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First, I am going to apologize for the terse manner of this first post. I have been meaning to get started on this thread for some time but it kept getting sidetracked by work...life...working on the basement...all the things.
Backstory:
I have been into home audio and big TVs since my early years. My grandpa was a DIY guy to the core and he had built tube amps, speakers, etc. for as long as I can remember. He introduced me very early on to the soldering iron and to music in general.
In junior high, I had a science teacher who was the same way and had a Dynaco ST-70 kit he had built and a pair of Klipschorns in his classroom. I don't remember the sources he used other than a tape deck and a turntable. But while we would be studying for one test or another, he would play Mozart, Bach, Brahms, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, George Gershwin, Miles Davis...the list goes on and on...softly in the background.
Later on, in high school, my uncle and I would try to outdo each other with 2 channel systems. He usually won because he had his own business and my aunt was his sugar mama...
. But I had an advantage at the time that he didn't...I was a blue shirt at Best Buy! I worked both car and home audio at the time and virtually 100% of every paycheck went back into the store.
After I left Best Buy (my manager left to work at his buddy's high end audio shop which he now owns), I would work at Radio Shack for a time and that sort of fired back up my DIY genes.
This of course laid the foundation for my life long love of shiny new electronics.
I met my wife in 2008 and started dating in 2009. In 2010, I moved into her 2 bedroom 1300sq ft townhouse. I brought with me my Sony HTIB and my 60" Vizio LCD. But I did so knowing that it was soon time to upgrade. The HTIB was fine for my tiny 1 bedroom apartment but was quickly underwhelming in the open floor plan lower level of the townhouse. So I began to slowly piece together a relatively modest home theater for the living room.
In March of 2015, on my birthday in fact, we hosted one of the stops on the Central Iowa Home Theater Crawl and enjoyed the feedback we had from the folks who visited our modest living room theater. There was a little bit of drama the week before the crawl as Vizio pushed a software update to my (at the time) 65" TV. This bricked the TV and the only way to fix it was to replace the main board. I found one on eBay cheap but it would not be there in time for the crawl. So my wife and I hustled off to Costco and ended up buying a 70" UHD Vizio (I love the priceerformance ratio of the brand). Once home and back up and running, I realized that the Yamaha AVR I had at the time was not 4k pass-through capable...so of course, I swapped it out with a Denon AVR-X4100W. A quick and dirty Audyssey run later and we were ready for the crawl.
On Easter Sunday of that same year, my wife went downstairs to feed our pets only to discover that there was standing water in our under stair closet, half the dining room and part of the kitchen. Our floating laminate flooring in the dining room was literally floating. Long story short, urns out that Lowes had damaged the ice maker water line when installing our new fridge and it developed a slow leak that ultimately caused $5800 worth of damage. Lowes made good on it and paid us out in a check for the damages along with a $1500 gift card to Lowes.
This gave us the opportunity to start our living room/kitchen/dining room earlier than we had planned. We replaced the flooring, granite counters in the kitchen and a stainless steel backsplash. In the living room and dining room, we installed faux stone along the entire length of the back wall.
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So this was the first "final" edition of our home theater. It worked well and got good feedback from our friends who came to watch movies. It was also virtually flat from 1k on up. @Archaea did some captures on the crawl and this is what my humble adobe looked like...
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(Continued)
Backstory:
I have been into home audio and big TVs since my early years. My grandpa was a DIY guy to the core and he had built tube amps, speakers, etc. for as long as I can remember. He introduced me very early on to the soldering iron and to music in general.
In junior high, I had a science teacher who was the same way and had a Dynaco ST-70 kit he had built and a pair of Klipschorns in his classroom. I don't remember the sources he used other than a tape deck and a turntable. But while we would be studying for one test or another, he would play Mozart, Bach, Brahms, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, George Gershwin, Miles Davis...the list goes on and on...softly in the background.
Later on, in high school, my uncle and I would try to outdo each other with 2 channel systems. He usually won because he had his own business and my aunt was his sugar mama...
. But I had an advantage at the time that he didn't...I was a blue shirt at Best Buy! I worked both car and home audio at the time and virtually 100% of every paycheck went back into the store. After I left Best Buy (my manager left to work at his buddy's high end audio shop which he now owns), I would work at Radio Shack for a time and that sort of fired back up my DIY genes.
This of course laid the foundation for my life long love of shiny new electronics.
I met my wife in 2008 and started dating in 2009. In 2010, I moved into her 2 bedroom 1300sq ft townhouse. I brought with me my Sony HTIB and my 60" Vizio LCD. But I did so knowing that it was soon time to upgrade. The HTIB was fine for my tiny 1 bedroom apartment but was quickly underwhelming in the open floor plan lower level of the townhouse. So I began to slowly piece together a relatively modest home theater for the living room.
In March of 2015, on my birthday in fact, we hosted one of the stops on the Central Iowa Home Theater Crawl and enjoyed the feedback we had from the folks who visited our modest living room theater. There was a little bit of drama the week before the crawl as Vizio pushed a software update to my (at the time) 65" TV. This bricked the TV and the only way to fix it was to replace the main board. I found one on eBay cheap but it would not be there in time for the crawl. So my wife and I hustled off to Costco and ended up buying a 70" UHD Vizio (I love the price
erformance ratio of the brand). Once home and back up and running, I realized that the Yamaha AVR I had at the time was not 4k pass-through capable...so of course, I swapped it out with a Denon AVR-X4100W. A quick and dirty Audyssey run later and we were ready for the crawl.On Easter Sunday of that same year, my wife went downstairs to feed our pets only to discover that there was standing water in our under stair closet, half the dining room and part of the kitchen. Our floating laminate flooring in the dining room was literally floating. Long story short, urns out that Lowes had damaged the ice maker water line when installing our new fridge and it developed a slow leak that ultimately caused $5800 worth of damage. Lowes made good on it and paid us out in a check for the damages along with a $1500 gift card to Lowes.
This gave us the opportunity to start our living room/kitchen/dining room earlier than we had planned. We replaced the flooring, granite counters in the kitchen and a stainless steel backsplash. In the living room and dining room, we installed faux stone along the entire length of the back wall.
So this was the first "final" edition of our home theater. It worked well and got good feedback from our friends who came to watch movies. It was also virtually flat from 1k on up. @Archaea did some captures on the crawl and this is what my humble adobe looked like...
(Continued)
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