Cabinet for home theater components

OK,  awhile ago I posted about my first shot at building a cabinet.   Since the last post I decided to add a face frame to the cabinet to dress it up a little.  I primed and spray painted it black.  It actually fits with the room pretty well.  And it definitely looks better than having the equipment sitting on the floor.

Cabinet for home theater components

All we need now is some popcorn

The projector is mounted to the ceiling and all the components are connected.  We watched Pirates of the Caribbean – Curse of the Black Pearl.  It looked fantastic, especially considering it is being projected on the wall and not a screen.

I was anxious to give it a trial run last night, so everything is running as it was set from the manufacturer.  The picture looked great, but the surround sound needs some tuning.  This weekend I’ll tweak the settings a bit.

I was a bit peeved that the Panasonic BluRay player didn’t come with an hdmi cable.  I mean really, 330 bucks for the player and you include composite cables?  It would have cost them less than a few dollars to include the cable.  I would have been happy to pay 333 bucks for the unit with the cable, because I wouldn’t have had to run to the store and spend $30 for one.  Anyway…

I was pretty nervous about mounting the projector, but it all went smoothly.   I bought a Sanus ceiling mount for $89 from ProjectorPeople.  It was relatively straightforward to connect.  It took about 30 minutes to figure out the best way to align the adjustable brackets to the projector, mostly because the mounts on the projector are not symmetrically spaced, which didn’t make any sense to me.  Bolting the mount to the ceiling took less than 5 minutes and about another 30 minutes of adjustment to ensure projector was level and perpendicular to the screen.

So far I’ve spent 5 to 6 hours installing everything.  Seems like not paying the home theater guys $1200 to do the install was a good decision.

Home Theater Speaker Install

More equipment arrived over the last few days.  A Panasonic BluRay player and a Monster Power Conditioner are waiting for installation.

Last night I installed the speakers.  I’m setting this up in a 7.1 surround sound configuration.  All the wire was run before the drywall went up, so the biggest part of this job was to install the four Polk Audio RC80i surround speakers in the ceiling.

The install was really straight forward.  The speakers included a template for cutting the drywall.  Each speaker has four cams to secure the speaker.  I just had to cut the hole, attach the speaker wire, press the speaker into the ceiling and tighten four screws.  Tightening the screws rotated the cams into place and secured the speaker.  The speakers and grills can be painted to match the ceiling, so they will blend right in.

Next comes the installation of the projector.

WooHoo! Carpet is in!

New carpet in the recreation area

The carpet went in yesterday.  It looks and feels great! And the basement is very usable now.    In other news, the first batch of the home theater equipment arrived.  Lots of unpacking, manuals to read, and installing.  Should be exciting.

Arrival of the home theater equipment

New carpet in the media room

Home Theater Equipment is on the Way!

The media room in the new basement is the one feature that everyone is most excited about.  This weekend we went out and tried out theater seating.  After shopping at a few stores and reclining in a lot of chairs, we picked four chairs in a straight formation from Berkline.

We opted for a higher end chair that doesn’t have any power.  It is really comfortable and looks and feels well built.  Plus I wasn’t that excited about running four power cords across the floor as the seats are not adjacent to the wall.

Equipment selection has been stressing me out for a while.  When we were roughing in the room we had a sales guy from one of the local home theater stores come out and give us some advice and a quote.   Nice equipment, but it was a little pricey for my budget, almost $12000.  Since it included about $1200 in labor I decided to tackle it myself.

So, with budget in mind, here’s the equipment selection: