Romy the Cat wrote:

This is a whole point with the screens. I spoke with the guys who practice HT and the gave a whole lot of information about screens p I kind of find it ridicules that they are expensive and I find it not true that they are “difficult to made”. The most likely the screens are expensive because the people who but they have some extra cash and do not question why the pay so much. The folks who know HT told me that the light force of projector must be matched with gain of my screen and if the ratio is off for a few Lux then my roof will collapse. Another ridicules thing in my view is the evenness of the screen – it cost reportedly zillion dollars to make the screen to reflect here and 3 feet away with same density. Sorry, I think it is ridicules BS.  Sure, the screen gain to a degree needs to be related to protector force but I can bet million dollars that the people who too much stress it will not read light density from screen. I know it because I can – the amount of light and color temperature - 30 years of Photography and custom printing career is not wasted, and I know that this is very seldom skills and a normal person would have a huge amount of comfortable light tolerability. Trust me, I sole in my life a huge amount of green, red, yellow, fried and underexposed crappy photographs and I know how easy people might be confused with culture of imagery. Anyhow, stop bitching, as I understand there are two approaches: get a combination of screen/projector or to get a screen that would do a perfect fit to my room decor and then to look for a projector that will handle the screen. The room that I am planning to set up the thing is naturally very-very dark, a pure cave. It is not even friendly for being there but it getting much better. I think it will be very good for Opera Room. A guy I know advised me to set up a high power TV antenna in the roof as according to him open air TV quality is very good. I can’t stress how much I do not care about TV in my Opera Room. On TV the only thing that I watch religiously and pretty much continuously are “Jon Stuart’s Show” and “The Golden Girls”. I use to watch Animal Channel but they not show as many Cheetahs and they use to…. So, the TV feed to my Opera Room is out of question. Well, the WGBH sometimes shows some MET and other opera houses performances, some concerts… perhaps it will makes sense to get it but I get it via dish and the sound that WGBH has via the dish is horrible. The Cat

oxric wrote:

Hi Romy: ....  If you are going fixed, then you may want to consider the Stewart fixed Studiotek with 1.3 gain, at maybe a savings of 50-65% over the price of a motorised version. All the best Rakesh

Sure, I am a total audio 'ho, and I'll take a musical fix when and where I find it. But I want to be sure no one thinks that I think this can really be done on the cheap.  It would have been more honest (and more helpful) to say earlier that I am not sure exactly how much my brother spent on his A/V system, except it was between 50 and 100k (USD), for the A/V system, alone.  In the meantime, I have tried various amounts of booze to go with the PBS/Ovation/TV operas on my own and others' "big screens" with nowhere near the hit I got from the grand, high $$$$$$ system.  Maybe there is a "Bang-for the Buck" way to do this, but I believe there IS a sensory threshhold that must be crossed, here; and since we, as humans, are over 80% dependent on our eyes for information, I would not underrate the visual components, here.

FYI, my brother said his A/V contractors had done recent local "concert hall" and University Music Hall "Reinforcement" systems; and IMO, it sounded like it...

Yes, I am currently biased against hall "reinforcement" that I hear; but I have to say, his home opera sounded "authentic", in the "modern" sense, and the vivid imagery somehow combines to put it "over the top"; "better" than seats I can afford, anyway, not to mention the "captured" epic performances!


Best regards,
Paul S

Serge wrote:

Romy, I'd agree that it is not really exciting to have the 5.1 for watching classical music videos in the Opera room. It is hard to obtain good sound from 2 speakers, 5 or more is then ridiculous. The downmix to 2.0 option is a bit of an enigma to me. To my understanding it is either a special code in the DD stream or the player's chip which provides instruction for downmixing. The 'chip thinking' is suspicious in terms of artistic value, isn't it? The question is how to maneuvre the sound out of surround stupideness? May be L-C-R in front will do the trick? What do you think?

It is funny that as I bought the house I did not have any use for this room, in fact I did not even liked this room but with recent event I truly developed appreciation of the room. I totally rebuilt the decor of the room, converting it to the very accurate observation of a friend of mine: “the room that reminds you your old city room at Marlborough Street”. I admit I love those dark l brown- yellow-green rooms with decadent dilapidating colors. It is what it is and the style-color reference for my new Video room is the Altec 19. Ironic, isn’t it? It is not surprise that like the appearance of the Altec 19 so much.

Even those I do have a good projector, good screen and good played (projector and screen are borrowed) I still am not sure if I like the whole film experience in HT format.  Perhaps later on in this moth a local friend if my will donate me his large sofa and I will like it more but I am not sure. What however I do like is to spend time in my new room, to spend time outside of using video installation – would never guess…

Audio wise I got rid of Altec MF horn and driver and put in use the multicell with S2 driver. I think it all that I will do with audio setup in this room. I will probably run tuner in there as I use that setup more and more. My large Macondo playback is tube-based and it has fine sound mostly in listening room. For whatever reasons when my Altec 21S plays (Altec 21 = Altec 19 + 2S) is fills the whole house with sound and I have no idea why by even the HF do not get lost. Now I ma listening Mahler 6 sitting 75 feet away in my deck with 3 room between me and Altec 21S and the sound is surprisingly not corrupted. In addition it is SS – it can run all day long….

Anyhow, I do not know if I end up with a good Opera/Video room but so far I accidently acquired a very pleasant addition to my house. I even enjoy eating in my new Video room whath the projector is off and the screen is rolled up. Perhaps I need to find a stimulating good material to play in my new video room. If you guys have any recommendation of any interesting opera/concert performances then please pitch me something.