Those are home made acoustic panels that I built from some plans found in the soundand vision forum almost 10 years ago. I need to recover them with a new fabric to better compliment the room. Thx for the compliments.
The entertainment unit sits in the corner and is diagonal to the sofa. The little sub (PSB Subsonic 5) as Alex likes to call it is behind the entertainment unit. There is one arm chair to the right of the couch in the 4th picture . Maybe I should move the surround behind it instead of its current location becasue the arm chair is out of the influence of surround speakers.
I had an hour to myself so I pushed the console away from the corner, slipped behind it with some cable ties, my new coax to HDMI adapter and a coax audio cable and hooked it all together. I also took some time tyring to clean up the wiring/cabling .... with limited sucess. I pushed it all back, turned on the system, lsipped a DVD in and pushed the digital button that enables teh Technics to accept bit stream and voila, I'm back in the digital age. Now that I had success with that, I decided to calibrate the 5.1 system with "DVD Essentials" attempting to set SPL for the center, left/right surrounds and subwoofer. The only level adjustment I can do on the Technics. The first thing the disc pointed out was that I had reversed left/right from speakers. After swapping the connections and restesting, I sat down for about 30 minutes
and watched a Harry Potter movie. It sounds more than good enough to be a backup system.
I had some quiet time in the house last night so I thought I would recalibrate the secondary system again. I'm glad I did because I forget to configure the distance parameters on the old Technics receivers (pre room correction facilities). I have it all dialed in now that I don't have more than a 2db difference in the DVD Esssentials full frequency sweep around the room. One thing that struck me is how well I was able to integrate the PSB Alpha mains with sub. It sounded like a pair of full range towers. The level of integration became apparent when I turned off the DSP on the Technics. The Alphas lacked bass from about 80 to 70 Hz down.
I tested the secondary system out yesterday with the DVD copy of Live, Die, and Repeat just to see how my little PSB sub would handle that extra low end at the start of the flick. It went low but stopped digging to the bottom layers of that sub track as expected without any ill side affects. However, I will have to rerun YPAO because the sub output level is a little weak for my tastes. The receiver's level of the sub is set at the minimum level of the AVR. I also can't raise the level of the sub setting on the AVR without it disabling YPAO. I will rerun YPAO with the sub's gain set to 1/4 mark, save the setting and then turn the gain up a biyt on the sub to suit my tastes.
I dialed down the gain on the sub, skipped all the settings except for level and reran YPAO . Now the AVR has its level sub smack in the middle of its output so it gives me some room to play without having to pull the entertainment center back from the wall to manually adjust the gain. I bumped up the gain a little on the sub before pushing the entertainment center back in position.
I was using my first non networked media player (Iomega Screenplay which has an internal 1TB drive) as a back up unit for a 1TB Seagate drive that was attached to my WD TV Live Plus. Now that I have my media transferred to from a Seagate drive to a 3TB WD MyBook, I'm decided to use the Iomega as my media player for my secondary system. Updating its media contents is a bit of PIA in that I have to disconnect it from the secondary system and attach it to the PC but I'm willing to work with it like that for the time being.
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