CurtPalme.com Home Theater Forum

[Curt Palme]

Sorry guys, no titillating post today.

But.. I did spent an enjoyable morning at a customer's house, working with a high end installation company, tweaking up a minty 9500 I sold about 6 years ago.

At the time, the set had no wear, new tubes. It, along with a Lumagen HDP and a Draper tensioned 133" wide (!) screen plus install went for about $16K CDN.

Customer had a dedicated room, with a 72" Hitachi LCD behind the Draper screen. Customer added a BR player today. When I walked in, I saw that the whole system had been upgraded. Classe DVD player and top of the line preamp, two massive Bryston amps (7B?), maybe multichannel, I didn't look, a MAP rack that slides out of the wall had all been added recently.

So I walked in with the Fury2 and made everything work.

No, seriously, I was there to tweak the projector, add the Fury, and the A/V guy was reprogramming the RTI remote.

Now, I will say up front, I was never quite happy with this projector. Oh, it looked great at the shop on an 8' wide screen, but I always thought that I could get a better image at his place, even with the 133" wide screen. So I allowed 3-4 hours, and YES, I got results. I always knew the issue was not color or contrast, but I simply couldn't get great focus.

First thing I noticed was that a fan had bad bearings on the LVPS. No problem, I was heading back next week anways.
Second, the one problem we ran into was that his 72" LCD screen was only good for 720p, and the customer REALLY wanted to have 1080p on the projector.

So, we lucked out, and the Classe preamp had dual HDMI outputs. Interestingly, the unit would transcode analog to HDMI, but there was no internal scaler. That ended up working out to our advantage.

We ran 1080i out from his BR and HD box. We ran HDMI to his LCD, and that synced perfectly, and looked fine all around. WE even connected his Classe DVD (non BR) and that looked good too.

We then fed the second 1080i HDMI output to the HDP DVI input, and upscaled to 1080p. Then the output of the Lumagen into the Fury2, then connected to a 30' run to the projector. Everything synced properly, and man, the pix looked like crap due to lack of focusing. But.. it had potential.

First thing I did was disconnect the astig wiring harnesses to the yokes, and saw that the R and G astig was a mile out on the tube necks. No wonder, this was one set that came from E'home with only 2 pole magnets. Funny enough, the blue tube was PERFECT with only two poles. After some tweaking, the red was acceptable, but the green was still the pits.

So on went the astig wires, and I got it a bit better, but I will go back next week with some 4 or 6 pole magnets to get rid of that oval dot on the green.

Now, 6 years ago, I didn't know to defocus the tubes while doing astig. I always sharpened the focus right out, and then tuned the astig for a tiny dot. WRONG! Defocus the dots, then use the astig controls to make as round a dot as possible. MUCH BETTER results!

I then tweaked the convergence and geometry, got rid of the significant image overscan by shrinking the image in the Lumagen,and damn, if it didn't look too bad!

I'll get another 10% out of it next week with the new astig magnets, but even the customer said that it looked better now than it did 6 years ago.

[Curt Palme]

Sorry guys, no titillating post today.

But.. I did spent an enjoyable morning at a customer's house, working with a high end installation company, tweaking up a minty 9500 I sold about 6 years ago.

At the time, the set had no wear, new tubes. It, along with a Lumagen HDP and a Draper tensioned 133" wide (!) screen plus install went for about $16K CDN.

Customer had a dedicated room, with a 72" Hitachi LCD behind the Draper screen. Customer added a BR player today. When I walked in, I saw that the whole system had been upgraded. Classe DVD player and top of the line preamp, two massive Bryston amps (7B?), maybe multichannel, I didn't look, a MAP rack that slides out of the wall had all been added recently.

So I walked in with the Fury2 and made everything work.

No, seriously, I was there to tweak the projector, add the Fury, and the A/V guy was reprogramming the RTI remote.

Now, I will say up front, I was never quite happy with this projector. Oh, it looked great at the shop on an 8' wide screen, but I always thought that I could get a better image at his place, even with the 133" wide screen. So I allowed 3-4 hours, and YES, I got results. I always knew the issue was not color or contrast, but I simply couldn't get great focus.

First thing I noticed was that a fan had bad bearings on the LVPS. No problem, I was heading back next week anways.
Second, the one problem we ran into was that his 72" LCD screen was only good for 720p, and the customer REALLY wanted to have 1080p on the projector.

So, we lucked out, and the Classe preamp had dual HDMI outputs. Interestingly, the unit would transcode analog to HDMI, but there was no internal scaler. That ended up working out to our advantage.

We ran 1080i out from his BR and HD box. We ran HDMI to his LCD, and that synced perfectly, and looked fine all around. WE even connected his Classe DVD (non BR) and that looked good too.

We then fed the second 1080i HDMI output to the HDP DVI input, and upscaled to 1080p. Then the output of the Lumagen into the Fury2, then connected to a 30' run to the projector. Everything synced properly, and man, the pix looked like crap due to lack of focusing. But.. it had potential.

First thing I did was disconnect the astig wiring harnesses to the yokes, and saw that the R and G astig was a mile out on the tube necks. No wonder, this was one set that came from E'home with only 2 pole magnets. Funny enough, the blue tube was PERFECT with only two poles. After some tweaking, the red was acceptable, but the green was still the pits.

So on went the astig wires, and I got it a bit better, but I will go back next week with some 4 or 6 pole magnets to get rid of that oval dot on the green.

Now, 6 years ago, I didn't know to defocus the tubes while doing astig. I always sharpened the focus right out, and then tuned the astig for a tiny dot. WRONG! Defocus the dots, then use the astig controls to make as round a dot as possible. MUCH BETTER results!

I then tweaked the convergence and geometry, got rid of the significant image overscan by shrinking the image in the Lumagen,and damn, if it didn't look too bad!

I'll get another 10% out of it next week with the new astig magnets, but even the customer said that it looked better now than it did 6 years ago.

[Curt Palme]

BTW, ZERO failures in 6 years of being on his ceiling. TAKE THAT, digital people!

[Curt Palme]

BTW, ZERO failures in 6 years of being on his ceiling. TAKE THAT, digital people!

[cmjohnson]

After I'm "in production" on the Advanced Frankenyokes, (Optimized Barkensteins or Mark IIs) you should sell him a set!

CJ

[draganm]

not to be a part pooper but why downscale to 1080i then upscale to 1080P and why a Fury on a rig like that,needs a Moome card.

[Curt Palme]

BEcause otherwise it makes life really difficult. If we kept everything at 1080p (only the BR player puts out 1080p anyways), then we'd have to use the Lumagen to downscale to 720p for the LCD which won't accept anything higher than 720p. Since he uses the LCD more than the projector, and since the Lumagen is a really good scaler, I figured 1080i->1080p via the HDP would be good.

Also, the HDMI run would be 35'+, and he didn't put a conduit in, and the RGBHV is stuck up in the ceiling.

[Curt Palme]

BEcause otherwise it makes life really difficult. If we kept everything at 1080p (only the BR player puts out 1080p anyways), then we'd have to use the Lumagen to downscale to 720p for the LCD which won't accept anything higher than 720p. Since he uses the LCD more than the projector, and since the Lumagen is a really good scaler, I figured 1080i->1080p via the HDP would be good.

Also, the HDMI run would be 35'+, and he didn't put a conduit in, and the RGBHV is stuck up in the ceiling.