Lakewood Theatre

PROGRESS TIMELINE
5/4 Room Layout
5/27 Room Swap
6/2 Finishing Up Room Swap
6/4 Network/Phone/TV Wiring
9/30 Seating Riser Complete
10/12 Monoprice Subwoofer

CURRENT PICTURES













Original First Post Begins...

I've been lurking for a while and figured it's time I make a sig thread for my system.

EQUIPMENT

TV: Vizio VX37L
Receiver: Onkyo TX-SR608 @ 7.1 channel
Speakers: Pioneer P-FS51-LR Fronts, SP-BS21-LR Surrounds, SP-C21 Center
Sources: AT&T U-Verse, XBOX 360, Playstation 3, cheap Sony vinyl player

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Original First Post Begins...

I've been lurking for a while and figured it's time I make a sig thread for my system.
HISTORY

I started a couple apartments ago with a Vizio VX37L bought on the cheap from Costco. A thumbtacked antenna in the living room got me OTA HDTV and it was good. From there, an HDDVR was added from Bright House, as well as a small computer 5.1 system with a Creative DDTS-100 decoder. An AirPort Express got added in the living room for iTunes streaming.

When I moved in with my fiance, everything was initially transplanted but the upgrades started coming fast and furious. Her XBOX 360 was added in, and Live Gold was added to her account for the Netflix streaming. My boss asked me on a lurk one day at work, "Do you like surround sound?" Uh, yes, yes I do. So he had me come over and take a surround system off his hands for $20. Unfortunately, he was missing the center channel speaker, and the Yamaha receiver was an old analog ProLogic II receiver with no optical or coaxial SPDIF. So an Insignia NS-R5101HD receiver was immediately added. With no center channel I had to canibalize a bookshelf system's speakers for the surrounds and used one of the Yamaha surrounds as a center.

At this point, my projection tech at work mentioned he had a 21U rack on wheels at home that he wasn't using, and was mine for free if I wanted it (not wife-accepted for him any more). Cheap shelves and blank plates from a surplus store were added for $50 or $60 bucks.

New speakers began being acquired, starting first with a Pioneer SP-C21. From there, the old Yamaha receiver was pulled out of storage and added with the Insignia's rear surround pre-outs for 7.1 Master Audio and TrueHD, finally using the original surrounds for surround sides.

At this point it's Christmas time, and two pairs of Pioneer SP-BS21-LR speakers as well as Monoprice ceiling speaker mounts were ordered and hung in the back of the room (Merry Christmas to me!). My fiance calls me from Target asking if she should buy a PS3… I don't game, but I do want one of the nicest Bluray players, so yes, yes you should Last speakers to be upgraded were the front L-R channels, replaced by Pioneer SP-FS51-LR, keeping all the speakers in the same timbre family.

I got tired of running 2 receivers to run the speakers, and the sound difference between the side and rear surrounds was really apparent, so an Onkyo TX-SR608 was added for complete 7 channel amplification. Way more HDMI ports was a nice addition, as was HDMI upscaling so the only wires running to my TV now are the power cable, single HDMI cable, and OTA coax lead.

We currently live in a town that is a little island of Comcast Country, in a great big sea of Bright House Networks- the predominant cable provider for Central Florida. And for 20 years, they have hated their franchise agreements with Comcast. Every ten years, they get a contract drafted with Bright House Networks to replace them, only to re-up with Comcast. 8mb service with Comcast is their top tier internet, while 2 blocks up the road can get 40mb with Bright House … One day, I spotted a crew trenching between all the phone pedestals in the neighborhood. I asked them on a lark if it was for U-Verse. I was so excited to hear yes, that I wired the entire house for ethernet 2 months in advance of their expected availability date. Once it was finally available to order, the installer was very happy to see how plug-and-play I made his appointment at our house. Whole house HDDVR and 24up/3down internet- I was incredibly happy to tell Comcast where to go

We just recently had an additional auditorium prepped for a 3D 4K projector at work, so a silver screen went up, and a large chunk of the white screen came down and into my trunk . Acoustically transparent and clean, I don't yet have a projector for the room, but since the price difference between a projector and 55" TV is negligible in my price range, the upside of going front projection wins on all fronts. Let's see, replace the 37" with a 55", or keep the 37" for daytime shows and news and have a 140" screen drop down in front of the tv and speakers for movies and gaming- tough decision.

Next up is building a riser for the back of the room to sit our other reclining sofa on, and buying a projector and screen mount.

Last night I sketched out what I think I want to do with the room as far as riser layout and screen.

The room has 3 passageways- 5' wide pocket french doors at one end with a 3' wide arched opening into the kitchen next to it, as well as a 3' wide arched opening into the back bedrooms hallway. The kitchen opening is justified to the back wall, so there is not really a corner. The hallway opening is 3 inches off the side wall. The left wall has wall-to-wall curtains. 4' on either side are heavy curtains (almost like thick blankets), and covering a central 9'6" window bay are floor to ceiling blackout curtains. The screen is going to be a drop down screen that will come down in front of the LCR speakers. Also back there is a wall-mounted TV that will be used for content not needing the Big Screen.

I've got a couple questions now from it...

Am I doing a disservice to myself by placing the right surround speaker much further away from the seating than the left surround? Ditto for the left surround being too close perhaps?

The Left front speaker will be basically in a corner. I've got the curtains there deadening the corner reflection a bit, but is this a terrible placement? Dolby setup places the front Left and Right at a 60* arc, and with the room having to be left-justified, I have to put it there...?

I said 108" wide screen (124" 1.78 diag.)- at the primary couch 9' away, that's a 53* viewing angle. Is that going to be too overwhelming? At the couch on the riser @ 14'6" away, it's about 35*. Is a 9' wide screen just too big in this setup? It's going to have to be almost right on the left wall for it to be centered between the wall and the hallway opening.

The whole room is awkward since I have to ignore the right 3-4' of the room to allow easy passage from the front entry room behind the pocket doors (normally kept open) to the back hallway (with no door or aesthetically wife-acceptable way to cover the passageway).

I'm putting together the idea of my riser...

It's going to be floating on the floor, as this is a rental house so I cannot drill the hardwood floors, nor can I fill it with anything other than insulation as we're on piers and would not support that kind of massive weight without overly stressing the main wooden beam under the house.

I'm making it out of 2x12" boards for the main platform, plus the height of the OSB and carpet.

The step is going to be 6", plus the height of the OSB tread and the carpet.

Looking at the diagrams below, is my step going to be too shallow or otherwise too small of a step for comfortable ingress/egress?

I work in a movie theatre, so the carpet remnant I'm swiping from there is movie theatre-themed... appropriate, no? The carpet is going down without a pad, and I'm planning on just stapling it up under the lip of the platform deck and the step tread lip. If there's enough, I plan on wrapping it under the bottom, to keep it from scratching the wood floors, and maybe make it somewhat slidable.

I'm wondering- how do I make a lip around the edge? Do I just cut the decking an inch more in each direction and wrap underneath? Should I take a router to it and roundover the edge? I'm likely going 5/8" OSB, since no-one stocks 3/4" and a more than inch thick deck seems overkill. Am I wrong for this?

Couldn't tell you. It was a $100 open box special at Circuit City back in '07 when I got it, but I got it for free since I won a $100 gift card to the City through work When the needle starts to wear down on it, I'll start looking at better cartridges to replace it with, but otherwise, it gets very limited use on old Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey albums and the occasional 7" bonus single that comes with deluxe pack CD's.

Phase 1 of the HT revision 2 is complete, swapping front to back the arrangement of the room.

Working on the back plates- HDMI out, Speakers out, Network/Coax in


Surrounds are down and ready for re-placement


Awww, come on. The wall didn't have a stud there when I ran my studfinder, just many layers of drywall for some reason... Gonna have to patch that face once I'm done.


TV is mounted and hung


Finally have the recessed outlet and keystones installed... That was a pain in the butt.


Tada! Front wall all done.

More pictures of buttoning up loose ends from the room swap.

Rearranged some power cord wiring to accomodate the IR repeater block and only have one power lead coming out of the rack.


Finally got a chisel and knocked some relief holes in the cinder block behind the wall to give the 22ga HDMI cable some room to bend as well as the keystone plate of network and coax some room to be able to screw the plate down.


Rearranged the component order to try and nail down a weird HDCP handshake issue I'm having between the Onkyo receiver and the U-Verse DVR. AT&T said receivers can drive their DVR's nuts when they're in close proximity.


Finally got the theatre seats from work all screwed together for the "theatre" feel.


Movie collection in the back. Rear Left Surround is seen, as well as the comfy recliner in the left side of the frame. I need to make a temporary riser for it until I make the real riser and stick the love seat 2nd row back there.


Still re-wiring the house communications lines... Pulled all the CATV lines from the Comcast box outside up into the closet where all the network lines were run. Telephone extension lines were run when the network was pulled, but I never terminated them. I found a great little Leviton box that does 8-way coax splitting as well as 9-way telephone bridging. So now I can finally terminate all the phone extensions from throughout the house, have all the TV coax lines centrally run and the easy ability to switch between CATV and OTA antenna depending on which line is connected from the middle plate. I'm still waiting on a couple keystones and faceplates from Monoprice to finish this project up.

This is the specific one I found, the one you linked to is likely the splitter that's in the module I got.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001529VRA

The fronts are on stands for several reasons. The ultimate goal is to make a seating riser and stick the love seat on it as a 2nd row of seating, with the main couch moved over towards the wall. As is, the love seat and couch are in an L arrangement, with the love seat blocking the lower couple of drivers on the left speaker. The coffee table was blocking the lower half of the right speaker. So to temporarily fix these issues, I've done this:


The cats as you can see, love sitting on the TV stand, which is one reason why I wall mounted the TV- they also love swatting at the people on it:



Since its extra furniture now, it makes a great temporary speaker stand. I need to get some MDF sheets and make purpose built stands as I actually like them now since they sit closer to the same vertical plane as the TV.

Finally got my keystones and bits from Monoprice, time to button up the infrastructure wiring upgrades...

Showing everything going on. U-Verse Residential Gateway next to the shelves up top; UPS backup for the RG, router, and switch down in the corner


Time Capsule as primary network router, gigabit switch, network/phone/tv terminations


Leviton panel, coax lines from the various rooms in the left recessed plate, inputs from phone and cable providers in the middle plate, and network lines from all the rooms in the right recessed plate. The middle plate has a coax connection for the OTA antenna in the attic if the whole house should be fed OTA channels as well as two lines from a good splitter outside in the Comcast box- one line for cable modem and one for tv, so modem gets a strong signal.


I figure the next people who live in this house will appreciate having everything all nice, neat, and organized in one common space.

Being laid off really put a hamper on the build out for the past 3 months. But now that I've got a few bucks and still have plenty of free time, I figured now was a good time to build the seating riser...

OSB mounted on the frame. 16" OC 2x6 planks, with the deck it's 7'3" deep and 8'6" wide


Laying out the carpet. It's a 15' wide piece, so lots of extra


Carpet tacked and riser slid into place. Moving the rack fully-loaded up onto the riser was a huge pain going it alone.


A view towards the back of the room with everything in place


Closer shot of the riser area


View towards the front of the room


Closer shot of the front speakers. Finally getting around to posting pics of the nicer speaker stands I built.


With all the extra carpet left overs, I built a base for my movie theatre seats so they don't rock all over when you sit in them.


Latest revisions to the rack:
Got my Middle Atlantic trim strips to hide the screw heads!

The U-Verse box gets just enough IR reflection from the front wall that it doesn't respond to the IR emitter in front of it, so I had to put a blanking plate in front of it. That made a great mount for the switch I had to wire in to be able to hard reset the box- the Onkyo and the U-Verse box don't keep their HDMI handshake after a while of using a different HDMI input, and the U-Verse box needs to have it's power pulled and restarted to recover.

The rack has been getting hot when running the 360 or PS3 for a long time, so I pulled some computer system fans and attached them along with a AC/DC converter to the back door of the rack to pump out the hottest air behind the receiver.

Ordered the 12" Monoprice subwoofer just to see how good it is.

So far, meh. Looks nicer than the old one I've been using though. The old one is now my other .1 sitting back on the riser.

While I was bored Sunday night and with the continuation of the 48 hour rain that Central Florida got over the week end, I replumbed the rack. Now the Harmony IR extender works better than ever with the U-Verse box. Next step for the rack is a plugmold strip mounted on the right side of the rack and have all the components plugged in directly next to their shelves, so no more bundle down to the bottom.

Anyone find a better price than $94 for the Middle Atlantic custom shelves? I really want them but that's a $500 investment just for a few shelves and a 2U drawer for storage.