When planning your home theater, the biggest decision you'll need to make is deciding its location. The best scenario is to design a home theater during the planning stages of a new home. You build a home theater in an existing home; you'll have some construction challenges and need to be creative when retrofitting the room. If space and your budget allow, consider building a new addition. You can also reconfigure a basement or garage. If neither of those options is possible, identify an existing room that is large enough to convert into a home theater. It should have room for seating and have few windows, closets and doors. A contemporary home theater needs to be able to access audio and video content from a wide array of sources including:

• Traditional cable and satellite services
• Broadcast TV
• The Internet
• Blu-ray Discs
• DVDs and CDs
• Digital and video cameras
• iPods/iPads and portable devices

Making your home theater capable of getting content from virtually any device or source is important very early in your planning. In addition, once all the devices are in the room, you will need to plan how to connect them since all wires and most devices are hidden, where they can be easily accessed or changed in the future.

Create an equipment checklist as your planning tool, shopping list and starting point for making a diagram of your home theater.