Put all your specs into this: http://www.carltonbale.com/home-theater/home-theater-calculator/ It will help with seating distances and such based on your screen size. Ours is 12 wide by 15 long, drywall to drywall. 144 inches wide is just enough for a bank of 4 chairs on our rear, elevated seating, just one step up. The front is a bank of three, creating a small "aisle" on each side. We have a 100" screen (diagonal) which is basically a 4x8 screen. Keep in mind, that neither of your designs allow for a raised second row. For two rows, you either need to elevate the second row, or elevate the screen, which can look odd. In your first plan, can you swap the bottom bedroom with the home theater, extending towards the pool table where the couch is? Then the door into the HT can be on the extended wall by the closet and the closet can be made larger for that bedroom. From the grid in your pics, you could get about 12x21 without impeding on the pool table, and narrowing the closet slightly (while making it longer). You should be able to get all of your seating (and dry bar) in there with raised levels going back. Brian

I think design A with the bar in the corner would be best. Just my two cents worth!

To fit 8-12 people, don't skimp on the ventilation in the room. The bigger the room, the more power you'll need to feed the speakers to hit the same sound pressure level (SPL) at the main seating position. Use an acoustically transparent (AT) screen with three identical speakers behind it—this greatly improves your front sound stage. Paint the room dark, including the ceiling. This improves picture contrast. Or better yet, cover the walls with AT fabric—this way you can hide speakers and acoustic room treatment. Put shakers in your furniture—they're a cheap and fun addition to movies. Although as with anything, you can go overboard cost-wise with these as well. Put the gear outside the room so you don't have distracting lights in the room. Plan for how you'll control the gear as well. Plan for bass control. For example, a riser can double as a broadband absorber. Look into Dolby Atmos—I did this in my last house with 7 identical speakers around the room and 4 overhead speakers. It was amazing.

Not much I'd do differently overall. But here are a few things; I would use rubber under the wall framing to isolate it from the concrete floor. I would try even harder to find someone to replace my wood support beam with steel. At least one long enough to remove the support column in the front of the theater, if not both. This would be more for aesthetics than performance. I did try over a dozen different contractors with no luck. They either did not have the time or they lacked the ability. Being able to decouple the ceiling would have been sweet but there were just too many things to work around and I would have lost at least a foot in ceiling height. But even decoupled bass is going to escape when playing at reference levels. Mids and highs are pretty well contained within the theater. I am running 2 Denon AVR's to get 9.x.6 layout. Still waiting for a reliable 9.1.6 processor. The 2 processor set-up is not perfect but it does come close enough to make the waiting bearable. I am running 3 18" subs up front and 4 15" subs in the rear. I have 6 12" subs under each seating platform (total of 12) to provide tactile sensations (and they work fantastically!). There are 36 speakers in total although the ones under the seat do not make sound - they just move the seats! My screen is DIY made from 1x4's and 1 layer of white over 1 layer of black spandex. It is a 2.40:1 scope screen. It is 124" wide (135" diagonal). Spandex makes the best acoustic material for a screen but it does have the drawback of being a bit on the darker side (not a great reflector) so you need a brighter projector to light up the screen. Good luck on your build!