white noise

Spent a few hours last weekend doing one of the last basement jobs remaining, and one I’ve put off for a long time…I finally got our backup sump pump all wired up. I plumbed it in ages ago, but haven’t been real excited to put the last bits together. It’s a small separate pump that sits next to the main pump in the pit. Each has its own discharge tube coming up, but then they “Y” together in the wall. The backup pump runs off battery power so in case the power’s out and the main pump can’t do it’s job, it’ll still keep the basement dry. A wall adapter keeps the battery charged and a small control panel provides battery/charger status and alarms. We’ve never had water problems in the basement, and the house sits generally high for the street, but there are times when the main sump runs a LOT. It’s one of those things that may never get used, but there’s much peace of mind in having it. To finish out the sump closet we applied some vinyl tile and baseboard. This may makes us one of the few people to ever finish out the area around their sump, but later we will be adding storage shelves in the upper part of the closet so we wanted it fairly presentable.

I also realized I hadn’t posted any pics of the finished electronics rack, which sits recessed in this closet. We installed a fairly typical steel pro audio rack to house the components. The small DVD shelves to the right of the rack were finished a couple weeks ago using some aluminum channel and 1/4″ birch.

The niche that the rack sits in is closed off to the inside of the closet to reduce sound from sump on the occasions when it kicks in. In order to access the back of the rack and the wiring, the whole rack actually slides out and rotates. Pretty sweet and extremely handy!

Hey, remember that little project I’ve been working on for years (literally). Well, after a few weeks off, the work continues. Last weekend we put in a couple full days finishing trim, painting doors, installing door stops, installing a cable lighting fixture, and hanging a few shelves.

I searched high and low to find movie-related artwork that would be classier, or at least more unique, than the home theater movie poster cliche. These pop art paintings (acrylic on canvas) from a couple of our favorites, “The Shining” and “The Godfather”, really hit the mark.

Here’s a look at the corner of the room after a weekend of work hanging the lights and the shelves. Yes, the cables for the lights run through the ceiling bump out. It was tough fishing the wire through the finished drywall, but once it was done it all came just as I’d planned, so very long ago.

As the basement creeps closer to completion, the task of building the movie screen nears. Of course there are all kinds of screens you can buy, but good ones are really pricey. Building one can save you a bunch of money and you can tailor it to exactly suit your space. Part of that tailoring process is choosing a paint.

The choice of paint color is actually pretty tricky. It’s a matter of optimizing picture quality – typically improving contrast without sacrificing brightness – for your specific projector and typical ambient light. Ambient light is a factor of all kinds of things, like how dark you keep the room while viewing, the color of adjacent walls and ceiling, choice of flooring, etc. You may think the brighter the picture the better, and as such a bright white screen would be ideal. But that’s usually not the case. With a very bright white screen ambient light is easily reflected and any dark colors in your picture are easily washed out. White screens are really only good in very dark environments or in cases where you need to increase your overall brightness at all costs (like in business applications in many cases).

My projector is LCD which inherently is pretty bright (even in “low lamp mode”) and has good, but not great contrast and black levels. LCD projectors shine light through LCD panels and even “off” pixels tend to let some light through so blacks are never pitch black. On the other hand, I like the fact that I can keep the lights up halfway and still have a very viewable picture – especially when watching sports. Still with the lights up at all the picture is prone to getting washed out. To make matters worse, our walls, ceiling, and floors are fairly light in color – a sacrifice I made to get the look we liked. So what do you do to compensate for (1) the LCD brightness and (2) a reasonable amount of ambient light? You use a gray screen. The question is “which shade of gray”?

After some research and good advice I’ve settled on two different shades to test. This week I taped off my screen area into thirds and painted the two shades and left the other third the white drywall primer that we’ve been watching movies on for a few months now.

Even though the painted wall doesn’t reflect the same as the eventual painted screen, I figured it’d still be fair to compare relative shades. For the viewing I watched all sorts of material (high def/standard, sports/movie scenes) at different room lighting levels. I also moved around the room to see if viewing angle had much effect (which it didn’t). I often used the freeze feature on the projector to keep a static image on the screen for consideration.

Here you can see a big difference even in a dark room between the white primer and the shades of gray paint (look at Barkley’s “black” jacket). Sure, the whites are darker as well, but it’s the blacks that really matter. They give depth to the picture and really make it come alive. As long as the contrast is set well whites will pretty much always look bright by comparison. Looking at the lighter gray (middle) to darker gray (right) it’s tough for me to distinguish much improvement one way or the other.

Now in a brighter room, the difference between the gray shades tends to pop up more. The darker gray is keeping the ambient reflection down (of course along with the picture itself) and a darker image is maintained. Here too you can really see how washed out the white screen would be (left).

So, is there a clear winner? I’m still debating. If the majority of viewing were to happen with the lights up, I’d lean to the darker shade. But since we tend to watch the projection more often than not in a darkened room, I’d say the lighter gray (middle) is appropriate and it avoids losing any shadow details. Stay tuned for a final decision…

So things are still moving along down under. Trim is nearly finished (that means nailed up, caulked, painted, the whole 9). Last weekend I finally installed a cabinet and utility sink in the laundry room. Too bad we didn’t have it a few months ago when we were doing major painting. But it’s nice to have now! Also last weekend we (with the help of Slick) finally painted our last room. It’s a really small room, but with three different colors on the walls it took some time. Currently, we’re painting doors and waiting for carpet which will finish up the flooring. Soon that will leave only building the movie screen and some decorating. Still I wouldn’t be surprised if we’re not calling it “done” until July. We’re really only working down there a couple nights a week – and probably only every other week at that.

Here are some shots of the latest. First up, the hallway all trimmed out:

It took some time to figure out all these angles around the stairs!

Our exercise / hobby room – very hard to get a good photo cause it’s small:

With the robotics season over, I’ve finally made a return to the basement. We’ve starting the trim work now. It’s a little funny transporting 16 foot pieces of molding with the Aztek, but it works. So far we’ve put casings on four doors (one to go) and put up all the base in the laundry room. Stay tuned for some pictures after we make a little more progress.

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!