[Josuah]

I don't think sealing up the electrical room would be a good idea. And yeah, unless your infinite baffle went to the outside, you would have to sound-proof (a lot, since bass waves penetrate a lot) the other side of that room and decouple the wall that is acting as your baffle or else the rest of your house is shaking.

 

[Steve Williamson]

The electrical room will house all the servers, components, cabling etc, the only spare room is next to that under the stairs.

I am using cinemazone plasterboard and off centre spaced joists to try and soundproof the theatre well, I have chosen trapeze lighting to reduce the amount of holes in the ceiling and walls.

The riser will be 4 x 8 sheets of 1/2" marine ply, with a second layer at right angles to cover any joints screwed down. Probably use glass fibre insulation to pack the riser rather than sand.

Should I board the entire floor or leave concrete with underlay and carpet?

 

[JCD]

Should I board the entire floor or leave concrete with underlay and carpet?

I probably shouldn't even answer this one (I'm a paper pusher after all ), but I can't see why you'd need to board the main floor.

JCD

 

[Steve Williamson]

Quoting http://hometheatermag.com/bootcamp/140/index1.html

An additional benefit of a raised wood subfloor is that it absorbs some low frequencies, which is good. Otherwise, these frequencies just reflect off of the original concrete floor. A wood floor also vibrates with low frequencies, to some extent, creating a more-tactile experience. A raised floor that has at least a 3- or 4-inch air space under it will vibrate even more. This technique is used in the screening rooms at Lucasfilm and Dolby Labs. Anthony's and Russ' clients like the added low-frequency feeling as the subwoofer's bass energy transfers through the floor.

This has always stuck in my ind since reading the article several months ago.

 

[Josuah]

If you placed something inside the floor, like insulation, then I suspect you can get the same low-frequency benefits from the raised floor as you would from a panel trap. The panel trap I have on my back wall makes a noticeable difference. I followed Ethan Winer's design and so it is a sandwich of drywall (the real back wall), air, semi-rigid fiberglass, air, and plywood in a sealed enclosure.

There are also some rubbery things or something that people sell for acoustical decoupling of the floorboards you put down on top of the 2"x6" supports.

You should also consider what you will put inside the riser. I have my riser filled halfway with sand. This prevents sound from being a problem inside the hollow cavity and since the sand can move around it will quickly absorb a lot of acoustic and kinetic energy.

A raised floor will vibrate more due to acoustical energy. In comparison, a concrete floor will transfer kinetic energy much more easily. So how tightly coupled your speaker enclosures are to the floor will result in a different experience with the two floor types.

 

[Guest]

I have a Sony Vaio running Media Center 2005 and would love to figure out how to have it or the 360 serve all my dvd content, control the lights etc.... etc....

 

[Josuah]

X10 products will take care of the lights and other household things. But I'm not sure if they have something that will send discrete codes out over IR, if your home theater gear doesn't have RS232 inputs.

As for serving DVD content off your computer or XBOX 360, it is illegal for you to take a regular movie DVD and store it on your computer for that purpose.

 

[Guest]

I don't wanna serve the content to other people, other places. I wanna serve to my home theater, just like I serve my music from this one computer to all the other computers in my home.

 

[Steve Williamson]

There is a commercially available DVD Storeage system that is using the premise that you can store your DVD's for personal use - Same as DVD Shrink users use.

The problem is you have to convert the ifo's to a wmv file to stream to XBox extenders as they do not permit plain dvd files being streamed.

Software like HAI control for media centre and homeseer will let you control X10 and ther similar technologies from with in the MCE interface.

I think that HIA has a product that can use standard remote codes to other equipment.

 

[Tommy]

Check out the reviews for the BenQ PE8720 projector. When on another board I know someone else mentioned how good the BenQ customer service was in Australia. He said they came right out to the house to update the firmware on the projector.

 

[Steve Williamson]

Well I own it now, and the plans are through the local body corporate so here is the first pic of the soon to be theatre :R

Hoping for a smooth 6 months :hail:

 

[khellandros66]

Steve IMO i would try to "hide" the speakers especially if this room is to be for mostly for HT use. Using Definitive UIW RLS2 inwall speakers are great because they use a sealed backplate enclosure and eliminate issues with "sound crawl". If you budget is roughly $5000USD you can easily afford four of these for mounting as rear channels, plus I would use the Power Monitor 900s for the front channels behind the screen. This will give you 250w RMS 10in subs in each of the front speakers and let you set them to large so that they can handily recreate full range audio.

I feel that the best thing for LFE money can buy is an Infinite Baffle system. See The Infinitely Baffled. Right now TC-Sounds has the TC-3000 15in at $400 and four of these mounted properly and powered by the Behringer EP2500 could easly tromp most high dollar prebuilt subs.

This kind of setup can be used for both movies and music and will give you mountains of dynamics for a reasonable value.

EDIT: Oh and why hide em you ask? well to make the experience have pull like gravity, letting you forget why and how but just enjoying it

~Bob

 

[Steve Williamson]

Unfortunately there is no dealer in Oz for these, they look good though for in-walls, ruled out IB due to lack of room/soundproofing issues so will probably resort to Jamo D6 7.2 system, should fit my budget and they are quite inconspicous when wall mounted.

I'm going to use only HTPC for HT, running through seperate amplification, the soundblaster Audigy 2 ZS 7.1 has THX certification so if I stay with THX certified amplifiers I should have a cheap THX certified Theatre

 

[khellandros66]

That Jamo system looks mighty impressive. Good design too makes it easy to wall mount.

~Bob

 

[Guest]

If you are looking for a subfloor solution that won't steal a lot of height and will also provide a moisture barrier, you could consider Dricore or a similar product. Easy to install but not cheap. Here is the URL:

http://www.dricore.com/en/eindex.htm

I used this in my basement and installed hardwoods over it! 2 years and counting on the hardwoods and (knock wood - pun intended) no problems. The home theater area will have carpeting and the installer/owner of where I am getting my carpet actually took a piece with him to show other clients an alternative solution.

 

[Steve Williamson]

Things looked like they where about to start last Thursday, but the digger was reqired somewhere else and now its raining.

Should have the slab down by end of next week.

I consoled my self by ordering the two rows of theatre chairs when I found these at Amart, salesman gave me 10% off even though the sale was on floorstock only and not ordered goods. They will be delivered end of September, just have to find somewhere to store them.

Full leather, 4 seater with storage and cup holders in the arm rests for AU$2250 a piece. Had to sacrifice the electric recliners as they added AU$2550 a row.

 

[Josuah]

I don't wanna serve the content to other people, other places. I wanna serve to my home theater...

And that's illegal for you to do, with DVDs. The Kaledescape(sp?) is a product that was made to do that, supposedly with permission from the right people. But now they're getting sued anyway.

 

[Steve Williamson]

It is illegal to store a taped tv program on a VHS cassette in Australia, but they haven't banned the use of them. We have a huge movement requesting fair use to be introduced in to digital content provisions over here at the moment.

How can products like the MAX Multimedia Server, Media Centre PC's or any of the DVR's out there be allowed to exist when they are only used for the storage of copyrighted content.

There is always someone that can only keep chirping about it is illegal to copy your own DVD's, that may be so, but the time is already changing that it is legal to store a copy of the original if it is not in the same format, eg ripping CD's to MP3, or DVD's to WMV, why do you think Microsoft won't allow the XBox 360 to play DVD's from the server, but it will allow WMV versions to play or Itunes allows you to convert your CD's.

 

[Josuah]

I'm not debating the technical capabilties, but rlogle's response seemed to indicate he didn't know ripping DVDs for personal use is illegal because it bypasses CSS. Making copies of or storing copyrighted material for personal use isn't what is illegal, it's bypassing CSS that is. That's why you can't use Windows XP Media Center to rip a DVD movie; it has to be in the drive to play (as far as I can tell).

I just thought he should be aware of this. His Media Center PC is not going to be able to serve all his DVD content the way he wants, unless he hacks something together and is willing to do so illegally. If he is, that's fine. I'm not trying to be the copyright police. The MAX Multimedia Server exists in the same way the Kaledescape exists, but that doesn't mean that company isn't going to get sued too.

 

[Steve Williamson]

That's why you can't use Windows XP Media Center to rip a DVD movie; it has to be in the drive to play (as far as I can tell).

The XBox 360 requires the DVD to be in the drive, MCE will alow you to rip the DVD to any format, including copying ifo's and it will play them.