I was wondering what software people are using to create Home Theater layouts. I did see a company that can create 3D layouts pretty cool.

Thanks

D-Tools with Visio Pro

when it was more work related, Visio, it is a good design SW, though at least at the time, there was no 3D rendering (so good for placement and to see layout and do work but did not look fancy.

For home, I bought Punch Pro many years ago and it works well, but any version of it should do the job. It is a pseudo architecture program, so a bit of overkill, but not too expensive and one day you might use it more.

I use the Cara Room Acoustic 2.2 Plus Program. This is a serious multi-reflection room acoustic program and it will, of course allow you to layout a HT system and the room and room furniture and wall/ceiling treatments. It does listening and speaker position optimization, sound field calculations, and what is called an "Auralization" calculation which measures reverberation or ambiance. It gives recommendation for "livening" or "deadening" the room if needed. It moves the speakers and listener around within defined boxes to optimize the sound field at the listeners position.

You can use its built in speaker data base or build your own speaker, which I did for my Definitive BP 7000SC towers with built in subwoofers. The anechoic response of this Cara build up speaker looks remarkably like the anechoic measurements done by speaker reviewers on real speakers. I measured the anechoic response of this Cara build up virtual speaker in a virtual anechoic room built again by Cara. It also has an extensive list of furniture with different covering treatments and all sorts of wall, floor and ceiling materials as well as wall treatments for sound absorption.

It's perhaps a bit of over kill for a simple hobbyist (me) who is not a professional and interpreting some of the calculation results indeed requires a bit of understanding of acoustics and absorbance behavior of materials.

Also it is very calculation intensive so if your computer is slow forget it. And if you over define the room with too many surfaces (polygons) it can take days to do the sound field calculations. It allows you to vary the number of reflections allowed in the sound field calculations but at least six are needed to get an accurate sound field calculation. You can build a room up with approximately 50 room materials, several hundred room polygons and over 500 edges and still get the sound field done in eight to ten hours with a fast computer. The sound field calculates the sound pressure level around the room across the audible spectrum from 5Hz to 20,000 Hz and gives the results for the sound field (pressure) in the room in a neat 3D graphic animation that shows the room and runs the animation from 5 to 20,000 Hz. Reducing the number of reflections or simplifying the room can reduce number crunching time to something more reasonable. Since I'm experimenting with only my own HT's and time is not critical I let it run overnight.

And It's only about $100, and I've had almost as much fun tinkering with it as with programming the MX980 remote.
Keith

If anyone is interested in this software read this.

[Link: hometheaterhifi.com]

and look here:

[Link: rhintek.com]

Keith

Mid-Atlantic has a great rack design tool on their website. I use it all the time.