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How to Measure and Maximize the Space Needed for Seats in your Home Theater
 An early task in creating a killer and comfortable home theater is ensuring your home theater room is big enough to fit your equipment, home theater furniture and audience. To do this, you need to have an idea of the audience you are planning on entertaining. This should be the first step when considering a home theater. Select a room that is large enough to fit your crowd comfortably. Once you have a room and an audience size in mind, you can begin to determine the optimal space needed for the best audio and visual experience. There is a relationship between your audio and visual equipment and the distance to your home theater furniture. Here are a few rules you can follow to ensure your experience is top notch.
Ideally, everyone who is watching the television should have a great view. How far away you will place your seats from the screen will depend on the size of your TV. A good rule to follow is set forth by the Society of Motion Pictures and Television Engineers (or SMPTE). This rule states that the entire screen of your television should fit within a 30 degree field of view in front of you. To calculate this you can use the general formula of taking the width of your TV and multiplying this by two to get the minimum accepted distance. For the maximum distance, multiply the width by five. If your TV is 40 inches wide (not diagonal width), then you should optimally place your seats between 80 and 200 inches away or between 6.5 and 16 feet. I would strike a balance of around ten feet but this could also depend on the clarity of your TV, or how well the HD looks in the room. If you are deciding to permanently affix the seating to the floor, make sure you test out the view first.
 Buyers should keep this formula in mind when buying their home theater equipment. A common amateur mistake is to buy the biggest television or projector screen a customer can afford without ensuring that they will have enough room to position their home theater furniture the proper distance from the screen. When you are shopping, make sure to write down measurements. Have the size of your room on hand. Write down the dimensions of the furniture needed to comfortably sit your audience. All of these home theater elements need to work in harmony as one system and being cognizant of home theater spacing is a key element to guaranteeing this.
Your home theater furniture should always be positioned in an arc to optimize audience viewing angles and creating a tiered system is a great way to accommodate a large number of seats without sacrificing the viewing quality of the audience. As to the spacing between rows, allow for approximately 20 inches clearance between chairs. Expressed differently, if you are making use of a movie theater sectional whose overall dept is 28 inches, than the spacing between adjacent rows measured from identical points on two rows should be 48 inches (28" + 20" clearance between rows). If you are pressed for space, the clearance between rows may be reduced slightly but the minimum for comfortable access is no less than 14 inches.
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