Big Red theater build 21' x 27' - Page 6

ok i am sold. i have a strategy which will give the masking 3 stops. i will also make the panels out of a material that does not risk warping. this week was pretty busy but i hope to do a bit on the theater next week to finish up the masking and the cqc touchscreens.

greg

jjgear - yeah i am wanting some new pics also but i have been distracted finishing my office lately. i found an old mill out in the country that buys trees and turns it into lumber and they had a stack of cherry beedboard sitting there they wanted to sell cheap so i bought it and used it for wainscoating in my office. i also hired bryan to help with acoustics and i am kind of waiting for him to give me recommendations so that i know how fur the room. hopefully i will be back at it soon.

carlson - yes you are right. it is particle board. not sure why i called it mdf. the magic to making those is to have some kind of stop on your chop saw. i have mine built into a long bench on the side of the garage with a fence like norm has. you just buy the stick on measuring tape and put it on top of a strip of hardwood as a backfence then you buy their little giz that sits on it as a stop. that has saved me hours of measuring and it cuts are perfect. before i had it i would clamp a peice of wood on the table as a stop for a project like this.

g

sorry for vanishing for so long. i got buried at work and then had to finish up my office. i will post pics of it soon. tore out a wall to make two rooms into one, built custom cabinets, cherry wainscoating and a 2.66:1 custom screen with dual projectors tiled on it. that last bit makes it qualify as avs so i will post some pics

i just started back into the theater. i am almost done building the column bases and i put the screen in. here is a shot of the screenwall. notice the raised panel, cherry column bases on the stage. these will have baseboard around the bottom and a 14" round cherry column on top. 12 of these and i have made a lot of sawdust in the last few weeks.




the screen is a 12' wide diy using smx material. i am having trouble with the infocus projector i bought from avs. i am working with infocus on it. (details here)

one question i have. i decided to move the left and right speakers behind the screen but all three of my mains are sitting on top of ubbersub. the challenge is that they tend to walk around a lot. does anyone have a suggestion for how best to deal with this? i could simple screw them down so they are REALLY coupled to the subs. would that cause any issue?

greg

hi ebr. so far the uber-sub is not an issue with the smx but i have not really put it all to the test. at this point i think it is what it is. i know that sub is not moving

hey art. i think the shelf idea is a good one. i started out not doing that because i didn't want to couple a speaker to the wall but if it is on carpet pad and high passed it will make no difference. since the subs went in sound control is kind of comical here anyway.

greg

cross posted from the constant height section

i posted in the CH section a while back that i was interested in the difference between the U85 and UV200 panny. i contacted panamorph and went for the uv200 so i thought i would post my results here.

i would say that the uv200 is definitely worth the extra money. the best way i can describe it is that it is like looking through good optical glass rather than looking through plastic. this is basically what it is. the 200 is basically an 85 with glass elements. the result is a little less CA and punchier contrast. i can't quantify it but blacks seem more black. you can even see it on a test grid.

U85


UV200


i think it really hit me when i looked at the lens while the light was coming through it. the 85 kind of has a white plastic look and the 200 looks like crystal. it is not like the 85 is cheap plexiglass or anything but side by side the difference is definite.

for my "big red cinema" build i am going with the uv200. if you have any questions about the lens i have found panamorph to be very helpful.

greg

i have begun on accoustic treatments. i hired bryan pape to do model my room and make recommendations and i really like the logic he is using. here is what the plan looks like:



the idea is to use a 1' x 2' x 8' tall trap in each of the front two corners and a 3" thick treatment on the rear wall for the lower frequencies as well as a 6" thick bonded cotton treatment on the ceiling behind my screen above the sub. the rear wall is treated which seemed odd to me at first but we are using fsk over the treatment to retain some reflectivity above 2K. the side walls are treated with 1" bonded cotton just as you would expect. i just about have the stage end done and will post pictures when i get them together.

the bonded cotton seemed like the ticket when i opened the box. no smell, no itch. then i tried to put a drywall screw through it to hang it. that does not work. the cotton spins around the screw until the drill can't turn anymore. tough stuff. i switched to nails with fender washers.

i find that the oc703 stinks. i certainly hope that goes away. my son won't come in the basement now and my wife is worried that we are going to get cancer from the fiberglass somehow flying through the GOM.

greg

Sorry I vanished again but work is nuts and has to take priority over my fun. The theater has moved along some finally. Trim is done and we are ready for stain. I will post pics tomorrow with any luck. I had a problem with my infocus 333 and sent it back to infocus for repairs under warrantee. They sent it back after 2 months and it would not even come on so they issued an rma for another trip to the factory. We will see where that goes.

Anyway, I wanted to post some pics of the reason my theater took a back seat. I have my office just about finished. Yeah I know that an office is not a dedicated home theater but I thought some might find it interesting. It has 2 dlp projectors, a 37” lcd and my two desktop lcds and it was a custom diy build. When we moved in the house had a typical layout with the dining room on one side of the entry and a useless living room on the other side (there is a family room that gets used all the time). Right behind the dining room was a small 10 x 13 office so we did some mods to turn the living room into a dining room (that never get’s used) then walled in the dining room and knocked the wall out between it and the office. Easier to just show a picture below.



I found a deal at an old mill nearby for a stack of solid cherry 3/8” beadboard so I carted it home and used it for wainscoating. I always wanted to do a room in natural cherry because I think it is a beautiful wood. I had maple hardwood layed on the floor which is great contrast with the cherry. I built cherry cabinets to go behind the desk and a desktop out of solid 2” thick cherry ( 96” x 42”). To top it off I put in a cherry soffit all around the room then painted the ceiling black to hide all the stuff up there. My wife thought I was nuts of course but I do a lot of videoconferencing and I wanted to be able to put lighting, sonex panels, etc up there and not worry about how it looked. Here is the look of it. It looks like this:




Pardon the legs of the desk. I decided after we were finishing that they looked to plain so I am getting a little more wainscoating and will do them the same as the walls.

For electronics I have a 2 PC’s I built using HTPC techniques learned here. They have solid state drives, silent fans and power supplies, etc. Each has a dualhead graphics card and the output goes into a video DA which feeds both a dualhead KVM switch going to my desk as well as an extron matrix switcher. From my desk I can hotkey between the two pc’s and both monitors switch together. The matrix switch drives a 37” lcd tv on the other side of the room and 2 dlp projectors tiled onto a custom 8:3 aspect ratio, 10’ wide screen at the far end of the room. This way I can for instance put the first pc onto my desktop monitors and tile the second one across the two projectors at the far end of the room.





i also do a lot of videoconferencing on a dedicated T1 from glowpoint (www.glowpoint.com) so the 37” has a ptz camera above it and the output of the polycom can be routed to any of the screens. I have a standard studio 3 point lighting setup done with track fixtures (key, fill and backlight). When I do videoconferences I use an in-ear monitor driven by a shure wireless in-ear unit. The whole video thing paid for itself in 3 months with not only reduced travel but also meetings that I was able to participate in that I would not have flown for due to logistics. Finally I just ebayed a crown dc-75a 1U amp and a pair of black axiom speakers that will be mounted on the ceiling in front of the desk aimed back at me. in the pics below i still need to wrap the black panel under the tv with speaker grill cloth.






Learning from home theater builds I thought ahead about how to run wires and access equipment. I ran a 4” pvc drain pipe under the floor before the basement was finished which comes up inside the leg of my desk. The other end comes up behind my cabinets so that even if you are under my desk you don’t see any wires. The only thing on the desk are the monitors, keyboard and mouse and all the video, usb, etc go under the floor to the racks behind me. I cut an access panel into the coat closet so that I can stand in the triangular space behind my equipment racks. All phone, network, video, UPS, audio, etc is in that room.

This has been a huge job but I am really thrilled with how it has come out. With work as busy as it has been it took to 2 years to get the office together and I still have a few finishing touches to do. I am most happy with how clean the desk looks with no drawers, computers, wires, etc. As a woodworker I am very pleased with all the natural cherry and maple and even little details like the doors to the cabinets have solid wood raised panels turned backwards rather than plywood panels. It is a dumb little detail but it really makes it feel like it is done right to me.

now back to the theater!

greg

thanks ebr and dellhop. no i am not a trader. i am a cto for a large computer company.

greg