Just Added a Projection System and 154" AT Screen!

This weekend really got flipped around... a week ago, I was informed by a prior existing client that I will be needed on the 14th to produce a DVD and CD of the symphony orchestra that I've worked for several times. This, having come up at the last minute, made it necessary to postpone the anime club meeting. Then two days before the concert, the orchestra committee gives me an 'agreement' with ridiculous limitations. My client bails out (the recording would be useless for their intended purpose, shackled with the orchestra unions' stipulations and legal threats for accidental distribution) and so I end up with nothing scheduled.

So I called a friend who was going to get together some time and discuss cameras to use for stock footage work. He ended up bringing his 13 yr old nephew, who's into anime and high tech.

We end up spending all afternoon and evening down here, watching movies. Since I had just gotten the new Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children on Blu-ray, we watched that. It was an awsome and totally enveloping experience. The next day, my friend called me to tell me what a great time they both had. The kid just couldn't stop talking about it.

So, our anime club meeting is scheduled for the 21st now. I'm working on building the LED track lighting over the theater seats, and over my workstation area. I bought these 1W warm white LEDs and am using copper 1/4-20 hex bolts and 1" PVC caps on 1/2" aluminum U channel. The end caps have a 1/4" hole in the top, where the bolt goes through from the inside. The LED is glued to the head of the bolt for heat dissipation. Wires come out of the LED and pass through a 3/32" hole near the top of the cap. I just need to find something to make a little reflector and also paint the surrounding interior flat black so it doesn't cast light in areas outside the downward spot beam. Each lamp will have it's own 30-ohm 2W current limiter and the whole shebang will go to a ceramic rheostat, powered by a 12V DC wall wart. The LEDs dim nicely, over a wide range of illumination. Each LED is rated 60 lumens at 1W power level.

I'm doing my own DiY lighting because I don't like the track lighting options and the cost. LED track lighting is absurdly expensive and I don't need a high amount of light in a projection theater. Just enough to be able to find buttons on the remote during dark scenes, but not so much that it's distracting. I think this setup I'm building will do nicely.

You owe it to yourself to watch the scene in "War of the Worlds" (the new one) where the Tripod comes out of the ground in front of the church & starts blasting people; INSANE bass @ 15 hz!

Hey TNR...do you have the complete title for WotW version you refer to?

Not sure; it's the one with Tom Cruise & Dakota Fanning...

We had a great club meeting last Saturday. We watched, first, a demo reel I'd shot of a military air show, then some footage of a symphony that I'd made a recording of (we had a first violinist in the audience), then we moved on to Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, then Mamoru Oshii's The Sky Crawlers, then other guests fired up some short anime OAVs from a USB hard drive connected to an editing workstation that was driving the projector from a DVI switcher and we saw several obscure and not so obscure anime, including one entitled Bartender which is an anime that must have been written by bartenders who understand the finer nuances of mixology and psychology. It was very well-done and I learned a lot about the trade and about mixing drinks that I was not aware of prior.
After that, another guest brought a DVD of an anime entitled Emma, a love story taking place in 19th century England. That same guest also put on a slide show later on of his trip to Japan, touring many of the train stations (he's a rail fan and a member of a society that's preserving an historic switch house in CT).
Another guest brought episodes of Inuyasha, Rozen Maiden and Tekkonkinkreet.
The other club administrator showed Seraphim Call, a series of stories about girls and their adventures.
We finished up with Umi ga Kikoeru (I Can Hear the Sea), a story about a girl high school transfer student from Tokyo and the impact she has on the class in a smaller city of Kochi, the cultural friction and the maturization of all involved over a ten year period.
We didn't get to Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea, but one of the serious otaku club members brought copies of a DVD of it and circulated them to anyone interested.

It was a pretty good meeting. 3 no shows out of 10 who RSVP'd.

I picked up V for Vendetta on Blu-ray at Costco last week for $8.99. Watched it last night. My second time around. What a great flick!

I got some donated panel bass traps, but they're a prototype that didn't work out because the panels are rigidly mounted, so my next project is to re engineer them so that that panels have compliancy and thus can function effectively.

"Holy smokes! 129 decibels hitting the listener chair when the 'signal present' LEDs start to flicker on the power amps." ........................At that level you ain't gonna be listening very long!!!!

"Holy smokes! 129 decibels hitting the listener chair when the 'signal present' LEDs start to flicker on the power amps." ........................At that level you ain't gonna be listening very long!!!!

It's time versus SPL. Thankfully the duration of a percussive transient is short. The A-weighted SPL is below 120. Most of the energy is below the sensitive range of the ear. But I HAVE pegged the SPL meter on the 140dB range on rare occasions while testing, or enjoying a particularly aggressive piece of pop music, and it is.. quite painful in the rib cage and a few other areas. Needless to say, I found a cure for constipation.

"Holy smokes! 129 decibels hitting the listener chair when the 'signal present' LEDs start to flicker on the power amps." ........................At that level you ain't gonna be listening very long!!!!

It's time versus SPL. Thankfully the duration of a percussive transient is short. The A-weighted SPL is below 120. Most of the energy is below the sensitive range of the ear. But I HAVE pegged the SPL meter on the 140dB range on rare occasions while testing, or enjoying a particularly aggressive piece of pop music, and it is.. quite painful in the rib cage and a few other areas. Needless to say, I found a cure for constipation.

AH~ the infamous "brown note"...

Having built a riser platform for the second row of seating, I had the opportunity to experience the enhanced illusion of bass when you're feet are standing on a wooden surface as opposed to a concrete footing (right where the centerline of the speakers is, is a center foundation footing underneath the concrete floor, going about 24" deep). Naturally, when standing on concrete, the dominant vibration is directly felt by the body, but the SPL has to be very high to get a good 'tactile' sensation.
Last week, I stepped onto the platform with The Who's Baba O'Riley playing at elevated levels and my feet and lower shin bones vibrated so much they tickled almost unbearably. The SPL was only around 130dB, but the difference in sensation was staggering when going from concrete to wooden platform, even though the platform places me standing 4' further away from the sound sources.

I first became strongly aware of this effect when viewing a film at a friend's HT which was on the second floor of a contractor-built home. There were some LFE events in the movie, the SPL was very low, perhaps not even 100dB and I didn't feel anything through the air, but the couch was vibrating, as was the floor beneath my feet. With very low power, the illusion of bass is greatly increased when the floor vibrates easily. You lose that on a heavy concrete floor. The listener may compensate by increasing the actual SPL to achieve the same tactile feel, but at a considerable risk to personal health.

Mark, I have visited fellow forum member (but infrequent poster) garcianc at his place in Upper Marlboro, MD, for listening sessions on a couple of occasions. He has the same issue in that his H/T system is set up in a BEAUTIFUL dedicated, insulated, basement room on a concrete slab. You miss a LOT of the extremely low bass notes due to that concrete floor & the fact it just doesn't transfer the low, low bass. Not that he's missing it, because he's running a 7.2 system that's no slouch~

Yes, vibration transmission through building structure to the limbs is one important metric for conveying a sense of powerful bass. While the concrete does vibrate somewhat, it takes enormous amounts of SPL to cause it to vibrate to the point where it can be felt under the feet, and by that time, the frontal direct bodily vibration takes over the senses completely to the point where just about all other stimuli are preempted.

You've got one hell of a system.

This is my current seating setup. Costco ran out of the True "Entertainer" Storage Ottoman chairs, which I use for the front row, so I had to get some folding chairs for row #2 on the riser platform.





I'm getting a 4mm ultra-wide angle (but rectilinear) lens for my HD video camera that I use in my cinematography business later this month, so I'll be able to shoot some video of the whole place and get much of it in one frame that I can post here later on. For now, this narrow angle shot from a D-SLR camera will have to do...



"Bass, the Final Frontier..."

Wow, that's nice.

sweet and juicy like these nutz. setup. Congrats

I forgot to mention the two 4x4 black fabric sound barrier panels that I built last summer. They're in the back of the back row and on the edge of the far end of the row, a little hard to make out in the photo. These were necessitated as a means of treating a fan noise problem from the Kurzweil K series synths that sit behind there, plus computer workstation fans and finally the fans in the audio racks.
Initially, I constructed them of 1x4 pine with 6" of fiberglass insulation stuffed inside, but I found that it did not block as much lower frequencies as I'd wanted, so I added a 3/8" plywood barrier and 3" of packed fiberglass on each side, which worked effectively.
Not visible, is LED lighting that I designed and built, which provides subdued light directly overhead and directed down on the seating. I built this of 1-watt warm white LEDs, aluminum that I stamped into parabolic reflectors and used 1" PVC pipe end caps as fixtures. They're mounted to an aluminum U-channel and wiring goes to a rheostat for dimming.