by Brent Butterworth

I swear, I will never put in a home theater for anyone ever again. I’m just going to tell them to go to a pro.

Thanks to my experience in wiring, carpentry, etc., family and friends often call on me to install their home theater gear. I review gear for a living, so the gear itself I can handle. It’s the control system that keeps me on the phone with them for hours, or has me rushing to their homes minutes before the Super Bowl or the Oscars.

All because they can’t figure out how to work the system. Or more accurately, because I can’t figure out how to build a system they can work.

Sure, there are lots of universal remotes that can, in theory, control an entire home theater system. But they have problems. Most consumers can’t figure out that they have to switch inputs when they want to watch a DVD instead of cable TV. Many can’t remember that they have to hit the DVD button on the remote when they want to control the DVD player.

Sure, you can set the remote control up for macros, where it performs a whole bunch of operations at the touch of one button. But the fact that most gear has just a single power button tends to flummox most macros. If the TV is off but the cable box is on, any macro that tries to turn them both on will shut the cable box off.

I did program a fairly fancy touchscreen remote for a friend of mine a few years ago. (He bought it from Amazon.) Unfortunately, this remote is still primitive enough that I had to get really creative when I programmed it. And the more creative the installer has to be, the less reliable the home theater system usually is. So still, I get the calls. He’s on his second touchscreen now and I refuse to program a third.

Control systems from companies like AMX, Control4, and Crestron solve these problems easily. These systems can monitor whether a device in your system is on or off, so they never shut it off accidentally. They can be programmed with simple commands like “Watch a Movie” instead of requiring you to remember how to work the system. And the installer can leave off the complex, confusing options that cause most people to mess up their systems.

Best of all, these systems are reliable. Yes, they can break, but it’s not like you’ll be calling your installer once a week because you can’t get the TV going.

These control systems aren’t cheap, and you can only get them through custom installers. But you’ll find them well worth every penny. After all, what’s the point of saving a few thousand on your fancy home theater system if you can’t figure out how to work it?

by Brent Butterworth
A new generation of projectors promises to fix every problem we ever had with video projection. Based on the time I’ve recently spent with a couple of these machines, it looks like the promises have been fulfilled.

These new projectors use LEDs as a light source instead of the UHP lamps that other projectors use. LEDs offer all sorts of advantages over lamps. The biggest one is that LEDs never need replacing—unlike lamps, which need to be replaced every 2,000 to 3,000 hours. That means a huge cost savings over the course of several years. Manufacturers rate the lifetime of the LEDs anywhere from 20,000 hours to practically forever (even though they’re all using the same LEDs).

Supposedly, the performance of LEDs doesn’t change much over time. But lamps start to dim and shift color after about 1,000 hours, necessitating frequent readjustment of the picture controls.

LEDs can also deliver deeper black levels and better contrast. Many lamp-based projectors use an automatic iris to get deep blacks; the iris closes down automatically during dark scenes to make the blacks darker. Problem is, you can often see the iris working. LEDs don’t need the iris, because they can be dimmed almost instantly to any level. Based on what I’ve seen so far, the speedy operation of the LEDs can indeed eliminate the “pumping” and flickering you sometimes see with auto iris mechanisms.

That’s a lot of advantages, right? Well, there’s more.

Because LED projectors use separate red, green, and blue LEDs instead of a white lamp shining through a rotating color filter wheel, the “color fringing” effect you see on most DLP projectors is eliminated. And because LEDs can deliver more intense, saturated color, you can set the projectors up for an ultra-vivid picture. Some will say it’s unrealistic, but I’ve grown addicted to the look after living with it for a few weeks.

This first generation of LED projectors warms up in 40 seconds, only about a third of the time it takes for a lamp-based projector to fire up. And when you shut them off, they go off instantly because unlike lamps, they don’t need to be cooled down gradually by a fan.

The time I recently spent with the Digital Projection M-Vision Cine LED convinced me that LED is the wave of the future for video projection. It’s a shame that only a small handful of people are getting to enjoy the rich hues of the Winter Olympics on an LED projector, but I’m glad I’m one of them.

by Brent Butterworth

December saw what may be the two most significant events in the history of 3-D video. On December 17, the Blu-ray Disc Association announced the finalization of the Blu-ray 3-D standard. The following day marked the release of Avatar, which will be as important to 3-D as the Magna Carta was to the rule of law and Gilligan’s Island was to the modern sitcom.

Based on what I’ve heard, read, and watched, the 3-D we see in the home might just beat out what we see in the theater.

The standard released by the Blu-ray Disc Association requires the use of a new 3-D Blu-ray player (or a Sony Playstation 3) and a 3-D TV. It will pass on the new HDMI version 1.4 interface, so no special cabling will be required. Standard 2-D Blu-rays and DVDs will play on a 3-D player, and 3-D Blu-rays can be backward-compatible with existing 2-D Blu-ray players. Discs can carry 3-D video in full 1080p resolution.

While few specifics of the new standard have been made available to the public, manufacturers tell me that the new 3-D TVs will require that viewers wear LCD “shutter glasses. When the TV is showing the left-eye image, the left LCD shutter becomes transparent and the right shutter becomes opaque. The opposite happens for the right-eye image.

These shutter glasses may be a little clunky, and they probably won’t look terribly cool, and they’ll probably cost $100 or so to replace if you accidentally sit on them. However, they may have an advantage over the polarized glasses you need to watch Avatar, Up, and other 3-D releases in the movie theater.

When watching Avatar, I noticed that if I turned my head slightly, the sides of the image went out of alignment, as if I were looking at it with my eyes out of focus. I had to be careful to stare almost straight at the screen if I wanted the whole image in focus. LCD shutter glasses shouldn’t suffer this problem. While LCDs don’t perform the same at all angles, they shouldn’t produce the blurred images that I saw during Avatar.

The CES show in January promises lots and lots of new 3-D TVs and Blu-ray players—and lots of really impressive demos—so we’ll soon have a better idea of what the new home 3-D video technology offers us. Actual products should be available sometime around summer of 2010 … just in time for the Blu-ray release of Avatar.

By Brent Butterworth

Everyone’s heard loud bass, but very few people have ever heard good bass. Good bass reproduction demands that every note in the bass range be reproduced evenly, with no notes emphasized. Fortunately, recent research has shown us for the first time a way to get even bass response in almost any room. The result is the most natural, accurate, and impactful bass reproduction that’s ever been achieved in the home.

Here’s the technical background: At bass frequencies (below about 200 Hz), a room acts as a resonator, much the way an empty Coke bottle does when you blow across the top. With certain notes, the room resonates, amplifying the note so it sticks out. Meanwhile, some other notes may disappear almost entirely.
Fixing this problem isn’t as simple as plugging in a graphic equalizer and adjusting a few knobs. That’s because the way the room affects the bass depends on where you are in the room. Move from one side of the couch to the other, and you’ll probably hear huge differences in the sound of the bass.
Harman International—parent company of numerous professional and consumer audio brands—recently devoted a great deal of research to finding ways to fix the bass problem. The solution they came up with is multiple subwoofers. Using two instead of one gives a big improvement. Using four instead of two gives an even bigger improvement. A Harman engineer gave me a full four-sub demo in my house a couple of years ago, and since then I’ve tried this trick with numerous subwoofers and it always delivers remarkably consistent bass response no matter where on my couch I sit.

Don’t let the thought of four subwoofers scare you. Instead of one big 15- or 18-inch model, you can use four small 10-inch models. And placement is easy: Just put the subs in the corners.

If you’re planning a new home theater or media room, talk with your installer about the merits of multiple subwoofers. If you equate bass with that annoying, boomy sound you hear when a hopped-up Honda Civic passes you, you’re in for a nice surprise.

How video calibration works – and why you want it

by Brent Butterworth

I’ve spoken with many people who are shocked to learn they have to spend hundreds of dollars extra to have their theater’s video projector professionally calibrated. I can sympathize. After all, who among us hasn’t brought a brand-new TV home, plugged it in, turned it on, and never once touched the picture adjustments?

I can’t tell you a fancy calibration process is going to make The Biggest Loser any more captivating. But when you’re watching movies, accurate color reproduction and crisp detail draw really help draw you into the story, especially with a projection system. Achieving this level of performance is an incredibly complicated process for which most amateurs are no more qualified than they would be to do a brake job on their car.

The very first thing a calibration technician does is make sure your system is hooked up correctly. There’s a huge benefit here that doesn’t often get discussed—you can be sure all of your devices (Blu-ray player, cable box, etc.) are set for the optimum resolution for your projector. The tech’s also going to make sure the proper cables are used and that they’re all installed correctly. You can rest assured knowing you’re not one of the millions of people watching standard-definition video when they could be getting high definition.

Then the tech will check the physical installation of the TV, making sure that the screen is level and unobstructed. If it’s a projection system, the tech will check to see that the image is properly zoomed, centered, and focused.

Next, the tech will make basic adjustments to such controls as brightness, contrast, and sharpness, using either a special test DVD or a video signal generator.

Now comes the complicated part, where the tech adjusts the grayscale of the display. Grayscale is actually a function of the mix of red, green, and blue in the display. Get the mix right and you’ll get a perfectly neutral gray (or black or white), and all your other colors should fall into line, too. Get the mix wrong and the blacks, grays, and whites might look blue. Or they might look red. Or the blacks might look greenish while the whites look purple. This process takes anywhere from about 30 minutes to 2 hours, depending on how bad the TV looks at the start, and it involves test equipment costing $5,000 to $15,000.

On many newer TVs and projectors, the tech will be able to adjust the specific colors of red, green, and blue, to assure that the TV’s delivering the full range of color of which it’s capable.

There are other steps, too, and the more features manufacturers add to their TVs and projectors every year, the more things the calibration technician needs to check.

I’ve been through the calibration training program run by the Imaging Science Foundation three times, and I review projectors on a regular basis, yet I still find the calibration process complicated and challenging. Sure, if you’re really tech-savvy and wanted to invest in the necessary test gear, you could do the job yourself. But by the time you get good at it, you’ll probably be ready to buy a whole new display.

by Brent Butterworth

When you still need to run wire in a wireless age

We’re definitely in the wireless age. At the recent CEDIA Expo in Atlanta, numerous audio, video, and home automation companies showed off new wireless gear. Wireless networks now transmit all sorts of home entertainment all over our homes. Wireless lighting and HVAC control are making home automation systems easy to install even in historical homes where running wires can be a nightmare.

However, there are some situations where running wires through the walls is still your best option. And for one relatively new application, it’s essential.

The advantage of a hard connection

Anyone who uses a laptop at home through a Wi-Fi network knows that wireless isn’t perfect. As robust and reliable as much of today’s wireless gear can be, it’s still susceptible to slowdowns and service breaks caused by interference. The interference could be coming from other wireless devices in your home, such as cordless phones. Worse, it could be coming from devices in a neighbor’s home.

In comparison, a properly specified wire, competently installed, will give you a perfect connection for many years to come.

While wireless technology is catching up to wired speeds, the wire still has a performance advantage. A typical wired home network runs at 100 megabits per second, while a typical wireless Ethernet bridge runs at a maximum of 54 megabits per second under the best conditions. In some situations, that doubling (at least) of speed can make a huge difference.

Where you always want a wire—and where you might not

All that said, wireless works beautifully in many applications where speed isn’t a big issue, such as home automation and audio streaming. But there is one application where I strongly recommend running a wire if at all possible: video streaming.

If you’re planning on adding a video server such as Kaleidescape, or using an Internet video streaming device such as Roku or Apple TV, you need a wire connection to ensure the best picture quality. The Netflix video streaming available through Roku and several Blu-ray Disc players will still run on a fairly lousy network connection, but the faster the connection the better the picture Netflix will give you.

Even in retrofit situations where running wire may be costly, it’s worth it to pay your installer to run those wires to your video streaming device. Every time you watch a movie over that wire, you’ll be glad you made the investment.

by: Brent Butterworth

Not just one but three companies have recently announced surround-sound technologies that go beyond 7.1 channels. Now home theater enthusiasts who thought they were finished adding extra speakers to their systems are asking: Is adding a bunch of new speakers to my system really going to make a difference?

It’s too early to answer that question for sure, because only one of the new technologies has actually hit the market. But I can share a few first impressions.

First Up: Dolby Pro Logic IIz

The first of the systems to be announced—and to be available in actual products—is Dolby Pro Logic IIz. PLIIz adds two front height speakers to a 5.1- or 7.1-channel system. The height speakers mount 3 feet or more above the front left and right speakers.

In most home theater systems, adding Pro Logic IIz should be fairly easy. However, the benefits aren’t dramatic. When I tried the first PLIIz-equipped receiver, I didn’t get the sensation of height that I expected, but it did make my speaker system sound somewhat bigger and more robust. The effect was noticeable only when I played action movies, though.

Coming Soon: Audyssey DSX

The second system to arrive will be Audyssey DSX, which is scheduled to arrive in new receivers this summer. In addition to the front height speakers that PLIIz uses, DSX also adds two width speakers, positioned outside the existing left and right speakers. The system uses two, three, or four surround speakers—so you could have a system with as many as 11 channels, plus a subwoofer or two.

I got an early demo of DSX at the University of Southern California’s Immersive Listening Lab, and I liked what I heard—but just as with PLIIz, the effect was fairly subtle.

The Big Maybe: DTS Neo:X

DTS demonstrated its own >7.1 technology at last January’s Consumer Electronics Show. However, the company has provided no specifics since then about the technology. (My guess is they put together a demo just to steal some of the thunder from Dolby’s announcement of Pro Logic IIz.) The tentative name for the technology is Neo:X, and what little information DTS has provided suggests it’s a 10-channel system with two front height speakers and one rear height speaker.

It’s still way too early to tell if >7.1 systems will take off. One thing’s for sure, though: These technologies will be more successful in custom home theaters than they are in the mass market. In custom home theaters that have their speakers mounted behind fabric walls, adding the extra speakers should be fairly easy. So if you’re planning to upgrade soon, think seriously about adding one of these new technologies to your system.

by Brent Butterworth

It’s rare that a professional audio/video equipment reviewer gets truly excited about a new technology—and even rarer when they all do.

The technology I’m referring to is Internet video streaming. It’s the ability to play video from Internet sources like Amazon, Netflix, and YouTube right on your TV. Streaming used to require a computer, but now it’s built right into numerous home theater devices, such as TVs, Blu-ray players, and video game systems.

Streaming didn’t catch on when it debuted about a year ago, probably because it started with a motley collection of second-tier web video services nobody cared about. In the year since, it’s matured into perhaps the most exciting and useful new home theater technology of the last few years. All of the reviewers and editors I talk with regularly not only like Internet streaming, they’re using it several times a week.

I’d seen Internet streaming at press events, but never thought much of it. Recently, though, I upgraded to a Profile 2.0 Blu-ray player and it just happened to include Netflix and YouTube streaming. I was astounded to see Jackie Chan’s The Legend of Drunken Master appear on my TV screen in a matter of seconds—and in surprisingly good fidelity through my 6 Mb/sec Internet connection.

Since then, I’ve spent many a night enjoying some of the 12,000-plus movies and TV shows available on Netflix’s streaming service. And I’ve used the YouTube streaming to watch all sorts of old clips and TV shows—most notably a forgotten favorite, Space Ghost: Coast to Coast.

None of these devices has enough internal computing power to run a browser like Internet Explorer or Firefox. I originally thought the lack of browsing capability was a crippling omission—but I now realize it’s an advantage. With no browser interface to accommodate, the Internet services can be reformatted so they’re properly cropped and zoomed to fill your TV screen, and so they’re easy to navigate using a TV remote. In fact, I find the YouTube interface on my Blu-ray player easier to use than the YouTube website.

To sum up: You get tons of great content, instantly available for free. All you need is a high-speed Internet connection and one of the new Internet streaming devices.