Most home cinema enthusiasts build a dedicated room in the home for the theater. These more advanced installations often include sophisticated acoustic design elements, including “room-in-a-room” construction that isolates sound and provides the potential for a nearly ideal listening environment. These installations are often designated as “screening rooms” to differentiate from simpler installations.

This idea can go as far as completely recreating an actual small-scale cinema, with a projector enclosed in its own projection booth, specialized furniture, curtains in front of the projection screen, movie posters, or a popcorn or vending machine with snack food and confectionery. More commonly, real dedicated home theaters pursue this to a lesser degree. Presently the days of the $100,000 and over home theater is being usurped by the rapid advances in digital audio and video technologies, which has spurred a rapid drop in prices, making a home cinema set-up more affordable today than ever before. This in turn has brought the true digital home theater experience to the doorsteps of the average person, often for the price of a luxury car. Current consumer level A/V equipment can meet and often exceed in performance the expected experience at a modern commercial theater.