white nøise

During the flooring stint we also put up the backsplash tile behind the wet bar. After New Year’s I finished it up with caulk and the necessary touch up paint. The glass mosiac tile, motar, and grout were left over from the kitchen so this was a virtual freebie. So what’ll it be, shaken or stirred?

I had a bunch of vacation to use up before the end of year, so I decided to spend it getting the flooring installed in the basement. My Pop came down for about 4 days and we hammered though it.

First, we put about 90 sq feet of tile in the laundry room. As can be expected we had to cut a lot of tile (along all but one wall). My Dad was a sport manning the wet saw all day while I did all the knee work setting the tiles. Very happy with the finished product – probably a little too nice for a lower level laundry room, but why not.

Then it was on to the wood flooring covering the majority of the basement. I had picked out a type of flooring that has the ease of installation of laminate, but all the perks of real hardwood. The choice was Vanguard by Tarkett. Their tongue and groove planks consist of hardwood plies (like plywood) with a quality, prefinished ply on top. The planks tap (actually pound) together without the mess of glue and float on top a layer of foam underlayment. Meanwhile the crossed plies reduce expansion effects. Just like a traditional hardwoord strip floor, the planks can be sanded and refinished if ever needed in the future (not that I ever will!).

I choose a light shade (natural maple) to keep things modern and bring a bright, airy feel into the basement. It’s actually a real poor choice of flooring for a theater room, but I let design drive this decision. The challenges are that the smooth, hard floor accentuates reverberation and the light color causes more ambient reflection on the screen. I felt these weren’t super big problems since the sound can be improved with other furnishings and the picture quality can be optimized with the screen surface and projector settings.

Here’s a look with the underlayment down:

And here’s the finished result:

It took about 2 full days to lay the roughly 370 sq ft of wood, but man, are we happy with the results!

This weekend I decided I needed to get back in the swing of working in the basement so I spent it hooking up the real sound system. Up to this point watching movies down there has been accompanied by a set of computer speakers. Well, astalavista Altec Lansing!

The first job was installing the five speaker mounts. Yep, it’s a 5.1 system going in down there. I ran wire for an additional back two, but I have neither the speakers or an amp that support 7.1. Installing the mounts went smoothly but it took some time. It took a combination of drilling into the steel studs and using drywall toggle anchors. I worked on it while watching OSU put a whooping on Northwestern. Even though the mounts are really intended for Bose satellite systems, they work great on my small Sony speakers.

Then I moved the sub-monster down there. I’ve had the sub probably close to two years now. I bought it on Ebay at a great price in anticipation of the theater room. It can pump 150 Watts, has a 12″ cone, and is THX certified. It’s about the size of an end table, but don’t even think of setting a drink on it! It’s really a bit more bass than anyone needs, but since the rest of my system consists of satellites I wanted to make sure there was ample bass support.

Next I tore apart all the entertainment wiring upstaris to move some of the components down to the basement rack. Once the rack was wired up the real ‘fun’ started…the calibration. I decided to go ahead and give the projector a video calibration. I was holding off since I’m still only projecting on primed drywall. But since it’ll probably be a couple months before I get to building a screen, I thought I might as well dial in the picture for the current situation. The AVIA calibration DVD is an awesome tool. Lots of test patterns to really help you tweak things. I’ve got a pretty good handle on Color, Tint, Brightness, Contrast, and Sharpness, but not as much on some of the more advanced settings (like gamma on each LCD panel). The thing about video calibration is you really need to set up a couple presets like “bright” and “dark” depending on the room lighting you might want. Luckily my projector has slots for 3 user settings in addition to the 5 or so factory presets. The other thing about video is that there is definitely a smoothness versus sharpness tradeoff. You can go really sharp which is instantly impressive (especially on HD material), but part of the impressive impression is just because things don’t look quite natural. Away from that end of the spectrum you get a smoother picture – a lot of people describe it as more film-like. The smoother setting doesn’t give you that initial jolt, but ultimately I find the picture more satisfying and easier to watch. For what it’s worth, the AVIA calibrations lead you to the smoother setting as well. There is a balance though because too smooth becomes soft and you lose detail. After the calibration I was really happy with the picture – not too different than before, but I think the depth and color are a little more natural.

Then I finished up by calibrating the audio. The AVIA disk also contains a bunch of great tests for that – pink noise, frequency sweeps, etc. I set up a digital sound meter (SPM) in the ideal seating location and ran through all the tests. The sound meter was especially helpful in setting the sub volume and frequency crossover. Matching it to the five satellite speakers is really crutial in making a good soundscape and without the SPM it’s hard for me to compare levels between very different frequencies. Something that was cool was I measured the sub without significant dropoff down to about 20Hz even though it’s only officially rated down to 35Hz (nice to see a conservative spec for a change). My hearing gives out around 25Hz, so I guess I have many rock concerts to thank for that. The other thing I learned is that the official calibration standard (according to AVIA) is VERY LOUD. The benchmark is to calibrate all speaker levels to 85dB at the optimimal seating location. That’s insane. From my reading on the internet 85dB is considered the threshold to hearing damage! I instead used 75dB as my benchmark (which is actually the common benchmark for home installations) – still very loud, but still TEN times less intense (dBs are log scale units).

After all that was done I enjoyed a few tracks off Peter Gabriel’s Secret World DVD. The sound is fantastic. I can’t wait to try out a lot of other disks.

We’re down to one last weekend before we are calling it quits through October so we can focus on Halloween. This was our plan last year and it worked out pretty good – no Halloween distractions while we’re doing basement work and vise-versa. With one coat of paint up things aren’t visually changing too much now. Seconds coats of paint are going up, shelves and cabinets are being hung, and some light fixtures are installed ‘for real’. Here’s a shot of the finished built-in shelves on one side of the screen. The lights are on a dimmer so you can set your ambiance versus distraction level accordingly.

The wet bar is taking shape, but there’s a LOT of work left to piece it all together. We’ll see how far it makes it to Halloween.

There also plenty of clean up needed before the annual party. Here’s a stack of empties we finally cleared out!