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Home Theater Geeks 460: A Starry Night Home Theater!
00:15:40
Redesigning a plain theater room beautifully
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- [00:00]
Scott Wilkinson
In this episode of Home Theater Geeks, I profile another great Home Theater of the Month from AVS Forum, so stay tuned.
- [00:09]
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- [01:28]
Scott Wilkinson
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- [02:16]
Scott Wilkinson
Hey there Scott Wilkinson here, the home theater geek. In this episode I profile another great Home Theater of the Month from AVS Forum. This one's from August 2024 so only a few months ago. We have a link to the actual article on AVS Forum in our show Notes, but I wanted to share it with you because it's pretty cool. The owner is named Alex, and he's only 31 years old, which is quite a bit younger than your average AVS Forum member. But he fully understands the value of a dedicated home theater. His young family bought a house in Las Cruces, New Mexico in 2023. Now, the house had a theater room, what they called a theater room. It was basically just a tall, empty room with a shelf in the back for the projector, no screen, and some low end in wall surround speakers. But it inspired him to build a real home theater in this room. In fact, when he saw it, he said, okay, let's buy this house. And you can see here the sectional, two loveseat combined sectional, the shelf with a projector on it. And then in the other corner, you can see this big, tall room. It's. It's really, really tall, 14 foot ceilings, which is much, much taller than any home theater I've ever seen before. Anyway, so he did a lot of, a lot of work in this room. And I will tell you at the beginning, and I'll also remind you later, it's all diy. He did this all himself. He built a. For example, he built a false screen wall to support the screen with enough room behind it to put the speakers behind the screen, which was going to be acoustically transparent. And that black material you see on the wall is 4 inch thick. Oh, I take it back. It's not 4 inches thick, but it is two layers of black acoustic duct liner to absorb the back wave of the speakers. Speakers radiate more or less spherically, and so that not only do they radiate forward, but they radiate backwards as well. And you want to try to minimize that interfering by reflecting off the wall behind them, the front wall of the theater. So you put that acoustic duct lining in there to minimize or reduce that back wave reflection. It's also black because an acoustically transparent screen has little tiny holes in it, which lets the sound come through from the speakers, and it also lets light come through. So when the projector shines onto the screen, most of the light gets reflected back into the room, but some of it gets through those tiny little holes. And if the wall behind the screen isn't black, then that light gets reflected and some of that comes back through those tiny little holes and can distort the image. So Alex did a really good thing there. He also did some really interesting things with the paint. He painted the ceiling a flat black and the walls he painted in what's called a lime wash dark blue, which looks quite a Bit lighter in this photo and most of the photos he's taken than it actually is. It's actually quite dark and you can see a ceiling fan here that he's removed as well. But that, that wall, you can see the, the lime wash kind of quality to it. It's got a real texture to it. It's really cool. Now one of the things Alex did, was very conscious about was acoustic treatments in the room. And he built these 12 acoustic panels of various sizes with, with wooden frames. Now he, he claimed he's not, he wasn't very handy, didn't have a lot of building skills when he started this project, but he dove right in and he, he really learned a lot. Now the panels, this is what I was thinking of earlier. The panels are 4 inch thick. Knauf acoustical board, that's K N A U F Nauf acoustical board which is 4 inches thick and therefore going to absorb a fair amount of frequencies. And they later get, get covered with a black fabric from the fabric store. Joanne and so he went there and got that fabric and built these, built these panels, 12 of them all together. We'll see where they're placed here in a little bit. In the next graphic we can see three of his front, his front, left and right and center speakers are from Power Sound Audio. The model is MTM210M and they reproduce the front, left, center and right channels. Also behind the screen are two Monoprice Monolith M15V2 subwoofers which are 15 inch subwoofers and they are what provide the base and really, really nice. Notice also at the bottom of this picture you can see the electronics. He doesn't have a lot. He's got a receiver in the middle. There's a, probably a blue ultra HD Blu Ray player there. A couple other things. He decided just to put those right there in the front under the speakers. Now the next graphic. One thing he did was to build a niche, or a niche, depending on how you want to say it, behind the wall. Remember that in the first photograph there was a shelf on the wall? Well, he didn't want that. He wanted to put the projector behind the wall. So he built this niche which is fan cooled to keep the projector cool. And he installed cinema grade optically clear glass in front of the projector which lets the light through just fine and helps minimize the amount of noise, the fan noise, getting into the theater. And he built this beautiful frame around the opening along with the frames for the acoustic panels. Now one of the cool things he did was he built an accurate replica of the HAL 9000 computer terminal from 2001 A Space Odyssey. And I just think, I mean, wow, it just looks just like it. It was great. Now what he did also did was he embedded an Apple Home Pod mini within this replica to accept voice commands. So for example, he told me whenever a movie is paused, the lights activate dynamically, emulating a dim fireplace while the home pod plays ambient fireplace sounds. Man, that's cool. And when you start playback again, the movie resumes while the lights and sounds fade to black. Oh man, that is just really, really nice. Very creative. Now he did the calibration of the audio, probably the video as well. But I have here a graphic that you can see the pre and post calibration curves for the room's base response. The purple is obviously the pre calibration and you can see some peaks in around 40 and around 55 and around 80 and around 95. But after calibration, that white curve is very, very flat. Not perfect, but close enough that no one will notice. It's really good. He did an excellent job in that.
- [10:53]
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- [11:41]
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- [12:13]
Scott Wilkinson
So let's take a look at a couple pictures of the final theater. Here. We're standing in the entrance and you can see some of the acoustics, acoustic panels on the back wall, along with an end on the sidewall as well, along with a projector niche and the HAL 9000. And it looks mighty nice. And we look at the next one and we can see, oh, this one, he's quite the bass fanatic. And so he added what are called tactile transducers under the seats. These are from a company called Croson. And basically when the, when the base low frequency content of the soundtrack gets really intense, these things actually shake your seat. And this is not my cup of tea. I would not install this in a home theater, but I know an awful lot of people who do. And if you really want to, it's more immersive. Certainly if you're watching an earthquake on a movie or a spaceship blast off or something like that, your seat's gonna rumble. Some people love it, I don't. But more power to them if they do. So he has the front two seats with these Croson tactile transducers. Now if we take a look at the back of the room, we can see seven acoustic panels and the rear overhead speakers which are mounted really high up on the back wall. Now unfortunately, he's still using the low end in wall surround speakers that came with the room. And I really hope he replaces them soon. That will, that will help improve the situation, the sonic situation greatly. But the overhead speakers, those, those are quite nice. He's got four of them, two on the back wall and two on the front. Now one of the most special features of this room is the star ceiling that he put up. Most people use what are called fiber optic star ceilings. They have dozens, hundreds of fiber optic cables that end in little tiny holes in the ceiling and shine with light that supposed to represent stars. This is not that. This one he painted with phosphorescent paint. And so he has several up firing ultraviolet lights that shine onto the ceiling. And he shines these, turns on these lights for a while that charges up the phosphorescent paint. And then when you turn them off, the phosphorescent paint glows for a while, it gradually fades, but the effect is wonderful. I have seen star ceilings like this and I really like them a lot. And he actually painted them with an accurate representation of the Milky Way and several constellations, which I thought was just great. So finally we take a look at the front of the Theater. And you can see he was wondering, how am I going to take care or deal with this high ceiling. I want the screen to be down where it's supposed to be, but that means I've got all this wall space leading up to the ceiling, 14 foot high ceilings. And so we covered them with this plush, you know, curtain material, which makes it look like a high end commercial cinema. I think that's great. I really like the way it looks. And here you can also see the front overhead speakers and some of the other acoustic treatments that are at what are called the first reflection points. So when the speakers send out their sound spherically, it will bounce against the walls at some point. And what are called the first reflections based upon where the chairs are, the seats are, are where those acoustic panels are, which allow them to reduce the amount that you hear of that reflection off the wall. And you're hearing more of the direct sound. Now, as I said, this is an entirely DIY theater. Do it yourself. Alex did everything except, he says, move a couple of electrical outlets. And he says he spent around $20,000, which is a fair chunk of change, no question, but it's one of the least expensive home theaters of the month I've ever featured. He says that if he had hired somebody to do this to an installer, it would have been more like $50,000. So he saved an awful lot of money by doing it himself. And he has a great deal of pride, justifiably so, in what he has accomplished. He named it the Odyssey Theater in honor of Stanley Kubrick and in particular his iconic movie 2001 A Space Odyssey, which you can't blame him for or you totally understand because he put a replica of HAL 9000 right there on the wall. So I think it's super well done. It's a really nice theater. And the fact that it's all DIY is just so much the better. So thanks for coming along with me on this Odyssey through the Odyssey Theater. Hope you enjoyed it. Now, if you have a question for me, you can send it along to htgitwit tv and I will answer as many as I can right here on the show. And we thank you, as always, for your support of the Twit Network with your membership in Club Twit, which gives you access to all the Twitch shows in their video form and lets you come into the Discord Forum and interact with folks who also love tech. So until next time, geek out.
- [18:48]
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