Tips To Build A Home Theater Stage.

Here are tips you should follow when building your own home theater stage

A home theater stage isn't only visually appealing, but it can also provide a very useful function.

Fill it with sand

A hollow stage will resonate if you put speakers or a subwoofer on it. You'll find this really distracting so solve it now during construction. If the stage is on a concrete slab, or in your basement, you can fill the stage with sand to weigh it down. Thats where you'll get most of your mass. Filling it with sand will absorb most of the sound energy driven into the stage.

You first want to line the inside cavities of the stage with a plastic liner to prevent the sand from leaking out. DON'T go cheap and use plastic drop sheets used for painting. That stuff is too thin and will stretch and rip under the sand's weight. Use a polyethylene sheeting product with a thickness of at least 4 MIL. Its color doesn't matter.

Check your hardware store and look for products from Tyco Plastics or Warp Bros. but other manufacturers are fine too. If you're putting the stage on a regular floor (a 2nd floor, for example), you can just fill in the cavities with a sound proofing material like Safe'n Sound to avoid putting too much weight on your home's structure.

Use a thick top shelf

Building a thick top shelf on the stage will provide plenty of strength and rigidity. If there's any flexing, no matter how small, you loose energy and your speakers and subwoofer won't sound as powerful as they could be. Mount one or two layers of 3/4" plywood or MDF on top of the stage and screw it down really tightly. If you're using two layers, one screw every square foot is good. The point is to avoid any squeaks between both layers of plywood.

Other's have resorted to putting tar paper or some other product between the layers, but that's not really necessary if you screw the layers down well.

Don't attach the stage to your walls

As heavy as your home theater stage will be, it's still going to vibrate a little bit. Prevent those vibrations from traveling to your walls by keeping the stage at least 1/4" from any walls. This will isolate it from the surrounding structure.

Isolate the stage from your floor

Separating your stage from the rest of your floor isn't going to make or break your theater. Some hard core enthusiasts prefer to isolate their stage from the floor to minimize any vibration. This makes the stage as acoustically "dead" as possible.

Place your stage on a rubber material like Acoustik or AcoustiBlok. Any part of the stage (including sand/liners) should be sitting on this acoustic material.