Valorums home theater

[Valorum]

I have a front-projection setup, which uses the following equipment:

Electrohome Marquee 8501LC projector, mounted to the ceiling with the popular unistrut stuff found at Home Depot.

The video signal is fed to the projector through a 25' VGA to 5 BNC (RGBHV) cable, which uses mini-coax wires. I bought this at a local pro-video distributor for about $65 IIRC.

The video signal is generated by the HTPC. I bought this from CellarCinemas way back. It's still only a PIII 1GHz with 256MB RAM. Not very beefy But i use it 99% of the time as a DVD player. The video card was originally a Radeon LE (7200?), which was the card of choice back then. I have replaced it with a Radeon 9700 Pro since then (which was my regular desktop PC's video card until i upgraded it.)

The DVD player software i use is TheaterTek. I also use the ffdshow filter to slightly sharpen the picture.

On the audio side, i have a 7.1 setup:

I have a Pioneer 1014-VSX receiver. I got lucky and got this one very cheap when the 1015 had just been introduced.

My main speakers (front left, center and right) are Mackie HR824 speakers. These are active speakers, meaning they have the amplifier built in. In this case they have 2 built in, one for the tweeter and one for the woofer. I feed them with the "pre-out" signal from the receiver. I use an RCA-to-XLR connector on the receiver side for each one, and then have a 50' XLR cable going to the speakers.

My sides are Wharfedale Diamand DFS speakers. These are bipoles, and I got these cheap on sale as well Because they are bipole and because of the layout of my theater room (14'x29') these work a lot better than my old monopole speakers i was using.

The rears are some old three-way speakers that a friend gave me several years ago. They sound ok, and for rear surrounds they are fine as far as i'm concerned. I used these as my sides for a while, but moved 'm to rear speaker duty when i got my Wharfedales for the sides.

For speaker cable to the sides and rears i use regular Home Depot grade cable. I believe it's 14 or 16 gauge. Nothing special here.

Then the sub I built this little beast myself over the past few months. It uses a SoundSplinter RL-p15 driver in a box that's 4'x2'x2' externally. It has four 4" ports, but right now i run it with one port closed. Variable tuning is cool

I feed power to the sub through a Mackie M-1400 amp. I have the driver's dual voice coils hooked up so that the impedance is 8 ohm, and the amp outputs about 700 watts into that, which seems to be just right.

I also use a Behringer Feedback Destroyer (BFD). The receiver's sub out goes into the BFD (using a converter plug from RCA to 1/4"). I also have a MIDI connection between my HTPC and the BFD. On the HTPC i have RoomEQ Wizard, an indispensible tool for fine tuning the sub. Through the MIDI connection i can program the BFD in seconds, which rocks.

I think that's about it... All in all i'm happy with this setup. But i am getting itchy about wanting to do HD-DVD now. That means i gotta get a player and upgrade my projector (new input card at least) to be able to do that. Hmmmm...

[Sonnie]

Very interesting... never heard of that projector before.

The Mackie's have had some discussion here and I looked at those a while back. I understand they are very good speakers.

I use Lowes 6 gauge wire for my mains and center. It was cheap and recommended by the owner of Bound for Sound (online audio magazine). It's huge wire but seems to do the trick.

SoundSplinter is a car sub huh? Or mostly for cars? I used a Kicker Competition 18" sub once in a home install. Worked out well.

[Phil M]

The Marguee is a CRT - CRT's still beat DLP/LCD in terms of image quality. The brave can pick up good refurbished units for $5k and have an image quality that compares with digital projectors costing over $30k. It's an option worth considering, but only if you feel comfortable setting one up - or have access to a CRT installer (they're becoming scarcer than the dodo - and more expensive!).