And in tandem with the rest of my crap I've been rigging up some 7.1 surround sound in my new place. After a couple weeks we *finally* got it all hooked up. Its a sweet rig, ran all the wires through the walls and everything. Minor complications, just lots of them. So let me talk shop for a second -
#Speakers
Luckily I had most of the speakers I needed already, I only needed to buy a couple. What we're featuring here is nht almost all the way around. My front l/r are athena towers (cause i still like to have a "stereo"). Everything else - nht. First the center channel, i don't remember the model (lol, I suck i know) but its cool. The rears are what really shine - the "surround" rears (i call them side rears) are NHT SB-1 speakers. The "Back Rears" are NHT Absolute Zeros.
Now check this - an interesting thing I learned while doing all of this. NHT Absolute zero's... check your serial number BEFORE you buy mounts. As awesome as it is, sometime mid production NHT changed the side of the mounting threads in the speakers. Basically they made them bigger, this requires that you use a heavier duty mount - these mounts are usually rated for speakers above 20lbs. Now the Abs zero is only 8 pounds, why did they do this? I don't have the slightest idea, but it was a huge pain in the butt. I actually bought 4 mounts and put them up only to find later that they wouldn't fit two of my speakers (which they would have fit, had i bought them earlier). Ugh - gets better too - we ran all the cables thinking we could mount stuff in dryall - these heavy duty mounts are also heavier - oops. We used some special anchors and got around the problem, but what a fucking pain.
#Wiring
We only ran cables in the walls for the rears (4 wires in total). In wall wiring has special requirements (like it doesn't heat up and set your house on fire) - so you need to get specially rated wire. I went with some 14 gauge (gauge is important when it comes to distance/power).
How about another lesson - before you do stuff. Check your walls for cross beams ahead of time. My house, as interesting as this might sound, has multiple cross beams all of which are several 2x4's thick. Doing the wiring near the receiver was a bitch. Basically what we did was cut out two large squares in the wall and cut out some of the cross beams to make room for the wire. God. If you don't have cross beams this whole process goes a lot faster.
#Receiver
Well - if we're going full 7.1 then we might as well have a receiver that can keep up. Since I also had a number of hdmi devices it was time for something with bigger nuts. I went with the denon 2809. It has a 4-1 hdmi muxer, upscaling, the works. Very exciting day when i picked that fucker up.
#Testing the experience
I gotta say - its fucking bad ass. Want to know? Try a number of blurays - its an experience, that's for sure. My first test was with the wall-e bluray (collectors ed since i work at pixar and i twas cheaper for me). Wall-e features dts-hd master audio 5.1 - this is a lossless audio format. Now, after some research there are a number of ways to create "lossless" content or I guess I should say formats. Wall-e uses a very high quality one. Its pretty surreal how good the thing sounds.
Now further testing is needed - why? I wanna know what this puppy can do. I found a cool website, bluray-stats.com or something like that. You can search by the features of a particular bluray, includin 7.1 lossless 24bit audio - if you want to get down to that level. Lionsgate films puts out the most blurays with killer audio tracks, the sad part is most of them are movies I really don't want to see. Oh well, I'll get them anyhow.
And for the truly hardcore audiophile there are bluray music discs that feature 96khz sampling in addition to all that goodies. I've heard 96khz tracks before (dvd audio) and its crisp. I'm exciting to see what a 7.1 audio track sounds like at 96khz. Too bad for me (being a rock fan anyhow) that all the music available is classical. I bet its tits tho - I'm sure i'll mail order one before long.
I think the first bluray music purchase will be NIN's ghosts I-IV since i'm a big fan and its an excuse to get some bluray audio. As for movies - looks like its going to be something like hellboy 2 (why? cause its got a killer audio track and comic movies are usually tolerable).
Anyhow, as usual, i'll keep you posted.
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
follow up
Alright kiddies - i've had a few weeks with the setup and there've been a few snags, luckily though they are easy enough to work around.
So what's the snag? Basically I found I was having major connectivity issues on my airport express in my living room. Examining the logs and all that it appeared to be related to signal strength - it was sitting around 20%. Sure, it worked but only sometimes, it was really frustrating. So why does this happen? I'll explain.
Although 5ghz N wifi networks have a few advantages (speed, less interference) - they also have a sore disadvantage - range. Now, sure, 5ghz doesn't travel as far but it physical objects affect it WAY more than they affect the 2.4ghz band. In an open room you can expect about 50ft range. You throw in a wall and some objects and that number reduces significantly.
Now my setup my airport extreme base station is in my office, then there's a kitchen and all sorts of crap in it followed by another wall. Clearly this was my problem. The solution? A repeater. And I'm lazy so I just bought another airport express and plopped in the kitchen. The result was about a 15-20% increase in signal to the aiport express in my livingroom (granted this is perceived signal). Since I've made this change nothing but stability. In fact it improved my peformance as well - the system is much punchier now (music/movies start quicker, lots of motion doesn't not induce stuttering).
It gets more interesting, and there are still things to try. Apple wifi products support two different "repeater" type mechanisms. One is apple proprietary - that's the one I'm using. The alternative is called "WDS" or "Wireless Distribution System". I haven't tried it out yet, but I've heard there are performance differences between that and the apple proprietary one. However, lucky for me, I've got enough performance and no connectivity problems - I won't be messing with it, but if someone does it'd be interesting to compare performance of the two mechanisms in a controlled environment. Btw - I've heard that airport expresses don't work well at repeaters - i've had no problems yet (3 weeks of use so far).
As for the network - that's that. I'm going to get into another project soon installing dd-wrt on a 20 dollar airlink router. The goal is to turn it into a fully functional and awesome access point for my b/g devices. Right now its running the original firmware which SUCKS, works tho. Big problems here are if you are using things like bonjour on your network (i.e. hooking the printer into your base station). I tried setting up a portmap for bonjour - no good. I've heard on the grapevine that doing this type of thing requires costly hardware/software - so screw that. Anyhow, that will get its only blog.
What else is coming up - oh, so I'm working on something I'm calling "the pipeline". This will be a linux setup that automatically downloads, repairs, and converts video - all in linux (cause i'm so sick of windows right now I could scream). Maybe not fully automatic, I'd still have to establish the downloads but i'm thinking I'll use inotify (I should say, pynotify ;) ) as the trigger mechanism. Should be cool, stay tuned.
I will also post my mediatomb config in its entirity one of these days. Really tho there's not much I can post here that isn't on 100 other websites, I just like the idea of being a complete source.
So what's the snag? Basically I found I was having major connectivity issues on my airport express in my living room. Examining the logs and all that it appeared to be related to signal strength - it was sitting around 20%. Sure, it worked but only sometimes, it was really frustrating. So why does this happen? I'll explain.
Although 5ghz N wifi networks have a few advantages (speed, less interference) - they also have a sore disadvantage - range. Now, sure, 5ghz doesn't travel as far but it physical objects affect it WAY more than they affect the 2.4ghz band. In an open room you can expect about 50ft range. You throw in a wall and some objects and that number reduces significantly.
Now my setup my airport extreme base station is in my office, then there's a kitchen and all sorts of crap in it followed by another wall. Clearly this was my problem. The solution? A repeater. And I'm lazy so I just bought another airport express and plopped in the kitchen. The result was about a 15-20% increase in signal to the aiport express in my livingroom (granted this is perceived signal). Since I've made this change nothing but stability. In fact it improved my peformance as well - the system is much punchier now (music/movies start quicker, lots of motion doesn't not induce stuttering).
It gets more interesting, and there are still things to try. Apple wifi products support two different "repeater" type mechanisms. One is apple proprietary - that's the one I'm using. The alternative is called "WDS" or "Wireless Distribution System". I haven't tried it out yet, but I've heard there are performance differences between that and the apple proprietary one. However, lucky for me, I've got enough performance and no connectivity problems - I won't be messing with it, but if someone does it'd be interesting to compare performance of the two mechanisms in a controlled environment. Btw - I've heard that airport expresses don't work well at repeaters - i've had no problems yet (3 weeks of use so far).
As for the network - that's that. I'm going to get into another project soon installing dd-wrt on a 20 dollar airlink router. The goal is to turn it into a fully functional and awesome access point for my b/g devices. Right now its running the original firmware which SUCKS, works tho. Big problems here are if you are using things like bonjour on your network (i.e. hooking the printer into your base station). I tried setting up a portmap for bonjour - no good. I've heard on the grapevine that doing this type of thing requires costly hardware/software - so screw that. Anyhow, that will get its only blog.
What else is coming up - oh, so I'm working on something I'm calling "the pipeline". This will be a linux setup that automatically downloads, repairs, and converts video - all in linux (cause i'm so sick of windows right now I could scream). Maybe not fully automatic, I'd still have to establish the downloads but i'm thinking I'll use inotify (I should say, pynotify ;) ) as the trigger mechanism. Should be cool, stay tuned.
I will also post my mediatomb config in its entirity one of these days. Really tho there's not much I can post here that isn't on 100 other websites, I just like the idea of being a complete source.
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