The short answer: the dedicated cinemas we take on start at around £100,000, and a fully specified reference room goes well beyond that. The long answer is more useful, because the interesting question isn't the number — it's what moves the number, and where the money actually goes.

Why the range is so wide

Two cinemas can share the same equipment list and end up tens of thousands of pounds apart, because a dedicated cinema is a construction project before it is an equipment purchase. The number is decided by the room: what state the shell is in, how much acoustic work the geometry demands, what the ceiling allows, how far services have to travel, how many seats the room genuinely supports. A garage conversion that needs a dropped ceiling, a rebuilt front wall and a full rewire is a different project from a room that arrives as a clean, dry, rectangular shell — with the same speakers in both.

This is why we are wary of price-per-room figures quoted in the abstract, our own included. A number that ignores the shell work is not a price; it is the deposit on a disappointment.

Where the money goes

In a room done properly, the spend spreads across five places, and only two of them are visible in a showroom demonstration.

  • The shell and the trades. Structure, isolation, HVAC, electrical work, joinery. On difficult rooms this can rival the equipment spend — and it is the part that cannot be upgraded later without starting again.
  • Acoustic treatment. Bass trapping, absorption and diffusion, designed against measurement rather than guesswork. This is the difference between a cinema and a loud room. We design and build treatment in-house, cut to the room's actual geometry.
  • The audio system. Speakers, amplification, processing. This scales further than most buyers expect — which is precisely why the specification should come after the acoustic plan, not before it.
  • Picture. Projector, screen, and on reference rooms outboard video processing and motorised masking. Commercial-grade projection is a genuine step over consumer kit, and it is priced like one.
  • Calibration and finishing. The hand-work at the end — measurement, alignment, tuning — that makes everything upstream perform as specified. We never outsource it.

The order protects the budget

The most expensive mistake in this category is not overspending; it is spending in the wrong order. A room that buys its equipment first and discovers its acoustics afterwards pays twice — once for the kit, once for the remedial work that lets the kit perform. Our process runs acoustic plan first, equipment specification second, costed scheme third, and you see the full number at design stage, before anything is ordered. We won't quote a number we can't defend.

A rule of thumb, honestly given

If the budget for a dedicated, acoustically treated, properly calibrated cinema is meaningfully below six figures, the honest advice is usually a very good media room instead — a different room with different compromises, and we've written about how to choose between the two. If the project is at or beyond that line, the next step costs nothing: tell us about the room, and we will come back within two working days with a straight view on what your budget can build.