Our name is Georgia Home Theater, but it doesn’t describe all that we do. Since 1989, we have been designing and integrating custom technology solutions for homes and businesses in Atlanta and throughout the Southeastern U.S. In the early days, home theaters and audio-video systems were certainly the core of our business. But technology has advanced rapidly, and we have moved just as fast.

Fast forwarding to 2019, our company now delivers a broad array of smart home technology solutions and employs over 30 professionals, and we operate two state of the art showrooms in Marietta and Buckhead. Whether you’re looking for smart home automation, HiFi Audio, a home theater, smart security, or all of the above, we are your one-stop shop for the best equipment, solutions, and services.

Want to get a flavor of what we can do as Metro Atlanta’s leading smart home company? Just read on to learn more.

Audio enthusiasts know the Bowers & Wilkins brand (B&W) as one of the finest names in loudspeakers. For over half a century, the company has produced transducers of uncompromised quality, starting with the first hand-built units in the back of an electrical shop in West Sussex, England. Bowers & Wilkins speakers are known for reproducing accurate, natural sound – the type that music lovers here in Metro Atlanta appreciate because it does not color the audio, presenting the music in the way the artist intended.

The 800 Series Diamond line is part of B&W’s flagship range that is a full line of speakers, from bookshelf to center-channel to floor standing models, addressing any audio application with aplomb. Unlike other manufacturers, B&W doesn’t believe that speakers are designed specifically for music or movies. Any speaker should be able to handle the dynamic range of both, and the 800 Series Diamond is right at home in a high-end custom home theater as well as a dedicated 2-channel listening room. The 800 Series can deliver the thundering, low-end bass needed for movie effects, while also making Nora Jones' sultry voice float in the room as if she was live.

Read on to learn more about some of the B&W 800 Series Diamond speakers, the perfect upgrade for your Metro Atlanta home cinema or listening room.

For over 15 years, Control4 has been a leader in home automation technology. One of its greatest strengths is the breadth of its business. The company does business in 100 countries, its systems interoperate with over 12,000 consumer electronics products, and its channels include 5,700 custom integrators, distributors and integrators. When you choose Control4 home automation for your Roswell or Metro Atlanta house, you know you’re choosing home control technology that will be around for years to come.

Georgia Home Theater is proud to be a Control4 Diamond Dealer and Certified Showroom. We can offer the full line of Control4 home automation solutions from controlling a home theater to automating your lights, motorized shades, lighting, climate control, and much more. We pride ourselves on our service and in delivering a fully integrated solution that works the way you want it.

Recently, Control4 has introduced new capabilities to its system that put even more power in your hands. With the popularity of smart devices, consumers have grown more comfortable with the concepts of controlling smart devices under different scenarios and making them work better together. Traditionally, expert integrators like us would program this automation, as it could get very technical. Control4 decided to open up more of the power of its smart home control systems, making it easy for customers to customize their own automation routines. Control4 calls this new feature “When >> Then.”

You don’t need to use When >> Then to harness the power of Control4 home automation in your Metro Atlanta home. But if you are a bit more technical, and you like to have precise control over many functions in your home, When >> Then is a powerful – yet easy to use – tool to customize your environment. Read on to learn more about the exciting possibilities with When >> Then and Control4’s innovative 4Sight services.

This blog has now been updated; you can view this updated post here.

Home automation makes controlling your home a simple affair. A touchscreen or your phone can command lights, audio, TVs, thermostats, and more to do your bidding. Sometimes, however, our hands are occupied. Sometimes our phones are recharging, or taking it out will immerse us in the thirty notifications we missed. At those times, we might just want to bark a voice command to get something done. Saying "I'm home," for example, could turn on a combination of lights in key areas and start a music playlist on your multi-room audio system. You might think that you need something like Amazon's Alexa, Google Home, or Apple's Siri to do that – but there's another option.

There’s a new voice home automation service that is going to make it even easier to control your Alpharetta-area or North Georgia home with just your voice. It makes it so easy and seamless that you may find yourself rarely reaching for a remote or your smartphone. It's called Josh.ai, and it will understand what you want to do as well as a personal butler.

You might be thinking at this point: What does Josh.ai do that I can’t do with Amazon Alexa or Google Home? Read on to learn how Josh does voice-controlled home automation differently.

Lutron is an industry leader when it comes to motorized shades, creating products that allow homeowners to quickly adjust their shades, drapes, and blinds with the push of a button. This provides a variety of benefits, from better insulation to reducing the damage caused by U/V rays and increasing the amount of natural light in your home so you can be more energy efficient with your smart lights. By linking your motorized shades to a smart home control system, you gain total control of their movement and can set up schedules and scenes that automatically adjust your window treatments for different occasions and times of the day.

Keep reading to learn about how Lutron’s variety of motorized shades, drapes, and blinds can enrich your North Georgia or Birmingham home – whether in Alpharetta or beyond.

Lighting is an essential element of your home, illuminating your space but also creating ambiance to make it more inviting. Georgia Home Theater is always looking for new ways to enhance the lighting technology for homeowners in Marietta and beyond, which is why we’re thrilled to announce our new partnership with DMF Lighting, a company dedicated to creating attractive, highly functional lighting equipment that is easy to install and maintain.

In this blog, we introduce you to our new brand partner and delve into why you want their products for your LED lighting installation. Keep reading to find out more.

If you’re making an investment in a home theater or media room, whether it’s a replica of the Strand or a more modest multi-purpose room, you want great sound to go along with a great picture on a big screen. While it’s a fact that better quality speakers and components will deliver better audio quality, sometimes other factors affect the sound adversely no matter how good the equipment is.

The inherent acoustics of your Atlanta media room or home theater layout might have more effect on the sound than you think. For example, too many hard surfaces might make some sound frequencies overly harsh. Things like windows along one wall and other room features can affect the sound, creating the impression that you might not be able to achieve the enveloping sound you want that rivals the local multiplex.

Don’t worry though; there are solutions. Home theater is in our name, so we know a thing or two about home theater sound. Read on to learn more.

With the advent of the CDs and digital music in the 1980s, everyone predicted that vinyl records would go the way of the dinosaur. In fact, with the convenience and longevity of CDs, vinyl records almost did disappear. The next phase of digital technology, the download, begat the iPod and “30,000 songs in your pocket.” The incredible convenience of digital music stored on a portable computer or player made it easy to take all your music anywhere. With streaming music from the cloud, the cycle was virtually complete. You didn’t even have to take your music with you; 40 million tracks are instantly available from the cloud. How many vinyl records can you carry?

The only problem with digital music is that it took away from the physical and focused experience of listening to music. There’s no way to make a playlist out of several records (short of tape or digital recording), so part of the magic of vinyl is listening to an album all the way through, with no skipping, in the order that the artist wanted it. Add to that the tactile experience of reading the liner notes, and the unique photography or custom artwork on the album cover, and the listening experience harkens back to a different time when the world moved much slower.

It seems that the vinyl experience is experiencing a resurgence, and what’s more, a younger generation that grew up in the age of the iPod is buying into it too. At a time when big box stores like Best Buy are ending CD sales, vinyl record sales are up 19% over 2017.

Vinyl isn’t going anywhere. It’s a great way to rekindle your love of music, rediscover old favorites or listen to new ones with the warm, pleasing sound that vinyl uniquely delivers. Along that line, it’s not too late to upgrade the high-fidelity audio setup in your Atlanta home this holiday season with some stylish equipment that will be the envy of your friends.

Why do you love your home cinema? Is it the luxury of having a huge screen at home, or the lack of sticky floors and overpriced concessions? Most likely you would rank both of those benefits highly. There’s nothing like being able to settle in to watch a movie or a show in your very own space with incredible sight and sound, with all the comforts of home.

If you already have a custom home theater, you may be lacking one thing. You might have a 1080P HD projector, but you’d really like to upgrade to 4K to take advantage of the new 4K streaming shows on Netflix and Ultra HD Blu-ray movies, with their much higher contrast and detail. Perhaps you have also been wondering why 4K flat-panel TVs are now very affordable, but 4K projectors prices have stayed in the stratosphere. The answer to the pricing is that projectors don’t sell in nearly the same volumes as TVs, so the cost curve of new technology diminishes more slowly for projectors.

If you’ve been waiting to pull the trigger on a 4K projector to complete your theater, or you were waiting for an affordable 4K model to build a new one, we have good news for you. As a longtime Sony Diamond dealer, we partner with Sony for projectors because of their leadership in projection technology. In 2003, they were the first to introduce a full HD projector for home use. In 2011, they launched the first 4K projector for home use. And now, with the VPL-VW295ES, they are introducing a truly affordable 4K home theater projector that doesn’t skimp on features or performance.

Read on to learn more about the VPL-VW295ES to see if it’s the right fit for the custom home theater in your Vinings residence.

This blog has now been updated; you can view this updated post here.

When it comes to home lighting, how much have you thought about the exterior of your house? We get it. Most people want to make sure that they have the perfect lighting indoors, but outdoor lighting plays a significant role in making your home more beautiful and more functional.

Your outdoor space transforms at night. Consider your garden. When the sun goes down, it looks different. It sounds different. It becomes a new place, and it’s one that you can take advantage of with a landscape lighting installation. You’ll get greater value out of your home while also adding safety and security to your property, and we work with Coastal Source to bring weatherproof, high-performance outdoor lighting and audio solutions to homeowners in the Buckhead area and throughout North Georgia.

Keep reading below to learn about the benefits of a landscape lighting installation for your property.

The holiday season is upon us, and that means your energy bill is about to skyrocket. And we’re not just talking about the Christmas tree, either. The temperatures here in Metro Atlanta are dropping, and your bank account could be taking a big hit when January comes around.

Smart home technology is intended to make your life easier, and it can take some of the financial weight of the holidays off. (You’ll have to hit the treadmill for anything you gain from feasting on turkey and pumpkin pie.)

Motorized shades are an especially valuable smart home technology when it comes to conserving energy.

Read on to learn how these window treatments can lower the power bill of your Metro Atlanta home during the holidays and year-round.

This blog has now been updated; you can view this updated post here.

Multi-channel soundtracks for film have come a long, long way in the past 25 years.

In the 1980s, Dolby Laboratories developed the Dolby Surround sound format, and it began by taking stereo soundtracks and “matrixing” sound for dialog and effects to the center channel and surround speakers by some clever processing. It was followed by Dolby Pro Logic, which took that technology a step further, allowing the stereo left and right channels to have additional audio information that with the proper equipment could direct those specific sounds to center and rear speakers. 

Dolby Pro Logic was good for its time, and because most movies were still on VHS videotape, tape could only handle a certain amount of audio bandwidth.  Dolby Digital 5.1, also called AC-3, was the first digital surround format and birthed the modern era of digital audio in video soundtracks.  First used on Laserdiscs, a predecessor to the DVD that never quite went mainstream, Dolby Digital became the standard for DVD and also for high definition broadcast TV. 

Today, the original Dolby Digital has been thoroughly reworked and enhanced over time.  Each successive version – like Dolby Digital Plus and Dolby TrueHD – has brought increases in audio quality and the precision of placing sounds in a sound field for more realistic and immersive entertainment.   The culmination of this development is Dolby Atmos. 

So at this point, you may have heard of Dolby Atmos (or not) and wonder what all the fuss is about.  You may be wondering why you’d want it for your home cinema in the Alpharetta area and what changes it might mean to your home theater layout. 

We thought the best way to do this would be to do a little FAQ (frequently asked questions).  Read on as we cover the basics of Dolby Atmos and to see if it’s right for your home theater.

The days of the old-fashioned doorbell are gone. Nowadays, you can see who is at the door and communicate with those people directly without having to walk all the way to the front of the house.

DIY video doorbells have become increasingly popular because they are relatively simple to install and access, but the performance of that technology can be unreliable, especially if there are any errors in the installation process.

Since 2003, Control4 has been leading the charge when it comes to smart home automation services, offering robust and stable control systems that, through a professional installation, can enhance how you interact with your home space.

Intercom Anywhere is Control4’s latest innovation, taking the core idea of a video doorbell and expanding it so the technology plays a more significant role in overall home communications.

Keep reading to learn how this feature can elevate your Metro Atlanta property.

At Georgia Home Theater, we have become known for recommending two or more subwoofers for our JL Audio home theater and high-fidelity audio systems. The goal is to achieve the best possible integration of the subwoofer system with the listening spaces of your Marietta home.

Bear in mind that bass is the only part of the audio spectrum that we feel as well as hear. It is vital to the storytelling aspects of a film, whether in the form of explosive special effects or more subtle tones that create drama or atmosphere. In music, bass is quite literally the foundation. Getting bass reproduction right can immensely enrich your enjoyment of movies and your favorite music.

Let’s consider a few basic misconceptions that often get in the way of achieving great bass response in home audio and home theater systems.

In the past, technology has often been seen as an obstacle that interior designers need to work around in order to create distinct, beautiful spaces. Things have changed, though.

Home technologies have evolved with design in mind, and manufacturers are building smart home devices that are tools interior designers can use to transform a room and make it more functional.

Design is about more than just aesthetics. It informs how people relate to their surroundings, and as technology changes the nature of that relationship, design needs to embrace the possibilities these smart devices provide.

Smart lighting control systems are especially valuable for designers, making spaces more versatile by allowing homeowners to change the atmosphere with the push of the button.

Keep reading to learn about the ways smart lighting systems in the Buckhead area can enhance your interior design projects.