February 8, 2005
Every Inch Matters
This theater thing is turning into so many details. Last night, I spent an hour understand which speaker wire I could buy and which I should buy. You must have specially rated wire for in-wall installations. I ended up with some THX-certified 14 AWG Monster Cable. Should be much better than the stuff I about got at The Home Depot.
On to today’s business, the screen. The issue is the size of the screen. My objective has been to fill the wall. I wanted the biggest Mario/Halo/NASCAR/etc. experience that I could get. I have had my sight’s set on a 119” 16:9 screen from the beginning. Well, today they snapped out all the lines in the basement and I am tight. Here is the 119” drawn in. There are a few inches to play with her and there but it is tight. The boxes on the left, right and below are the in-wall speakers. This is to scale (as close as I can get).
On size down is the 106” screen. More space but you start losing the height cause of the HDTV aspect ratio.
So which screen? Do I attempt the 119”? It is pretty close but I think it would be right in there. Or just go with the safer 106”? The pro of the smaller is that you only lose roughly 6 inches on each side. Kim thinks that is a good deal because it will be a little less enormous when you sit in front of it.
Another option is to go with a screen that allows you to put the speakers right behind the screen — sort of like IMAX. Then you don’t see them at all but the sounds travels through at some 95+% of normal. The screen costs a bit more but it might be nicer looking. I am not sure if that is the way to go or not.
Suggestions? My wife is sick of talking to me about this. “Honey, should I get 16, 14 or 12 AWG wire?” She said something back to me that wasn’t very nice.
Tonight I have to research receivers some more and then work on IR repeaters. Joy! On receivers, I am down to 3 brands: Yamaha, Denon, Harmon-Kardon. All are 7.1. All 3 of these have 3 component video inputs which is key for me. Been leaning towards Denon but starting to think Yamaha. This Yamaha line here is one from a specialty store. They carry a better line than places like Best Buy does.
Experts! Help! :)
Sorry, I can't offer any suggestions as my home theater consists of a 31" tube with a $300 sony home theater in a box system, and I don't think that qualifies me as an expert, but I do have one question.
Is this thing going to be ready for Daytona?
Oh, sure...rub it in! I will just have the roomed framed by Daytona. More like I will be able to watch the Pepsi 400 on it in July.
I'm a tinkerer not a pro, but my old housemate was an EE from RPI and now current Director of Engineering for Fox Sports in LA and he used to mock me for buying Moster Cables and gold plated terminators. He said it was all about the wire material, gauge and insulation and I could get just as good stuff from the local hardware store and not pay for Monsters marketing overhead. He also said that gold plated terminators couldn't fix cheap wire; so no point in pricy ends if the middle was laced with noise. =) He was a big fan of ferrite beads though and we had a kick azz home theater system for cheap.
There's a speaker system called Whisper, it's used in high-end retail stores in the UK. It can turn a wall or a piece of glass into a speaker so the sound eminates from the entire face of the surface. It's pretty slick.
Never seen it used on a wall in a home but so long as you had a double stud wall with a few inches of air space inbetween no reason it wouldn't work sweet and not chain the sound into other areas of your home. Of course it might be seriously cost prohibitive, but it's fun to think about.
One more thing. We jsut made our own screen in our office for projecting presentations on.
Some of the gotchas were:
1) Reflection from behind the screen from bright presentations. Eitehr you need a thick, reflective, and opaque screen or you need more than layer to reach the same effect as a thick expensive screen.
2) We originally had a center support but you could see a hint of it once the screen material was pulled tight. Don't over stretch your screen material if you are building your own.
3) The reflectivity of the material goes down if it is stretched. We actually wound up applying a matte sealer (from a local art supply store) to the screen once it was fixed to the frame to regain the lost reflectivity from drawing the amterial tight enough to make it smooth.
4) Couldn't hide the frame from showing through the screen material so we had to box our screen once it was mounted on the wall so our 100" screen became 96" or so.
5) Making our own screen saved us hundreds of dollars and came in under $100 in the end. Bought the screen material from EBay and nearly paid more in shipping than the price we won the auction on. I think we spent about 4 hours total on the project.
It looks and works great now. Easily a match to what is in our corporate HQ.
You know what they say: Size matters. Ha ha. Seriosly though, the speakers behind the screen. That would be pretty sweet.
So have you had an audio guy go through your room design to make sure that you you're not going to get any wierd reverbs or effects?
So here is my research results on the Receivers... When it comes to Receivers, they say that Dennon is the best but Quality, Harmon Kardon is the way to go... I first got the HK AVR 335 because it had the multi room capability so when someone is watching a movie downstairs, my home built in speakers would still play music.. So I used it for couple weeks but then I start to look around and found out that AVR 635 is not only more powerful, but also have additional features such as you can connect your computer to it (dont know much about this feature yet).. as far as the price goes, they list it as $1200 but I got it from Amazon.com for $750 (dont remember exactly)... So do consider taking a look at this..
i would have to say return the THX Monster Cable speaker wire. You got taken for it. Ripped off. Hi-jacked. The wire from home depot is as good without a doubt. Proof: no audiophile to this date has been able to tell the difference in an A-B test. No audiophile has the ability to hear the difference either. They will say they can, but i do believe there is a million $ still on the line for the first one that can.