white noise

This weekend I decided I needed to get back in the swing of working in the basement so I spent it hooking up the real sound system. Up to this point watching movies down there has been accompanied by a set of computer speakers. Well, astalavista Altec Lansing!

The first job was installing the five speaker mounts. Yep, it’s a 5.1 system going in down there. I ran wire for an additional back two, but I have neither the speakers or an amp that support 7.1. Installing the mounts went smoothly but it took some time. It took a combination of drilling into the steel studs and using drywall toggle anchors. I worked on it while watching OSU put a whooping on Northwestern. Even though the mounts are really intended for Bose satellite systems, they work great on my small Sony speakers.

Then I moved the sub-monster down there. I’ve had the sub probably close to two years now. I bought it on Ebay at a great price in anticipation of the theater room. It can pump 150 Watts, has a 12″ cone, and is THX certified. It’s about the size of an end table, but don’t even think of setting a drink on it! It’s really a bit more bass than anyone needs, but since the rest of my system consists of satellites I wanted to make sure there was ample bass support.

Next I tore apart all the entertainment wiring upstaris to move some of the components down to the basement rack. Once the rack was wired up the real ‘fun’ started…the calibration. I decided to go ahead and give the projector a video calibration. I was holding off since I’m still only projecting on primed drywall. But since it’ll probably be a couple months before I get to building a screen, I thought I might as well dial in the picture for the current situation. The AVIA calibration DVD is an awesome tool. Lots of test patterns to really help you tweak things. I’ve got a pretty good handle on Color, Tint, Brightness, Contrast, and Sharpness, but not as much on some of the more advanced settings (like gamma on each LCD panel). The thing about video calibration is you really need to set up a couple presets like “bright” and “dark” depending on the room lighting you might want. Luckily my projector has slots for 3 user settings in addition to the 5 or so factory presets. The other thing about video is that there is definitely a smoothness versus sharpness tradeoff. You can go really sharp which is instantly impressive (especially on HD material), but part of the impressive impression is just because things don’t look quite natural. Away from that end of the spectrum you get a smoother picture – a lot of people describe it as more film-like. The smoother setting doesn’t give you that initial jolt, but ultimately I find the picture more satisfying and easier to watch. For what it’s worth, the AVIA calibrations lead you to the smoother setting as well. There is a balance though because too smooth becomes soft and you lose detail. After the calibration I was really happy with the picture – not too different than before, but I think the depth and color are a little more natural.

Then I finished up by calibrating the audio. The AVIA disk also contains a bunch of great tests for that – pink noise, frequency sweeps, etc. I set up a digital sound meter (SPM) in the ideal seating location and ran through all the tests. The sound meter was especially helpful in setting the sub volume and frequency crossover. Matching it to the five satellite speakers is really crutial in making a good soundscape and without the SPM it’s hard for me to compare levels between very different frequencies. Something that was cool was I measured the sub without significant dropoff down to about 20Hz even though it’s only officially rated down to 35Hz (nice to see a conservative spec for a change). My hearing gives out around 25Hz, so I guess I have many rock concerts to thank for that. The other thing I learned is that the official calibration standard (according to AVIA) is VERY LOUD. The benchmark is to calibrate all speaker levels to 85dB at the optimimal seating location. That’s insane. From my reading on the internet 85dB is considered the threshold to hearing damage! I instead used 75dB as my benchmark (which is actually the common benchmark for home installations) – still very loud, but still TEN times less intense (dBs are log scale units).

After all that was done I enjoyed a few tracks off Peter Gabriel’s Secret World DVD. The sound is fantastic. I can’t wait to try out a lot of other disks.