Theater Build: Mike's Money Pit - Page 6

I'm pooped, so this will be a quick update, but I just wanted to show the progress that Derek and I made over the last three days. We started with this:



And ended up with this...





We had to temp in a bunch of the power connections because the UPSes are without batteries until the replacements arrive, and they won't run without them. There also a couple of other temporary connections that will be sorted out shortly.

This was Phase 1: enough to have the living room and master bedroom TVs have access to the TiVo and the Kaleidescape, plus get the Mac Mini server up and running. All the distributed audio speaker connections are made as well.

Phase 2 will integrate the rest of the components into the A/V distribution system, and Phase 3 will be all the wiring specific to the theater.

And, finally, just a quick look at how far we've come. This is almost the same angle as above.

Yeah, I didn't want to have the monitor go outside the rails. See the post above for the finished look. The monitor will accept a 1080p signal, it just doesn't have the full pixel complement, but for a preview monitor, who cares?

Thanks!

For the keyboard, I'm using a Middle Atlantic roll-out shelf, with an Apple Bluetooth keyboard and Magic Trackpad. The keyboard and trackpad together just fit in the available space side to side. I may have to stick them down to ensure at they don't move. We'll see.

The only downside is that you have to leave 1U above the shelf for the keyboard, and so I need to dress up that little section of rail on the racks. It also takes 2U total (one for shelf, one for keyboard). I looked at purpose built 1U keyboards and keyboard drawers, but I didn't like any of the ones I found.

By the way, when the racks are all finished, I'll post better, more detailed pix with a description of what everything is.

Holy crap this is cool!!



Would you like to take a walk around my theater room and see what things look like today? Would you like to be able to peer into the bookshelves or look up at the ceiling?

Well, you can, because I've just had a visit from the future. I had a visit from Matterport. It's a wicked cool 3D scanning technology that generates accurate 3D models of a space purely through optical scanning. The technology is currently in development, and I have friends at the company, so they were kind enough to bring one of the scanners over to capture my theater room. Here are a couple of pictures of the scanner as we moved it from place to place within the theater.







You move the scanner a few feet, step out of its field of view (it sweeps the whole room, so we ducked into the kitchenette), and tap a button on the iPad. The scanner does a 360° rotation and builds a point cloud representation of the 3D space, with color imagery captured to map onto the 3D objects. Each successive pass adds more data to the 3D model, and the different vantage points allow you to capture details that were hidden from view in the previous sweeps. No precise positioning of the scanner is required. You just move it from place to place and work your way through the space, and the software figures out the rest as if by magic.

To see the result, you need to visit the URL below. If you don't already have the Unity3D plugin installed, you will need to install it to be able to navigate the room. But once you have it installed, you can walk all around within the space and see the current state of things. I recommend standing on the stage and looking up into the ceiling where you can see the mummified roll-down screen. Or check out ceiling-mount subs, which are also wrapped in plastic to protect them from dust. The bar counter is under the enormous pile of acoustical materials at the back of the room.

When things are a bit farther along, we'll do another scan, and then we'll do one more when the room is completed, and that one will include the kitchenette / snack area and equipment racks.

I hope people like this! Welcome, have a look around!

http://matterport.herokuapp.com/model/mqSiSs

Hehe, thanks! I think I'm still in the running for slowest, right?

@jetforme: I'm sure as soon as we get enough underpants, Phase 2 will become clearer.

Batch 1, complete. I need some practice, it seems, as this came out a smidgen chewy, but still.

Just a quick photo update. The bookshelves are finished. Next steps are getting the grilles installed in the lower doors, and finishing the acoustical treatments surrounding the center speaker. Then we get to move on to the wall acoustics!

Note that the backs of the bookshelves (where the binary diffusers are) will be covered in black fabric.

It's an exciting day! The installation of the acoustical treatments on the walls has begun!

I wish I could say that it was going up permanently, but at least we got the bracket mounted today.

You know, I don't think Mark Seaton made this thing big enough. Good thing there are three of them...

It's been killing me! So glad to finally be getting them installed. We'll be doing our first "shake & rattle" test pretty soon, and for sure we needed the SubMersives online for that!

Yeah, I think that's a slimming angle on the sub.

I wish I had more updates to share -- it's been really slow going with all the meticulous woodwork that has been done, and unfortunately some of the stuff I would love to share is wrapped up to protect it, so I can't get pictures quite yet. This includes the woodwork around the exterior window and door, which now has built-in light blocking Lutron roller shades with the tracks inlaid into the casings. Really turned out beautifully.

BUT! I do have some shots to share!

One of the recent big projects was completing the doors on the lower cabinets. These have metal grilles which are laser-cut aluminum, which has been painted with a satin finish oil paint. Two of them are left with just the painted metal, because they're the HVAC air returns, but the rest have speaker cloth behind them to hide the two big subs, and to hide some bass trap treatments. My carpenters, as usual, did a really fine job of mounting the grilles and cloth.

First, here's a shot with the grilles in place, but no cloth behind them yet. You can also see in this picture the speaker cloth covering the location of the Aerial CC5 center speaker:



And here's a detail shot from the back, showing how they're mounted. There's a rubber gasket around them to ensure no rattles:



Also, we have the surround speakers in place! The rear surrounds were white, so we had to paint them. We may still have to de-shine the ring around the woofer to keep it from glinting through the fabric:



And, here's one of the side surrounds, temporarily peeking out from behind its protective cardboard:



Sorry it's a smallish update, but it's something!