Dedicated Home Theater/Listening Room Suggestions

Ask around in virtual systems, write the owners of rooms you like and ask who did what you may find insight by DIY guys and cautions, I think having a room built for you by a pro can be a con if you are not careful. The Home Theater market has created huge profits for less then honest installers, some wont even sell gear UNLESS they do the build.

I had great results with separate circuits for digital, analog as well as for amps and powered subwoofers. I wired the entire room with JPS Labs in-wall wire and Wattgate duplex outlets. The power and silence our outstanding. Well worth the effort and cost.

Use a drop ceiling - you never know what might come up in the future, and a drop ceiling will be invaluable. Damping of it is also important.

One of the best resources I've found is http://www.acoustics101.com/

Good luck.

If you are going to the trouble of running dedicated circuits , make sure that you additionally connect them to
what is called an isolated ground . This will segregate the power from the rest of your house and eliminate any noise from other items in your home .

Try to familiarize yourself enough about isolated grounds to be able to hire a professional that actually knows how to do it ! This might seem like a no brainer but few residential electricians have any experience with this circuit . Isolated grounds are usually used in commercial applications , generally computer rooms and hospitals . I went through 3 electricians before finding one that actually knew how to install this type of circuit correctly !
Google is your friend !

You can save yourself some money by running the wire yourself and paying the professional to just make the connections . And unless you live in a sandy area , they usually don't like pounding in the ground rod either !

Good luck .

A few tips:

1) Hire an expert in acoustical engineering. I used Rives (of Rives Audio) for my dedicated two channel optimized Home Theater and I recommend him heartily.

2) A great book is "The Master Handbook of Acoustics" by F. Alton Everest. It contains everything you need to understand acoustics, but it won't give you the practical first hand experience that a degree in the subject and/or years of designing rooms in the field will give you (refer back to tip #1).

3) You can check out my AVScienceForum thread on building my own room from the Rives Audio schematics. I went with a level 2 consultation, but if you can afford to do it, I would go with the level 3. Looking back, this would have been the best choice to ensure that the utmost care was taken in all the construction. It ended up being a lot of insane work on my part to understand everything being done with the F. Alton Everest book, since I decided to General Contract my own room. I wanted to make sure everything was done according to exact specifications so that the acoustics wouldn't get botched by over-creative builders who thought they could sometimes use any material lying around to create approximations of the designs instead of using materials specifically mentioned on the schematics (or specified by myself or Rives).

4) It is better to do it right the first time, than to be unhappy with the mistakes and results that are the product of amateur/unexperienced work and design (refer to tip #1).