esc's Home Theater Odyssey

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Here it is finally. From roughly the beginning to its current state. I have been promising I would get pics of my room up for a couple years now and here they are.

I am still in the middle of editing alot of the pics (I took way too many during construction), but here is what I have so far.
Hopefully in the next couple weeks I'll have them all up.

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Back in October 2005 I had sold my 46" RCA TV and started the whole process of building a theater room. Unfortunately I don't have any pictures of what the room looked like before with the old TV and sound system (and 70's couches I had inherited from my parents... yeesh!). In 2004 or 2005 I had gotten ahold of a free Proxima, 250 Lumen, 50 or more decibel projector which served it purposes (it got moving pictures on the wall) but that was about it. The screen door effect was aweful, it was loud and hot, but it was pretty neat and continued my love affair with home theater. I got hooked on the idea of a projector.

You can see in the pictures the old white screen and black border painted on the wall, and marked out in green painter's tape the approximate size and position of where I thought the new screen might end up being.

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Fast forward to January 06 and not much has happened yet. I am in the process of saving for theater hardware, so the room is being used for storage and occasionally a space is cleared to measure out cloth for the curtains. In the pics you can see some of my toys and theater decorations.


I wanted to get done what I could while I had free time before the real construction began, so I bought way too many bolts of a black fabric called Pleather. It was about $3 or $4 per sq yard so it was affordable and available at WalMart. It is quite heavy, with cloth on one side and thick and rubbery on the other, so it is very durable and stretchy. Because of its qualitys, it's sometimes used for S&M gear (just FYI). The dimensions of the room weren't going to change so I got alot of the curtins cut and sewn way before any of the construction was done or the screen went up.

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The furnature also arrived in January. It was a backward way of doing it to get the furnature as one of the first things, but I found a set of black leather seating at a local discount liquidation place for cheap and if I didn't pick them up that day, they would have been gone.

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Puttying the snot out of all the walls to get rid of bumps and cracks.
I worked my ass off to get the front wall as smooth as possible (bottom 2 pics) as I thought the screen would be painted directly onto the wall. Little did I know what the future had in store. (I'll be putting up my 3rd screen in 2007 as there were a couple screen disasters looming in my future.)

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Early in the year my players arrived to replace my Panasonic 5 Disc non-upconverting player which I am now using as a multi disc CD player becuase it is getting very twitchy when playing DVDs.

I decided on the single disc upconverting Panasonic S77S.
Fantastic player and highly reccomended for anyone who is into picture quality on any size or age of TV.

review - http://www.bytesector.com/data/bs-article.asp?id=503

It has more settings and sub menus than anyone would know what to do with which can be very confusing when trying to navigate at first. I can't really fault it though. The image it produces and the increase in sound quality that I have noticed over other players more than make up for the menu issues and it only being a single disc player. It is not just the crispness and quality of the image that is better with this player, there is also now a depth to the image on alot of DVDs that I had never seen before which is quite impressive. The increase in video quality is not just over HDMI. For a time I used an S-Video to RCA adapter to run the player out to a TV made in the 80's with spectacular results. We're not talking instant HDTV here, but as I've said, the increase in image quality on any screen is striking.

I also picked up a Toshiba SD4980 for my Region 0 and PAL needs.
It has nowhere near the picture or sound quality of the S77S, but its great for overseas DVDs.

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The projector arrives!

After much deliberation over Sanyos, Sonys, BenQs, Panasonics, DLPs and LCDs, and much input from the forum I settled on the Sony VPL HS60 Cineza. Based on its specs and many reviews it seemed to be what I was after. Other than a slight motion blurring effect (due to it being LCD) that is visible to only some people, I have been more than impressed with it. The screen door effect is non existant unless you are 3ft away from the screen. The colors are vibrant and upconverted images to 720p or 1080i look fantastic. Plus it has multiple inputs, including 1 HDMI port, and endless menus, settings, knobs and dials for adjustment.

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Me celebrating the arrival of the projector.
I loves my Malibu !

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A few drinks later and I was ready to plug it in...

I just set it on top of a speaker in my empty room and threw in a few DVDs.

Whoops, we'll need some calibration here.

[EM3]

Nice pics! Looks like you have put in quite a lot of work. So what kind of screen disasters are you talking about?

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I had LOTR FOTR EE and War of the Worlds handy so I threw them in. Upconverted over HDMI they looked very impressive on just the wall with no player or projector calibration. The low quality if the images is due to my 3.1 MegaPixel $100 digital camera, not the image quality produced by the proj. I'll try to borrow a much higher quality camera that can take better pictures in the dark for when I put up pics of the final screen images.

The pics don't look that great, but it gives you an idea of just how bright it was. Check out the level of detail on Gimli's headgear. I had never seen those ornate metal carvings before.

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This one is taken on a night setting with a fatser shutter speed.

Very cool detail in the costumes and hair.

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More putty, sanding and paint later and the wall was looking good.

Here is the first test hanging of the curtains to see if the method I had come up with to hang them would keep them up.
It involved lots of nails and swearing.

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More curtain sewing on the 60 year old sewing machine I borrowed from a co-worker.

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Behind the door of the theater Where the component rack is going to go. Let the destruction of the house begin!

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Construction started around April. Here's my boyfriend in the storage room behind the theater getting ready to start banging holes in the walls to make room for the component rack.

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My house is trying to send me secret ALIAS messages through the drywall ?

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[tomdkat]

Cool! When do you expect to be done?

Peace...

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its about 95% done now. just a few more toys and electronic components need to arrive.

These pictures are months old and I have alot more done to the theater as of now. I only need to find more time to put the rest of the pics up.

[Pirate]

Looks like it's coming along great. I can't wait to see the finished product!

Nice job!

[sub780lime]

I felt like i went on a journey through the history of your theater...good job. I am really excited for the end of the book...i mean theater.

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Cutting shelves for the rack + my little helper dog Sam.

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Rack from the front and back.

After that had been started it was time to start putting together the riser that would raise up the seating in the rear of the theater by about 8".

All of the Xbox and PS2 controller cables are run underneath the riser and the controllers plug into ports on the front, underneath the seating. Since the Nintendo Wii is backwads compatible with GameCube games, I didn't have to worry about GameCube ports, and the Wii and XBox 360 are both wireless, so the controllers for those are already taken care of when I get those systems.