Page One Two Three Four
New Equipment
Here’s a bad pic of my new projector as it hangs from the ceiling. It’s an Acer PH530 projector; 1280 × 720 HD resolution; 1000 lumens. A 1080p projector would’ve been nice, but not for five times the price of what I paid for this. And besides, Oliver Stone’s personal projector is only a 720p machine, so if it’s good enough for him…
I found a deal on an HD DVD player. WalMart ran a secret sale on a Friday early in November; they were selling an HD DVD player for $99, when they had been selling for $299. I haven’t been in a WalMart in years, but for this deal, I would make an exception. The sale started at 8am. I arrived at 8:01am; I was 30 seconds too late.
Undaunted, I thought that perhaps Best Buy or Circuit City might match or somehow beat this deal. I returned home and started checking websites. Success! Best Buy matched the deal, but they had none in stock; however, they were now selling the next generation player for $199 with nine free HD DVDs. I bought one online for pickup at the store. This is it before I installed it in the media rack.
Two days later, in the adverts in the Sunday Tribune, Best Buy was offering the same player with 10 free HD DVDs, but at a higher price than what I had paid. Knowing that the worst that could happen is that they’d say no, I returned with my receipt to ask if they’d give me another HD DVD. There was one guy in line ahead of me; he was there for the same reason. The customer rep was all too happy to let us both grab another disc.
Here’s my new receiver. I bought a Yamaha RX-V661. It lets me matrix 7.1 via Pro Logic IIx from 5.1 surround, which lets me use my HD DVD player to decode the new high-definition audio codecs like Dolby Digital Plus and Dolby True HD and transmit them as uncompressed multi-channel PCM via HDMI to the receiver.
One of the nice things about this receiver is that it has an IR-in port on the back of the receiver. This means I can connect it directly to my IR repeater system without sticking an IR emitter on the front of the receiver. When I was hooking up the receiver, I knew I had the right cable for the IR-in port somewhere in storage, as I had purchased one for another purpose several years ago. I went into the storage room, and peeking out of the first box I saw was one end of the cable. It took me all of three seconds to find the cable when I was expecting over an hour of digging— I was happy.
What’s Next
Now I need an anamorphic lens, so that I can fill my screen. Right now, I’m still stuck with bars top and bottom for Cinemascope movies instead of widening out to fill my screen. I’m torn between building my own or buying an inexpensive one that’d probably outperform what I’d build, but for more money.
A Blu-Ray player is also in the plans so I won’t have to worry about the next-generation disc format war.
For the bar itself, I need to grout the tile and make doors for the cabinets under the bar. I’m not really sure what sort of panels I want in the doors, so I’ll have to figure that out before I can make the doors.
Page One Two Three Four
267 Lemon Infusion Vodka
Skyy Vodka
Hennessey Cognac
Patron Citron