CurtPalme.com Home Theater Forum

[Tom.W]

[ecs1]

First of all both the jvc and the sony 4K are ILA projectors. simple digital one's, The JVC has a super picture with amazing contract but one huge problem. no where near the light output for the 28' screen. Arnold using a 6K digital cinema lamp running around 6500 watts. The image pops off the screen at around 22FL and a 3/2 roll off.
That's been the biggest complaint light out is to low for the JVC 4K unit. JVC targeted that unit for simulation and it's amazing but not for cinema of large scale.
I can't wait for 4K content but in the mean time the current 1080P codec's keep getting better and better.
I want to here the review.
regards

[ecrabb]

Leo, the 4k JVC looked absolutely stunning with 4k content at CEDIA, but yes - it was on nowhere near a 28' screen... Probably closer to 20' wide, if even that. You'd probably need three or four of the 4k JVC or Sony machines to match the brightness you're getting out of the old light valve with a 6500w lamp, yes?

I'm sure the old light valve looks incredible with great 1080p content. 22fL must be a site to behold on a 24'-wide screen in a private home theater.

Can't wait for Clarence's review, either.

Cheers,
SC

[Clarence]

Let me first give my thanks to Arnold for the visit. It’s always fun to meet other forum members… I figure I’m at well over 100 face-to-face meetings with you guys, probably closer to 200.

Second, sorry, no pictures. He’s already provided some great shots as the construction has progressed. I brought my camera, but let’s just say that Arnold has something lined up where we’ll all be able to get a much better representation than what I could provide with pictures. But it reminded me of the first time I went to the Grand Canyon with a point and shoot camera… got some great shots (first snowfall of the season), but there’s no way to capture the awe and effect of the total surroundings.

Maybe on a future visit I’ll get a screenshot with Arnold standing at the podium in front of the screen just to give you a better scale of how large this screen really is.

No notes, so I’ll just start at the beginning and continue rambling from my recollection…

I was in the area so I called Arnold on Monday night during the Patriots-Dolphins game, which I can guarantee he wasn’t watching… more on that later. We picked 8pm the following evening, he gave me good directions, and I took the scenic route up Rt 9… about an hour drive from my hotel. Buzzed the intercom, the gate lifted and opened and street lights came on, and lit the way down a winding driveway… beautiful landscaping… maybe as a precursor of things to come it reminded me of the winding roads to Hershey Park or Disney World.

As you probably imagined, the whole house is stunning… clean (as in not cluttered), simple yet complex. From the flooring, the trim, the lighting, the furnishings… everything was elegant, not gaudy or extravagant. I’m not an architecture connoisseur and have very little interest in the interior decorator shows that my wife is always watching, so I’m never going to be able to adequately describe the overall style or theme of the house, other than to say, wow, this is nice… as in done well. Impressive without being explicitly pretentious or gaudy.

It was raining, so by habit I kicked off my shoes when I walked through the front door... just something that I’m used after moving into our new house several years ago… having a couple of boys (and a whole neighborhood of kids)… everyone had new light-colored carpet and you never wanted your kid to be the one that left muddy footprints everywhere. That’s how we always take census at neighborhood parties… count the shoes and divide by 2. Anyways… Arnold assured me that I could leave my shoes on. I guess the marble floor was capable of handling a little foot traffic. But if my boys were there, I’d have them kick off their shoes. And wear gloves. Ah, let’s be honest, I’d just leave them in the car with the windows cracked.

So we took the elevator down to the HT. Actually, HT is not a fair term at all. Let’s just call it a theater. Or probably more appropriately, a Theatre. Yep, with a capital T. And the classy British “-re” spelling. You walk into the Lobby and the glass lit case is well stocked with all the movie snackbar classics. All that was missing was a menu board with outrageous prices, a cash register, and a slow teenager to swipe your credit card. Nice commercial popper… huge, but Arnold said he was actually replacing it with a larger one to handle a capacity crowd. Separate Women’s and Men’s restrooms (with stalls for dual standing customers BTW) with nicely lit signs that he found 17 years ago and has been saving for this setup. So the idea of a large HT obviously isn’t just a recent whim.

So then we moved into the projection room. Very nice. I knew the ILA was going to be huge, but it was even bigger than I expected… looked like a refrigerator/freezer with a gas furnace next to it. And man that furnace was pumping out some heat, even with the huge exhaust duct above it. Nice digital displays, IIRC they were temp and maybe air volume. And a built-in rack with 3 or 4 full-width/full-height slots. The wiring was surprisingly sparse. A repeater wire for the IR, a stray power cord hanging looking vulnerable to trip over, but Arnold's in the midst of configuring all of the source connections, so the wiring is far from being completed and tidied. But regardless of all the enormity of this setup, it still boiled down to just 5 wires feeding the beast… RGBHV. Arnold had cranked everything up an hour before my arrive to let everything get up to temp and stabilize.

I’ve got to run to a meeting, so I’ll save the HT design and PQ comments for my next rambling post… (warning... I've probably got 9 more posts like this one to go)

[perisoft]

[stefuel]

Wow, what a busy guy. He even found time to change his name half way through the visit

[greg_mitch]

[Tom.W]

Quote:

I was in the area so I called Arthur on Monday night during the Patriots-Dolphins game, which I can guarantee he wasn’t watching… more on that later.



Arthur must be Clarence's bookie....

[stefuel]

Did................Hobsun..................answer the door?

[achase]

The joke is on you guys...my daughter is in the new "Arthur" remake with Russell Brand that is filming now...

[Clarence]

That's too funny.

My bad... I work with an Arthur. That's what I get for multi-tasking on my Blackberry.

[Tom.W]

I've always thought that Razzberry's were far more fun then Blackberry's.......

Clarence, Please continue with your review !

[Clarence]

OK, I'm back in the hotel, so I'll ramble on a for a bit more...

So Arnold puts in a DTS demo DVD (blu-ray?)... Black Crowes concert clip, BT, Night at the Museum, Eragon... I don't have this demo disc, but I'll have to look for it on ebay. Mainly we were using it for audio. I intended to bring some of my homemade demo discs... mainly because it really helps if you're intimately familiar with the source material so you know what to look for and listen for... you don't want to be focused on new content, IMHO it's better if you're overly familiar with the audio and video so you can pay attention to the subtle background details.

Unfortunately, most of my previous homemade demo discs are HD DVD format. 2-3 years ago they were great as we were starved for HD content, but now that we've got pristine Blu-ray content, the HD cable .ts clips that I used look overly compressed. I don't think Arnold has a HD DVD player, even though he did have a LaserDisc and even mentioned VHS. I meant to mention it at the time, but a DVHS player like the JVC HM-DH5U might fit the bill, especially since it has HDMI. DVHS/D-Theater is stunning... a bit ahead of it's time and now it's even more OBE than HD DVD. I think Cliff was looking at selling off his DVHS player and collection. I should probably do the same. It's just been sitting in the rack untouched for over a year. I finally took my HD DVD player out of the rack. Anyways, I've been meaning to revisit the latest tools for capturing and creating Blu-Ray clips to make a new demo disc, but that's been around #101 on my Top 100 To-Do list.

Arnold did have a nice media closet with shelves for his DVDs, Blu-Rays, and CDs. Not a critique or criticism, just another rambling observation, but it was a relatively meager collection... probably several hundred titles instead of thousands. Almost more comforting than walking into a room with every Blu-Ray ever sold. I know I hardly buy any Blu-Rays any more. I used to buy about one a week, but now that Blu-Rays are more common, there's almost too much content to chose from, much less own and collect. I have a pile of stuff new that I still hadn't watched yet, so I rarely watched owned content more than once. A couple of years ago we signed up for the monthly unlimited BlockBuster plan where you can pick anything in the store. My kids love it because most of the time they pick a PS3 or X360 game, but if there's a new movie on Blu-Ray, I just rent it and watch it instead if buying it. Going OT, but it ties into a discussion that Arnold and I had about whether he considered building a HTPC media server instead of picking physical media from the shelf. Bottom line, he prefers to spend the 15 seconds to pick a disc off the shelf, insert it and press play. Wise choice. Dang, I'm getting further and further OT from my intended PQ critique...

[Clarence]

So Arnold puts a DTS demo DVD (blu-ray?) in his Oppo... Black Crowes concert clip, BT, Night at the Museum, Eragon. Again, since I don't own this disc, it's hard to know the original video quality of the source, but the emphasis was clearly intended to be on the audio. Arnold has nice backlights behind the screen to give a sneak peek at the pyramids of LCR speakers. I'll add that to my list of future photo ops.

Critique and criticism is always the toughest to share, but I'll just say that the *video* on the first clip we viewed (BT?) was underwhelming. But the DTS audio was the main intent. Arnold has the audio set at the calibrated levels... and bottom line, that's how it sounded... perfectly neutral and balanced.

Now, for those of us that have been to Cliff's HT meets... he's known for going over the top with Audio and Video levels. Art and Arli can really crank it too. Spinal Tap goes to 11. Cliff goes to 12. The whole house shakes, neighbors call the cops, Amy screams ("Turn that sh!# down and go to bed you guys... it's 4am!"), but that's half the fun and bammmm we're always sitting there in shock and awe... grinning from ear to ear, Cliff giggling like a school girl. I've sat in Arli's basement and could've sworn he had bass shakers under the riser... nope, just woofers physically thumping your butt everytime a dinosaur takes a step.

The whole time at Arnold's I was thinking that Cliff would've grabbed the remote and crank it from 7 up to 12. MP has made a similar comment about my HT audio... well-balanced, strong but subtle, instead of dammm-bammmmm in your face. I've never known whether that's a compliment or a criticism. I use dual 15" subs, but not thumping and pumping like a 16-year-old's car. Same here at Arnold's. The surrounds were well-balanced and hard to localize. But that's a good thing. That's professional. That's top-notch... probably perfect by-the-book reference. But Cliff wouldn't have his silly grin. The rear audio was seamless... if anything it seemed more like a solid bar across the back of the room instead of satellites in the corners.

A classic demo clip comes to mind... the cannon battle in Master and Commander. I'd love to try that clip in Arnold's Theatre. I know when I first played it, I literally looked up at the ceiling and wondered who was running in heavy boots across the kitchen floor above.

I sat in several different seats, including every extreme corner. The audio was continually balanced. The video angle of view was as you would expect... very similar to a commercial theater... I never want to sit in the front row of a movie, and the theater is rarely completely full so you never really have to, but every once in a while when you show up 10 minutes late to a new release, you end up in a terrible seat. Bottom line, even the terrible seats in Arnold's Theater had good audio. I don't think I'd want to watch a 3 hour movie in the front corner, but I suspect Arnold's capacity crowds will typically be for a speaker/podium presentation, so no worries on the most extreme viewing angles. But note to self... don't show up 10 minutes late.

[Clarence]

Re-reading my previous post... "the *video* on the first clip we viewed was underwhelming"... that's not intended to be a summary of the overall PQ of the ILA, just of the video source on the first clip we played.

I'll save detailed PQ comments (very positive) for Chapter 4 tomorrow.

[stefuel]

"Arnold did have a nice media closet with shelves for his DVDs, Blu-Rays, and CDs. Not a critique or criticism, just another rambling observation, but it was a relatively meager collection... probably several hundred titles instead of thousands. Almost more comforting than walking into a room with every Blu-Ray ever sold. I know I hardly buy any Blu-Rays any more. I used to buy about one a week, but now that Blu-Rays are more common, there's almost too much content to chose from, much less own and collect. I have a pile of stuff new that I still hadn't watched yet, so I rarely watched owned content more than once. A couple of years ago we signed up for the monthly unlimited BlockBuster plan where you can pick anything in the store. My kids love it because most of the time they pick a PS3 or X360 game, but if there's a new movie on Blu-Ray, I just rent it and watch it instead if buying it. Going OT, but it ties into a discussion that Arnold and I had about whether he considered building a HTPC media server instead of picking physical media from the shelf. Bottom line, he prefers to spend the 15 seconds to pick a disc off the shelf, insert it and press play. Wise choice. Dang, I'm getting further and further OT from my intended PQ critique... "

We've already kicked this pig but this is exactly why the right equipment and a little automation would go a long way.
" 15 seconds to pick a disc off the shelf, insert it and press play." How long is the walk from his seat in the theater to the rack and back? For my money, there's no need for a "media shelf" if a Sony 400 disc BD player was in the rack. A simple tap of the home button from his favorite seat brings up the OSD with all his loaded media to select from and he could even do it with the factory remote as he uses a IR repeater now

[Tom.W]

A media server would be handy if your up in the bedroom or living room and just want to watch a movie in a different location other than the main HT.

[MikeEby]

Media Servers with cover art ROCK!...Once you've seen or owned or own one your hooked, disks seem soooo old fashion. When I do a demo in my modest theater people are most impressed with it. I have not watched a movie from physical media in over a year.

The majority of the time I let the audience decide on what they want to watch. The load times from a server is maybe a second, and no FBI warning or menus to fiddle with.


Mike

[garyfritz]

Do you rip just the movie? (In which case you have no menu or navigation?) Or do you rip the whole disk and somehow bypass all the FBI/etc junk?

[MikeEby]