet is soft underfoot, warm and visually gives you a chilled out feel. It’s flexible depending on the style and material and you can dress it up or down with accessories. They do use carpet in movie theatres too which for a home theatre will also deliver the best results long term! The only difference is that you’ll have to do the vacuuming after snacking on popcorn.