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The Ticket Line Starts Here Home theaters are reinventing a night at the movies - from a $6 million investment to a home soundtrack 
To say that Jeremy Kipnis is passionate about his home entertainment system would be a grave understatement. That's because Kipnis, who heads up Kipnis Studios in Redding, Conn., has a six-million-dollar home theater. That's right: $6,000,000. But this is no ordinary home theater. The Kipnis Studio Standard features an 18-by-10 foot lab-grade screen, an 8.8 sound field, and a Sony projector that's more than twice as powerful as one you might find at your local cinema. "As you can imagine, this didn't just start as a whim and a fancy to design something that's over the top and that costs a lot of money," says Kipnis, who estimates he spends five-to-six hours a day in his mega-theater. "I've been looking forward to this moment since about the age of four or five." While not everyone is as gung-ho as Kipnis when it comes to home-entertainment systems, the market is growing and expected to boom. A new report from Parks Associates' projects that the U.S. home theater market will nearly double by the year 2012, with total revenue amounting to more than $11 billion. "People are spending more money on entertainment systems for their homes, almost thinking of them as appliances or as infrastructure," says Bill Ablondi, director of home systems research for the Dallas-based market research and consulting firm. More and more Americans are finding that a home-theater upgrade is an attractive addition, Ablondi says. As the price of big-screen televisions continues to go down, the appeal of features like surround-sound stereo systems has increased as well. But the escalating home-theater market isn't likely to threaten the institution that is a night at the movies. "I don't know specifically if people have actually stopped going out to the (movie) theater or live performances," Ablondi says. "Something tells me they see the home as augmenting that experience." While the visual aspects of home entertainment are enticing, it is the audio side that's prompting the majority of current sales. Nowadays, Ablondi says, people want to have access to their music anywhere, and that means multi-room audio systems is the popular trend. "It's one thing to walk around with earbuds in your ears, but when you're at home many people just choose to have the music be a part of the environment, in the background." So what's next for the home theater world? Media storage systems - like the Apple TV - that feed the video and audio systems are becoming standard at the high end. According to Ablondi, such storage systems are should become the industry norm within the next five years. |
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