Soft Opening / First Impressions - 10/02/2017
As of last Saturday my theater is operational.
No pretty overview pictures of the theater yet because I'm going to wait on my sound treatments, but I can show you the last parts of the install.
Pretty straight forward as my equipment is pretty meager. Don't get too excited about the oldshool Linksys WRT54G. It's just temporary and configured as a switch (DD-WRT firmware) to handle networking responsibilities in the rack area. Only around until I get another 1Gbit switch.
Temp display is built into a basic thermostat. With all the cabinet doors closed and the volume blasting my equipment stays ~ 82 degrees with a fan switchpoint of 80 degrees. I can raise or lower that number, but in my experience it's a good balance so that the cabinet fan isn't on all the time. It's not a 100% proven cooling solution, but it's doing a very good job so far and with everything shut, it is silent from inside the theater.
Here's how the frontside of the reworked combo laundry shoot, rack enclosure, front right speaker cubby, and the backside of the screen wall turned out:
If you look you can see my center and right front channels in the pics. Don't choke too hard laughing :D Hopefully I'll be able to budget a new LCR setup in the near future.
Funny side note. When I brought out the little HTIB speakers my wife was like "what are those!?!" with disgust. I explained they were the old LCR speakers from our last setup. She was under the impression that I had secretly bought a new front soundstage and stowed it away somewhere. Why else would I have built the speaker supports so big?
I spent a few hours getting the wiring as neat as it is. I could spend a 1/2 day longer, but right now it works, so I'm leaving it until I start upgrading things.
The backside door works as advertised and does the job of keeping the heat and noise isolated from the theater.
Remote duties for the theater went to my Harmony 900. No real issues there.
The Lutron Maestro IR was a most excellent buy and integrates well with the remote. Dimming the lights from my seat got lots of ooohs and ahs
First impressions:
Unlike the rest of my fam I've only got ~ 30 minutes of seat time, so my first impressions are limited but I thought I'd go ahead and give it a go:
Visual - Very impressed with the spandex screen. At 10' 1/2" from the screen I couldn't make out any material texture / pattern. I was also presently surprised that I adapted to the size / immersion of such a large screen almost instantly. I've never been one to sit in the front half of the movie theater, so in the back of my head I was a little worried. That pared with the fact that the HW40ES performed admirably filling 150" made me happy I bit the bullet and went LARGE!. Finally, I wasn't distracted at all by my white theater door or the wood floor (I've been worried about excessive glare), but I'm sure that opinion will solidify with more time in the seat.
Audio - I didn't even have to turn on the sound to know that my bass response was going to be pretty gutless / all over the place and it was. Additionally, I knew from running my AVR's basic Audyssey EQ and seeing the results that the front speakers are holding a lot back. That being said, my fairly untrained ears were happy in their ignorance :D Despite its faults, I'm really enjoying the experience. Just hearing the realistic imaging from having the front speakers spaced properly and at ear level (a first in my HT endeavors) makes the whole AT screen worth while. Audio will be the area that will most likely receive upgrades down the road. I don't have any interest in atmos at the moment (or 4k for that matter), but a better front soundstage is definitely in my future and I suspect I'll invest in a small AVR upgrade that can provide a little more fine tuning in the EQ dept (Considering a Denon AVRX3300W for Audyssey XT32). After that, some DIY Sub(s) may be in my future.
Next up - Headphone control. To make the theater really usable during late hours (while my daughters sleep on either side) rolling out my headphone plans is a must. The original plan was to use the AVR's headphone port with an automated toggle tied to the HTPC (HTPC is able to switch a relay which can enable / disable the headphone port on my modded AVR) to output to a pair of 1x4 headphone amps. It worked, but I'm changing my plans simply because the HTPC will be bitstreaming multichannel surround tracks to the AVR most times, even when the AVR is only pushing it to the stereo headphone jack. My thinking is that, if it's possible, it would be ideal for the HTPC to switch audio outputs on demand from HDMI to analog stereo on demand. When it makes that kind of switch the player / audio filters will know that the output device is only capable of stereo so it will select the video's stereo track and output it. I think this will be superior to the AVR downmixing 5.1 or 7.1 to stereo, but we'll see.