Get the room right before you cut a hole
Most disappointing theaters are not caused by cheap gear. They are caused by speakers in the wrong place and a room nobody treated.
Seating distance, screen size, speaker angles, and the first reflection points off your walls decide more about how a theater performs than the badge on the receiver. All of it gets settled on paper, and all of it is expensive to fix once the drywall is up.
Send me room dimensions and a budget. You get back a layout with speaker and seat positions marked, a screen and projector or display pairing sized to that throw distance, an acoustic treatment plan for the surfaces that actually matter, and an equipment list that fits the number you gave me.
Building into an existing living room rather than a dedicated space is a different problem with different compromises. I plan for those directly instead of pretending the room is something it is not.
A theater does not have to look like a dark cave to perform like one. Black walls and a row of recliners is one way to build a room, but not the only way. Finishes, fixture placement, and where the treatment actually goes can be worked out so the room still reads as part of the house and still gets used when nobody is watching anything. Kinetics Noise panels, which I sell, come in sizes and fabrics that let the treatment read as wall panels rather than studio foam, and LED backlighting behind them turns the acoustics into the lighting design.
The walls get the same attention. A bank of four switches by the door becomes one engraved keypad that does more than the four did, so the room is not covered in plates and nobody is guessing which switch is which. Speaker grilles get specified to disappear into the ceiling rather than interrupt it, and shades get a pocket to hide in. Those are design decisions, and they are cheaper to make now than to apologize for later.
Dealer accounts get you equipment and theater seating at better than retail, and once it is in I handle calibration and control programming remotely.