Jautor's Rock Creek Theater - A post-build retrospective - Page 9

Thanks! Glad you found the thread useful. It was fun to write all in hindsight, as there's no stress involved at that point.

Why is it that permanent? Mine is spliced to romex at the drywall, and would be easy to swap out each chunk. (same way the builder's electrician did it for all the other rope light in the house)

Soon after installation I had one section (probably 3 feet) that glitched off. I flexed the cable and it came back, and hasn't had an issue since. Everything else has been solid. But I wouldn't want to make anything permanent, even LED, as they can still fail (just for different reasons than bulb wear). "Easy" is different from "expensive / impossible without serious destruction". You should be able to pull a whole rope out without cutting into drywall, for example. You certainly don't want to run the stuff through walls - not rated for that.

Jeff

Radiohunter, thanks!

The columns were site-built by the finish carpenters. They're constructed from veneered-plywood and off-the-shelf molding pieces in a block-panel style. My custom builder charged $500-550 per column to build them - working with a carpenter directly would be a lot cheaper, too (that's what I get for not asking up front!). And as I mentioned way back in the thread, I "upgraded" to the wood-paneled columns way late, so there's framing and drywall behind them. And a mistake to not build those inside the room regardless of finish - as all the surround channel in-wall speakers penetrate the shell and are easily heard in the hallway and staircase behind the room. Luckily this is still many walls away from any bedrooms, so not a practical problem for me, but certainly near the top of the "Things I would do differently".

Here's a couple photos of the columns during construction - you can see they're build as a block-paneled front face, and several pieces of trim to finish the top (it's the same as the crown molding with an additional egg&dart detail).



This one is basically finished, just waiting for the crown molding to continue... Note that the side columns have romex poked through for the sconces, while none in the back. I'll come back later and decide NOT to route out the round box now behind the panel, and instead attach a pancake box/plate for the sconce.



Jeff

That a
Thanks! That's a PowerBridge. There are similar products from other companies, but for projectors I prefer the look of the PowerBridge.

They have an AVS discount, too...
http://www.powerbridgesolution.com/avsspecialorder.html

Jeff

Yep! The single/double gang designs work better for inlets for TV installations, especially when coupled with a recessed box like the Arlington units. But the horizontal design of the PowerBridge, and the fact it comes in black!, makes it IMO a better solution for projector mounts.

Thanks! It's all about the details. When I was building my house, I had gone around to as many other homes under construction as I could find. I took a ton of pictures of little things I liked (fixtures, moldings, paint schemes, carpets, cabinet layouts, etc.), and when it was time to meet with my designers/decorator, I handed her a pile of "ideas" I liked... Turns out she had done the design work for several of the model homes I visited, and basically anything I liked - she had been responsible for! Needless to say, we got along great!

(and yes, she helped with the schemes for the theater!)

Jeff

That's a lot of questions! Ok, here goes...

You shouldn't vent to unconditioned space and you absolutely can't pull air in from the garage (unsafe). Vent your AV closet/stack to your HVAC system's return, or dump the heat into an adjacent space in the basement since it'll probably be cool there anyway.

BIGmouthinDC will tell you that you need 6.5' (78") between rows of theater recliners. Your diagram shows a good placement of the back row a few feet away from the rear wall. But if those are going to be theater recliners, you'll need several more feet of riser - an 8-9' total riser depth would be appropriate - and you've got plenty of space for it.

Yep. Lesson learned.

You don't have much width to spare - a 30" aisle is plenty, mine is only 18" and it's only moderately tight. The fact that the recliners aren't very high prevents it from feeling too tight. But yes, lesson learned - I'd have liked another 6" or more on each side. 30" from the walls will also help with surround sound consistency.

While there's some personal preferences there, I think in general the benefits of an acoustically transparent (AT) screen with the LCR speakers behind should push you in that direction. You'll have the >8-10' minimum viewing distance to avoid seeing the screen mesh, and as I said in the thread, getting the speakers further from the front row will give you better volume consistency for all the seats.

Thanks!

Your placement on your grid looks pretty good to me. I would get them at least 2-3' from the corners, which you have done. Side surrounds at or slightly behind the seats, 12-18" above seated ear level. Some folks may comment about the choice of using multiple side-surrounds because of the potential interference / imaging. I think mine worked out well, but I may have gotten lucky...

Ah, basements... One of the few things I miss from living in the Midwest, along with excellent pizza...

If the utility closet / furnace room was near enough to the theater to be convenient, I'd put everything in there. If the rack can be exposed to the theater entryway to make it easy to make adjustments and insert discs, even better. If I started my home design over from total scratch again, I'd have put my gameroom closet adjacent to the rear of the theater, and made it serve as my home AV closet as well. I'd probably keep the theater gear exposed into the room, though, as it does look nice.

Yep! You're definitely learning my lessons!

Doing it "right" means Kaleidescape. Love to have one of those systems, not willing to pay for it. Doing it "pretty well these days" means a DIY HTPC setup and a bunch of hard drives. I will probably do a BD media server at some point, but don't expect to house the whole collection - just the cartoons / Pixar stuff and enough of the "clip / demo" material that can be called up easily. The benefits to having a hard drive copy of the BD's is convenience and ease of whole-house distribution. Since I'll watch movies in the theater, and only distribute kids' movies elsewhere (and do) in the house, it hasn't been worth the time/expense for me to do it.

Glad you like it - I like the Craftsman style as well - there are some examples IIRC in the "show me your completed theater" thread of theaters in that style. A blend of deco / craftsman could be cool, too!

Nope - you don't want the sub in the floor. Lighting under the seats or in the cupholders - I am not a fan. If they were subtle, dim, and white, maybe... A bunch of blue LEDs doesn't match the style of the room (I'll leave it at that... )

The room is dedicated, and I was going to expose the speakers, so having the projector visible wasn't an issue for me. If it was, concealing it into the soffit would have been my choice. Motorized mounts aren't usually used in dedicated theaters - since you can generally build the theater to house the projector correctly. Non-dedicated spaces with retractable screens is another story, completely...

The rack, speakers and projector are all on one circuit. I could install a UPS, but haven't. Our power is very reliable, and if a storm knocks the power out during a movie - I'll just not turn the projector back on, which is the only real issue - striking a hot lamp again.

The 2x4 was to provide height (spacer) to get the boxes off the floor, and centered into the eventual baseboard. The depth (DD + baseboard) required the use of outlet box extenders.

It's a great system for a theater. Crestron can control just about anything that has an interface - I believe they have a specific module to interface with the GrafikEye, too. But there are RS232 / IP / IR interfaces possible...

I ran conduit from the rack to 1) the attic, 2) the projector and 3) to the front wall. It's all 1.5-2" Carlon Resigard (I'll have to look up which one)

My house is all Cat5e, so I just kept with it to be consistent, and knowing that cat6 is probably overkill for the next decade... But the wire cost is minimal now, so running cat6 today is probably the better answer. And no, speaker wire is the one AV thing that requires a different cable type. For a theater run 12-14AWG wire. 16/2 or 16/4 is common for whole house audio due to cost of running thicker cables for lots of runs. If you're planning to run AVRs remotely, you should spend the extra bucks for 12AWG on those runs, as the distance can impact the performance otherwise.

The Belden wire is for line-level subwoofer (.1) channels from the AVR / processor. That wire is specially made for these purposes, but RG59 generally is better than RG6 for subwoofer applications. It's the shield / insulator construction that's the difference we care about.

You made it an awful long way through the thread before asking the first question - glad you didn't save them ALL for the end!


Jeff

Yep, just make sure that space has adequate venting / cooling to and from other conditioned spaces. You can't exchange any air with the garage, and any door needs to seal up.

The user interface on that changer isn't the best, the DIY media servers are much better.

Music is used much differently than movies. But having all the BDs on a server is a good thing - I'm just saying that for me, it hasn't been worth the time or expense. I can grab a BD and load it up pretty easily. But I do that once an evening...

Personal choice, I went with step lights instead of the under-tread rope.

You don't use a sub that way, it would be a waste and not perform well. But if you want the shake, you can easily install tactile transducers (aka "Buttkicker") into the seats. Just a bit a wiring to prepare for them, and you can get them pre-installed in some brands of theater recliners. I'm not a fan of them personally, but I did put wire in place for them, and many folks here on the forum have them and love'em... That will get you the "feel" without having to generate so much bass energy (that you then need to contain).

Power and line-level audio. You just run a coax cable (RG59) and terminate it with an RCA jack. Or, perhaps easier, terminate the coax cable with F-connectors and use an F-to-RCA fitting to connect to the subwoofer. I bought my Belden wire for the sub in nice pre-made 50' lengths and connected them to a wall plate keystone. Then an F-to-RCA adapter and a common RCA cable as a jumper from the wall plate to the sub.

Jeff

Yes - I didn't plan for the top of the rack to be solid, so if the vent wasn't raised, the rack top would have blocked the vent except for small fan vent holes. There was no benefit to bringing the "ceiling" above the rack down - leaving it at ceiling height would have been better and easier - it would still be hidden behind the wall anyway.

Framing and drywall isn't precise like a piece of cabinetry - the wall isn't 100% square in all directions - when I roll the rack out, it scrapes the top right corner of the side wall. A wood box built would have been square.

Pre-install brackets are sold by many speaker manufacturers specifically for their speakers. It makes things easier, but not mandatory. The "generic" adjustable brackets I used aren't available anymore and EZ-Bracket has apparently gone out of business... Dimensions for cut-outs are speaker-specific, and any speaker maker worth considering will have those dimensions in their specs.

Yep, that's why. Exchanging unconditioned air is a bad idea generally (unless done with a heat exchanger as part of a fresh air system), but in the garage hazardous gas potential makes that an absolute no-no.


Jeff

Outside of discussions with forum folks and a lot of manufacturer's personnel at CEDIA and on the phone, that was it for the AV / Theater portions. I did have an interior decorator helping with the colors / furnishings, as she had worked on the whole house, so it was an easy call...

A rubber underlay for the carpet, which was probably unnecessary, and a solid core door with seals. The door is paneled, however, and remains the weak point. The house was designed with the theater several walls away from any bedroom, so my soundproofing needs were "moderate". Seeing how little the extra efforts actually cost as a percentage of the project, doing it over (and adding a bit more space), I probably would have chosen the clips & channel. But certainly wouldn't have done "less", the noise floor in the room is noticeably lower than even the hallway just outside of it.

Usage is probably 70% movies, 20% sports/events and 10% TV. That breakdown probably influences the screen ratio and the screen material choice, as if you were going to have the lights on most of the time (all sports watching), a 16x9 screen with better ambient light rejection would be prudent.

I didn't pay extra for premium wood selections, so it's standard clear pine and likely birch plywood on the columns. Which matches the rest of the house.

Studying the Middle Atlantic site and their white papers is essential for all the rack pieces - a good look through their gear at CEDIA and talking with their helpful folks is worth the trip by itself. A normal set of sources get hooked up with a single HDMI cable these days, perhaps a patch cable for Ethernet. It's when you get into the control gear, legacy stuff and "extras" that it gets more complicated. Note that the majority of wires I pulled to the rack from around the room are not even used currently...

Much.

Probably (which in hindsight I could have fit as I ended up with a 3-4" gap between the chair and the stair tread). The "loveseat" configuration doesn't function as a couch / loveseat in the sense that it's not comfortable to sit in the middle, nor can you lie down comfortably, either.

With the 2.35 screen all the seats are within the screen width, so I'd stick with straight.

I generally invite ~20 folks for a movie, and get around 8-10. On rare occasions I've pulled one more chair into the room to fit 13. Superbowl it's completely overflowing - I think there were 17 people crammed in this time when I went to check on them (but that's my annual big party).

Some folks go sit there because they like the back. Parents with kids in attendance (downstairs watching something in "Cinema B") sometimes sit there for easier in/out. I had planned it for overflow, but it seems to get used more often than that... I was more concerned about the front row being "too close", but may guests head right for the front and center.

Curved screen with masks were out of the budget by 2-3x, especially since the Masquerade was already well above my pain threshold.

Having seen the CIH gear at CEDIA with Panamorph, I had thought about it from the start of the design. Looking through the movies I had purchased over the years, it was a 60/40 split of 2.35 / 1.85 titles. But taking into account the subset of those that I would expect to show to a group of friends, it was much more like 80/20%. So I wanted to maximize the 2.35 image - and CIH does that "correctly".

I seriously tried to do without the masking system, especially since I tend to show scope content, but it's just so cool. I've shown folks the difference with the black bars on the sides (masks retracted), and while they disappear as you get into the film, pulling the masks in for 16x9 content really improves the experience. And since I have the auto masks, I start every movie night with 4x3 cartoons, then a 16x9 trailer or THX intro, then onto the main feature. For first-time guests, the progressively larger screens always gets 'em...

Jeff

Because I wanted to spend the budget on the equipment, not thousands on control system hardware followed by thousands in programming then and for every change over time. And then there's my fundamental issue with paying folks for programming - since I'm a computer/software engineer by trade...

But the theater system itself is really not complicated - while I still haven't re-done my basic iRule panels to make it easy for guests to operate without me (which hasn't really come up as a use case anyway), so the capabilities of a full-blown automation system I think are overkill for my room. Nothing a few macros can't handle.

For the rest of the house, I'll add more systems over time - but I'm not looking to pay for (or need) the integration provided by the dealer-only systems anyway.

Hey thanks! And you prompted me to actually do the maintenance I meant to do tonight! Here's some current pictures - the water plants are all thriving, and there's a healthy coat of algae on the liner and the rocks. I haven't check the biomedia to see how they're going, but the bog plants are certainly doing their share of cleaning.

If I'd change anything - it would be bigger. I may have overpopulated the water lilies to get good coverage last fall, as they've already covered most of the surface. So yes, another several feet more across if I was doing it over... Bog area would have been wider and perhaps narrower, to wrap a bit more around the back edge and provide more linear space for plantings. The only thing I think I'll actually add at this point is some trees or large shrubs behind the pond (back in the corner of the yard) to give a better backdrop when viewed from the patio.

I've been happy with the very low levels of maintenance overall - this pond is 4x the size of my previous one, and seems to require about 1/4th the work to keep it in shape. So yes, nature works and the larger the pond, the more it works "naturally". Water quality is good so no plans to add any additional filtration. I have been adding an algaecide every week or so (when I remember) as I do get clumps of it, although that hasn't been an issue since the spring (which tells me the biofilter / bog is working now). If that cycle repeats in the fall/winter timeframe, I could see adding an inline UV sterilizer, which wouldn't be difficult at all.

The bog garden:



The pond:




The stream has become quite a hit with the natives... I'd have made it longer with some more 'still' areas to facilitate this.



And all of the fish are still around - no Heron visits since the fall. I've got a number of new fish - a native Texas species that I didn't buy! I assume they came along as eggs with the birds that washed them off in the stream. I bought a couple bottom-feeding plecostomus (es)?, which I released and haven't seen since - so assuming they're alive and well they're probably feasting on the bottom, and I'll catch a glimpse of them in the fall when they''ll be 8-12" long, if history repeats itself...

Thanks for the prompting!

Jeff