Jim's Home Theater Weblog

Oooh boy, new speaker cable!

Last night I decided to rewire my front speakers, replacing the really old 12-Guage wire with the 10-Guage wire I bought from Parts Express last week. I also took the opportunity to experiment with using banana plugs, since I've never used them before. I found out that they didn't work so well in the back of my speakers, nor in the standard speaker wire entry hole on the back of my Sony receiver; but I did discover that the posts on the receiver had open ends that fit the banana plug perfectly. I was very pleased :).

To my surprise, it actually made the speakers sound better! Well, not necessarily "better", just more full. I would say that it was only in my head, except for that I had to adjust some of the levels of my front and rear speakers to compensate for the extra output from the front speakers. I didn't realize such a small modification like new wire and some connectors would make such a huge difference.

I also tinkered around with some of the settings on my Harmony remote that had been bothering me. Everything works much better now :).

Expensive hobby...

I got a fairly substantial raise over the summer, and was looking forward to saving lots of money. Since then, however, I've started buying more and more home theater system related stuff, and it really drainks the bank account!

I'm still saving up for the Axiom QS4s, though I've been considering going for the QS8s. But do I want to spend over $600 before I know what kind of house I'll be living in at this time next year? Perhaps I should wait and save my money during that time, and then go out when we get our place and get a whole new speaker system at once.

But that would just be so not fun! I'd ask for advice, but I know nobody reads this blog, so it wouldn't do much good!

New Goodies

I just received some speaker wire and banana plugs that I ordered from Parts Express. I think I'm going to rewire my front and center speakers this evening.

I would (should!) rewire my surrounds (as well as run a cable for the back surround), but that would require massive amounts of efforts fishing under the wall-to-wall carpet in the living room. I can't wait until I'm not a renter so I can do whatever I need to do to run the wire through the walls or under the floorboards properly.

A New Hope

I must be a nerd. Within hours of it being released, I found myself at the store buying the re-release of the Star Wars Trilogy on DVD. I got to watch the first installment, A New Hope, last night. And I must say, all the hype was well deserved. Some of that dialog sounded louder than other parts, indicating it had been re-recorded or re-dubbed at one point, but for the mostpart it was right on. For a movie that was made in the 70's, the remastering was incredible. I can't wait to watch the subsequent installments tonight and tomorrow.

The other thing watching the movie told me was that I totally need new surround sound speakers. The dogfight in the X-Wings shouldn't hurt your ears!

Yankees in HD on YES?

I received a PM from a user on my Yankees Forum who claimed to work for YES doing their switching. He claims that with the exception of "one minor problem", YES is ready to go with HD. He said he doesn't expect anything this season, but all they're really waiting for is a carrier to ask for it.

So, Comcast? How about it?

Recent modifications/additions

Watch a DVD? Sure, grab the DVD remote to turn on the DVD player. Grab the receiver remote to change the audio input. Grab the TV remote to change the video input. Put your left foot in and you shake it all about. You do the hokey pokey and you turn yourself around, and that's what it all about.

]]> My remotes were a mess. There were 4 of them on my coffee table, and all could be used at any moment during a typical weekend. This had to end, and end qucikly.

I heard nothing but good things about Harmony remotes on the AVS Forum, and decided to give it a shot. So over the weekend I purchased a Harmony H659, and it lived up to its advance billing, and then some. I love it. I can put all the oem remotes to the side and use one to quickly and easily control every aspect of all my components. It is a dream come true.

After doing some listening, I decided that my subwoofer was terrible -- not that I wasn't aware of this already. But before starting the upgrade process, I thought I'd try putting it in the back corner of the room, instead of in the front next to the kitchen (where all the bass seemed to go).

To do so, I needed to do a pretty long subwoofer cable run, so went out and bought a cheapo 25' Acoustic Research subwoofer cable for $10 from SoundCity. I got it home and hooked it up, hid the cable very slopily and lazily, and powered up. Sounded much better, the bass actually complemented the rest of the system for once. It wasn't a cure-all, as some scenes from Star Wars Episode 2: Attack of the Clones became really distorted during my tests, but overall it made things much more enjoyable.

It also made me reconsider what next to spend my time researching and money on: new surround speakers. I'm thinking of the Axiom QS4s, but I'm only in the beginning stages of looking into this.

Next on the list are the front stage speakers and the subwoofer. Then it's back to looking at components, such as the DVD player and receiver. Boy, this is fun :).

First entry

Ever since I was in High School, I've always been interested in home and car audio. I had the best sounding 1984 Nissan Maxima station wagon this side of Los Angeles (and it was the mid-1990's!). I worked as a custom car audio installer for several years, until I graduated high school and went into the real world. At that point, with a leased car (that I couldn't modify) and a credit card, I went out and bought the first pieces of my home theater system -- some inexpensive speakers, components, etc. And for several years things stayed that way.

It wasn't until the past year or so that I actually had the money and enthusiasm to start building my home audio/home theater system properly. I've recently, within the past 6 months, taken a real interest in having this be a real hobby, as opposed to having it be something that I just enjoyed doing.

It started last Christmas when my fiancee, Deborah, gave me a Sony STR-DE895 receiver to replace my base-level Aiwa receiver. It was the first time that I could truly enjoy real Dolby surround sound. I then grabbed the Kenwood SW-103 subwoofer that my father wasn't using anymore and added that to my setup.

More recently, I've acquired a Sony KF-50WE610 Rear Projection LCD Monitor and a new Sony Progressive Scan DVD player to replace my antiquated pre-Progressive scan Sony DVD player. I only wanted something progressive scan to use with the new higher resolution TV, and I plan on upgrading the DVD player at some point in the future.

So that's where my system stands now, in additon to the JBL Decade Series front speakers, JBL HLS Center channel speaker, and Sony (ugh!) "surround" speakers. And now I'm going to start upgrading the system piece by piece, until it's perfect. And I really doubt it will ever be :-).