Top Tips for Setting Up Your Entertainment Center
As you move into your new home or rethink the main room of your existing home, the entertainment center is a 21st-century necessity. Planning out how you’ll enjoy media in this space is a bit of interior-design foresight that will pay off for years. As you start plotting, consider a few of our top tips for setting up your entertainment center.
Here Comes the Sun?
Not every setup is in a basement, far from the sun’s rays. While natural light can certainly be welcome in a family room or living room, it can come into conflict with your television screen, especially at certain hours of the day, depending on where your windows are. Try to position your new entertainment center and the furniture you’ll use to enjoy it in such a way that you won’t have to worry about the sun washing out your screen. If all else fails, look for curtains or blinds that will tastefully keep the light out.
Give Yourself Room To Expand
There used to be a joke about computers and the breakneck pace of technology: by the time you got it home from the store, it was already functionally obsolete. Back in the days of cathode rays, a well-built television set would last for years. Your grandmother probably got a good 30 years out of her Zenith. But today? TVs are the computers that are obsolete as soon as you unpack them. Television technology gets more and more sophisticated every year, and it also gets more and more affordable to have a larger and larger screen. Don’t buy a cabinet that will constrain this ever-expanding screen space. Give yourself—or your future TV—room to grow.
Think About Interior Design
Speaking of sophistication, let’s talk accoutrements. Your college-slum apartment days should be behind you—no more putting a TV on some cinderblocks and declaring it good enough to go with your salvaged pleather couch and vertical blinds. You’re an adult now, and your entertainment center, as the centerpiece of your family room, should incorporate subtle but tasteful furniture, art, and accessories. Design your TV cabinet space as something of an art piece unto itself—not just where you watch movies and sports, but a series of moving pictures for residents and guests to admire.
A Decibel Point
It’s not all about moving pictures, however. Sound plays a key role here as well. One of our top tips for setting up your entertainment center—one we’re a little surprised we find ourselves giving—is not to forget the importance of speaker placement. Ideally, you should leave room for your left speaker, right speaker, and subwoofer in your console. Televisions may be advancing by leaps and bounds each year, but internal speakers are never going to be good enough.