Home Theatre near you

New South Wales restricts musical instruments and electrically amplified sound equipment, which covers a home theatre, by reference to whether the noise can be heard inside a neighbouring home. Legal Aid NSW states the restricted hours as between midnight and 8am on Friday, Saturday and any day before a public holiday, and between 10pm and 8am every other day. Outside those hours the general law about offensive noise under the Protection of the Environment Operations Act 1997 still applies, so late is regulated by a clock and the rest of the time is regulated by reasonableness.

Every state and territory has its own version of this, with different hours and different enforcement paths, so check the rule where you live rather than assuming the New South Wales times are national. What is consistent across the country is the structure: a neighbour complaint goes to the council or the police, not to a court, and it goes there long before anyone measures anything.

In an apartment or townhouse there is a second layer. The scheme's by-laws will contain their own noise provision, and any work that fixes or modifies a common property wall, floor or ceiling needs the owners corporation's approval before it starts. In a strata home theatre the approval conversation comes before the design, not after it.

Australian daylight is the argument. A projector produces a far larger image for the money and is unbeatable in a room that can be made genuinely dark, which in practice means a room with no western glass, or one with blockout coverings on everything. In a bright living room facing the afternoon sun, the same projector looks washed out and the household quietly stops using it.

A large television is brighter, sharper in ambient light, simpler to live with and has no lamp or filter to service. What it cannot do is scale: past a certain size the price climbs steeply and the delivery and wall-fixing problems climb with it. For a dedicated dark room a projector is usually still the better experience; for anywhere else in an Australian house, a television usually wins.

If you are on the fence, decide the light control first. A room that will get blockout blinds, a dark ceiling and a door that shuts can take a projector. A room where the family will want the blinds up at four in the afternoon cannot, and no amount of lumens fixes it.

A home theatre is a sealed, dark, insulated box containing several hundred watts of electronics and a few warm bodies, and it is being operated in a country where summer evenings are often still above thirty degrees. The heat has nowhere to go. Rooms that were comfortable in a Melbourne winter become unusable in a Perth or Brisbane February, and the usual reaction is to open the door, which undoes the noise and light control the room was built for.

Air conditioning a theatre has its own problem: the fan noise is in the room you have spent money making quiet. The workable answers are a system with a genuinely quiet low-speed setting, a ducted supply with generously sized ducts and turning vanes, or a unit serving the room from outside the acoustic envelope. Whichever you choose, it belongs in the design with the acoustics, not bolted on afterwards.

Move the equipment out of the room where you can. A rack of amplifiers in a cupboard on the other side of the wall removes both the heat and the fan noise at once, and it is far easier to do while the walls are open than later.