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This article originally appeared on the Electronic House Magazine website May 4th, 2009.  Written by Steven Castle.

New York Yankees pitcher A.J. Burnett likes things big and powerful. He has a big contract and powerful cars. So a big and powerful home theater was a no-brainer.

A Runco 1080p DLP projector and a superwide 104-inch Stewart Filmscreen CinemaScope display, combined with a 7.2-channel surround-sound system consisting of high-end B&W loudspeakers, an Integra A/V processor and a 7-channel McIntosh amp certainly provide a robust home theater experience.

“The sound is amazingly full, and he can play it as loud as he wants,” says Elliott Wier of audio/video installation company Gramophone in Timonium, Md. “The McIntosh amp and B&W speakers will take it.”

With some help from Cinema Design Group International (CDGi), Gramophone also provided the star pitcher with a tastefully refined space trimmed with luscious cherry woods and soothing tones.

The process of retrofitting this space for a home theater didn’t come without some nasty curveballs, however. The first challenge was accommodating Burnett’s 6-foot-4-inch frame in a theater with a 7½-foot ceiling. That doesn’t seem so bad until you consider that a video projector has to be mounted somewhere.

“We reverse-engineered the room,” says Wier. “We put the projector over the bar area so he wouldn’t hit his head on it, and then we determined the throw distance to the screen and built a false wall for it.”

Ah, but if a person’s height were the only challenge. Another hard-to-hit pitch was access to the space down a tight, winding stairway that prevented large objects to be brought into it. The CDGi chairs, the columns and acoustical panels all had to be built to go down the stairs in two pieces. The starfield was made from drop-ceiling iSky panels, and acoustical absorption panels are used all around.

Gramophone also had to relocate some bulkheads for plumbing and the like, which are hidden in arches leading to the theater. A 15-by-20-foot lobby was added later in the process.

In the theater, the center-channel B&W speaker and two 10-inch Velodyne subwoofers fire from behind the paneling below the screen, while two B&W left and right front-channel speakers sound from the sides of the screen. Side and rear B&W surround speakers are situated behind the wall fabric as well. A Crestron home control system with an 8.4-inch wireless touchpanel operates the works, including a Blu-ray player, satellite receiver and the Lutron Grafik Eye lighting system.

One of Burnett’s favorite things about his new off-season getaway? The Kaleidescape movie server that stores his family’s many kid movies. It makes this theater a winner.

Below are images of the original concept by CDGi that decided the direction for the room.

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 Reprinted from Electronic House Magazine: In “Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith,” Chancellor Palpatine invites Jedi warrior Anakin Skywalker into his impressive office overlooking the capital Galactic City (aka Imperial City). It’s a pivotal moment in the film and the saga, for it is there that Palpatine invites the young Jedi to be his personal representative, setting in motion an inevitable clash. Nothing in the saga will ever be the same.

Home theater owner Steve Simon had a pivotal moment as well, though his likely didn’t involve Jedi forces and dark sides. Simon wanted to convert part of his garage into a home theater, and he thought he’d decorate it with the Star Wars memorabilia he had collected over the years.

Simon hired his friend, Jorge Ocampo of Miami-based DreamSpace to be the electronics installer, and DreamSpace does a lot of work with CDGi (Cinema Design Group International), which makes acoustical panels and furnishings for home theaters. Once Simon realized that CDGi’s CinemaScape acoustic system could surround his home theater with customized dye sublimation printing, everything changed. His home theater would no longer be decorated with Star Wars memorabilia. It would be something right out of Star Wars itself.

What to use as inspiration didn’t take much thought. Simon loved the red colors of Palpatine’s majestic office, the futuristic sconces and above all, the backdrop of a detailed capital city. So there was the plan: Simon’s theater would be red, with identical sconces and ringed by windows showing the capital city. “I love the fact that there’s a futuristic city in the backdrop. That’s the place where you get to see most of the city,” Simon says.

DreamSpace and CDGi agreed, and from there, nothing was ever the same. CDGi knew that this would be a great way to show its CinemaScape technology in printing on acoustical fabric. Only there was a major challenge to fulfilling Simon’s request. The detail of the city from the movie couldn’t be copied on the large scale needed for Simon’s theater. The resolution just wasn’t good enough. So CDGi had to re-create the city in detail, using 3D rendering and then transferring that to a computer—several computers, in fact, to handle the huge files. And that would set this project back months.

“It became a labor of love on our part,” says Carey Schafer, vice president of engineering for CDGi. “Our 3D artists have done great work, but taking something to that degree was a totally different dynamic. We took some still shots from the movie and drew individual buildings based on the movie in a 3D world. Then we created the sky behind it. We had to build two supercomputers to crunch the image and get through it—and we used a shared array with eight more computers to go through it. We learned a lot [about] what goes into something like this.”