Home Theater Build

[Deety]

Sharp now has an 80" LCD HDTV. Ho. Lee. Shit.

http://www.sharpusa.com/ForHome/HomeEntertainment/LCDTVs/LC80LE632U.aspx

Out of curiosity, I used the "find retailer" button. It came up with a list of job openings. You know a TV is expensive when they measure it in entire jobs!

 

[sparcboxbuck]

Sharp now has an 80" LCD HDTV. Ho. Lee. Shit.

http://www.sharpusa.com/ForHome/HomeEntertainment/LCDTVs/LC80LE632U.aspx

Ho Lee want know why you always so maaaaaaaad.

 

[jwinslow]

Big combined Christmas present: EMP Tek E5Ti & E5Bi speakers (will add the E5Ci when it is in stock)

Anyone looking for a higher end system on a budget should put themselves on the wait list for B-stock speakers. They retail for $500/pair and are comparable to $1-2k sets, and are $250/pair for B-stock towers, $125/pair for bookshelf speakers. B-stock function perfectly but have minor cosmetic flaws, usually very hard if not impossible to find. The only caveat is there are no returns.

Also skip the subwoofer. The speakers are outstanding and outrageously cheap (even at retail prices) but the subwoofer is quite average

Audioholics review:
http://www.audioholics.com/reviews/speakers/floorstanding/emptek-e55ti

AVS thread:
http://www.avsforum.com/t/1388934/50-clearance-emp-tek-e55ti-towers-any-good

The red burl finish is really popular, it just didn't go with our decor:

We opted for the glossy black ash instead.

 

[usf72]

I am trying to come up with ideas of how to set up my ideal home theatre system but I'm not really sure which direction to go in. I am planning on ripping all of our DVDs and putting them on a hard drive along with our music. I would like to come up with a way to have one hard drive and multiple devices for each TV pulling the media. Any ideas on what devices might work. I looked into Western Digital tv hubs but I'm not sure.

 

[Dryden]

XBMC Media Center. It's free and open source so available for many host OSes. XBMC includes a UPnP server, so it can stream to other UPnP devices (360, PS3, Sonos, Roku, etc) without having to really worry about middleware or other voodoo.

http://xbmc.org/
http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=UPnP/Server

You can either run XBMC server from your desktop PC or purpose build a HTPC (Home Theater PC) to act as your hub and include PVR capabilities.

 

[Taosman]

When investing in a home theatre, protecting your investment with a good quality surge protector and even a line filter will be an excellent investment. I have both. I like the line protection products from Blue Circle Audio that is built in plastic pipe to keep costs down. http://www.bluecircle.com/page32.html also I like http://www.audioadvisor.com/products.asp?dept=174
For music I stream with a Squeezebox from my Tosh laptop. 650G hard drive.
Dryden has a good suggestion for movies. Start out simple and see how much trouble that is before committing to going multi rooms. It can get very complex and expensive! There are web sites to help.
http://www.audiostream.com/
http://www.hometheater.com/

 

[usf72]

I have been playing around XBMC for a while and I am impressed. It will take some time to customize but will be well worth it. I have thought about building a HTPC but I am trying to stay on a budget. I've started looking at prebuilt but I am not really too sure what to look for. Anybody have any opinions on these?

http://us.gateway.com/gw/en/US/content/models/sx-series

 

[exhawg]

I have been playing around XBMC for a while and I am impressed. It will take some time to customize but will be well worth it. I have thought about building a HTPC but I am trying to stay on a budget. I've started looking at prebuilt but I am not really too sure what to look for. Anybody have any opinions on these?

http://us.gateway.com/gw/en/US/content/models/sx-series

Not really related, but I just loaded XBMC on a Raspberry Pi and it is fantastic. Everything worked pretty well without too much tweaking except for adding in a USB wifi adapter and the Bluecop addin for Amazon.

I'm throwing Ubuntu based XBMC on a desktop for my dad to use for his home theater and HDhomerun DVR. He needed a way to watch HDTV in his garage without wanting to pay to put in cable or a dish.

 

[usf72]

Not really related, but I just loaded XBMC on a Raspberry Pi and it is fantastic. Everything worked pretty well without too much tweaking except for adding in a USB wifi adapter and the Bluecop addin for Amazon.

I'm throwing Ubuntu based XBMC on a desktop for my dad to use for his home theater and HDhomerun DVR. He needed a way to watch HDTV in his garage without wanting to pay to put in cable or a dish.

I've thought about a Pi but I wasn't sure how well it would handle video. I don't think I would be to literate on setting up a Pi. What was the difficulty of the setup?

 

[exhawg]

I've thought about a Pi but I wasn't sure how well it would handle video. I don't think I would be to literate on setting up a Pi. What was the difficulty of the setup?

I'm in IT so I have that going for me, but I don't really know anything Linux and was able to set it up without any issues.

I used XBian, which sounds like it is the least user friendly, but most powerful of the xbmc builds for the Pi. It was very easy to load on the SD card with the Windows app from the below site.

http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Raspberry_Pi/FAQ#Installing_XBMC_on_the_Raspberry_Pi

If you can plug in a network cable it will work pretty much out of the box. I had to go in through SSH to setup the USB wifi card, which was probably the most difficult part.

I think I got the instructions for wifi from this thread: http://xbian.org/forum/showthread.php?tid=72

For Amazon Prime or Hulu (don't think it does Netflix) you will need to load the bluecop repository to get the add-on

http://www.howtogeek.com/113491/how-to-get-hulu-and-amazon-video-on-xbmc/

The biggest key for something like this is to google any question that you have. 99% of the time someone else has had the same problem and posted the answer online.

I've seem some youtube videos of people doing some pretty crazy things with xbmc on a Pi. For me I'm just happy that it plays mp4's off of my NAS and streams Amazon.

 

[Magua]

I use a business class HP Compaq USDT (Ultra Slim DeskTop) with a built in GPU (Think it's like a Radeon 4500 series? The PC is a few years old) and I have it running Windows 7 and hard wired to my network. I have played with XBMC and Plex and both have worked just fine. However, I find myself more often than not just using VLC Media Player (I have the Remote App on my phone and iPad). I have a Windows Server 2012 Essentials Server running in my house that has all of my network shares for music, installs, pictures, videos, recorded tv, etc... and just stream everything over my network from that. You obviously don't need all that, just share out your videos from your PC/Laptop and play them on the HTPC.

Long story short, you don't need much for an HTPC just something small that can play network shared videos on your TV.

 

[Dryden]

I have been playing around XBMC for a while and I am impressed. It will take some time to customize but will be well worth it. I have thought about building a HTPC but I am trying to stay on a budget. I've started looking at prebuilt but I am not really too sure what to look for. Anybody have any opinions on these?

http://us.gateway.com/gw/en/US/content/models/sx-series

Problem with a standard PC - even a small, low-powered one, - is that you're going to wind up with issues placing it because of the internal PSU and the PCs size. If the box is contained inside a media shelf there's risk of it overheating, or of it contributing to overheating your receiver, which would likely be far worse, cost wise.

A mini-ITX/booksize system is the most popular choice for a number of reasons, among them the PSU is an external brick/wallwart (which gets most of the heat out of your media center), multiple HDMI outputs, and the graphics are integrated to the CPU.

One of the new Intel NUCs (or something similar) is what I would go with.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16856102002

Those aren't complete though, so doesn't really help keep you in your budget, but just my recommendation. A Zotac based box could probably be done under $300 though ... same thing.

This is why the Pi is an excellent choice for this.

 

[Taosman]

I have talked about protecting your investment with a good quality surge protector. Now I will talk about the next step.

Power Regeneration.
My amplifier died a horrible single channel death and since it was out of warranty and not much value to fix I bought a new amplifier from Rogue Audio. The new Sphinx hybred design. A tube preamplifier stage with a Hypex digital class "D" power stage. As it turns out the reason for the previous amps death was it had taken too many hits before I got the surge protection situation sorted out. So, I still had power line quality issues(over wattage, RFI from cell phone towers and even some noise from a local church pa. I tried the cheap approach with some power filters but the new amp seems more sensitive to bad power or the power just could have gotten worse.
PS Audio to the rescue with a Power Regeneration system. The PS Audio P3 is their "cheapest" AC Regeneration system. I found a "Factory Refreshed" unit and saved some big money, so the cost wasn't so bad. This got me half way there but my noise problem was very bad. So I bought a shielded power cable for the amp.
Pangea sc9SE. Now, I have everything plugged into the Power Station and everything gets clean power. The TV looks and sounds great and the stereo sounds the best it's ever sounded and is protected from any power events.
If you have a big investment in gear it just makes sense to protect it from power events and "issues". For me the difference was not subtle!

 

[OneBuckeye]

So our new house has a home theater system. My wife's laptop has an hdmi out so we hook it up and watch hbo go. Quality is ok for the most part but sometimes there are green digital artifacts. Any tips for streaming off a pc? Our cable provider doesn't allow roku to use hbo go so thAt is not an option. We have a 1k Mitsubishi projector and 5 ceiling speakers ( not sure on size or model) with a 500 w pioneer receiver. The sub is from a box all in one the previous owner had and needs replaced. So I'm looking for Any good ideas on how to do this right.

 

[Magua]

Bare with me and my MSpaint skills, but below is a picture of the layout of my living room. I am trying to figure out a way to get my two surround speakers mounted on the wall behind my sectional couch without speaker wire running across the floor and in the way/looking tacky.

Now, keep in mind this is just a Samsung BluRay Home Theater system and not a massive speaker configuration with an HD Receiver. I have all of that but I am in an apartment for a short period of time while searching for a home to buy and I did not want to hook up my big sound system in this apartment (i'll get myself in trouble!).

Any ideas or suggestions? The speakers do not use standard speaker where, as they have plug-in tips on the end that plug in to the back of the BluRay player. So I don't think I can use these speakers with some sort of wireless rear speaker receiver. Red = front, center, and subwoofer speakers. I have 2 surround speakers I need to find placements for.