Home Theater

After learning about Walter Murch (Wiki) (my Movie page on Editing & Sound) and his development of 5.1 surround sound I set about improving my home theater system. 

Watching "The Cell" (IMDB) with 5.1 is a completely new experience.  This is a movie that's visually stunning, but there's so much more information with the 5.1 it's like watching a new movie.

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The old Sony GX909ES only has composite video (yellow RCA) jacks and sounded mushy when processing 5.1 surround (maybe because the input was stereo audio (red and white RCA jacks)?  The speaker banana jacks are on 3/4" centers allowing the use of dual banana plugs on the speaker wires (at both ends since the speakers also have 3/4" c-c banana jacks).  When the remote was used to control the volume the knob rotated.  There is a switched outlet in the upper right on the back.  Used with Super VHS tape, karaoke, audio cassette, DVD.  Has various sound "colorizing" equalization settings (buttons along bottom). The AM loop antenna looks identical to the one that comes on the Pioneer receiver.

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Although called a receiver (it has an AM and FM radio function, the main purpose is to switch various Audio/Video sources to a display and act as an audio power amplifier to drive speakers.
The new Pioneer VSX-1019AH Audio/Video receiver took a few days to get operational. 

The first problem was the speaker banana jacks are NOT on 3/4" centers requiring the purchase of a bunch of banana plugs and cutting off the old plugs so individual plugs could be installed for the five speakers.

The next problem was the remote where there are TWO buttons marked "Receiver".  This makes interpreting the directions difficult.  The upper left corner button (1 on pg 11 of the manual) is the On-Off switch for the VSX-1019AH.  The lower right button (16 on pg 11 of the manual) means that the following button presses are directed to the VSX-1019AH rather than to some other device (it's a universal remote).

The second problem was where to plug in the rear speakers for 5.1 sound.  The default speaker arrangement is for 7.1 surround sound so it wasn't clear how to do 5.1, i.e. should the rear speakers be connected to the left and right jacks or to the rear jacks.  The connections that support 5.1 are: Normal, Front Bi-Amp, Zone2 and SpeakerB according to the manual.

The rest of the wiring was just moved from the Sony GX909E.  No matter what was done, including getting the MCACC speaker calibration to pass, the rear speakers would NOT provide 5.1 surround sound.  There is no telephone help from Pioneer for this unit that I've been able to find.  The manual does not help in troubleshooting this problem.  t this point only the DVD player was connected using composite video (3 coax cables) and stereo audio (two coax cables) and various ways of connecting the speakers was tried, all to no avail.

The next problem was that the On Screen Display (OSD) was out of sync and could not be used.  The monitor is being driven using composite video (three coax cables).  This is a bug in the VSX-1019AH.  The workaround was to run a single video (yellow color code coax) cable to another input on the monitor.  This requires retuning the monitor channel whenever you want to use the VSX-1019AH OSD then tuning back to the program channel.

Multi-Channel Acoustic Calibration Circuit (MCACC) uses a supplied microphone to listen to each speaker and adjust it's loudness, time delay, equalization, etc. for optimal performance.  The system also checks the wiring polarity.  This system sometimes gets the speaker polarity wrong, not sure why.  When that happens select the next step or continue.

The solution to the missing 5.1 rear speaker operation was to remove the audio feed (red & white coax) from the DVD and replace it with a digital feed (single RCA cable) AND repeated pressing of the "STANDARD" button until "Neural THX" appears.  I'm using the opening scene "Ghost Helicopter" Apocalypse Now collector's edition DVD as a test where the sound sequentially is heard in each of the five speakers.

Good up to 1080i/480p.  The red convergence went bad a year or two ago caused by failure of the dirve ICs.
When the DVD is set to output 480p that's what goes to the monitor.  When the DVD player outputs 480i that's what goes to the monitor, so the Pioneer A/V receiver does not automatically upconvert.  Maybe there's a setting for that?

In order to get the HDMI equipment to output 1080i (or 1080p) video for the Philips HDTV a converter is needed.  Need to get a 2 meter HDMI cable since this unit will end up very close to the input terminals on the back of the HDTV.

The small screws that connect the supplied cable to the unit are impossible for adult hands to access and even with tools they are impossible to seat.  They may be mis-dimensioned.

When playing copy protected media the output is at 480p, but when not copy protected the output can be as high as 1080p.  One solution is to use this converter and the other is to make a copy of the movie using something like DVDFab that removes the copy protection.

Composite Video (Yellow RCA Jack, sometimes a 1/8" Jack) (Wiki)

S-Video (4 Pin DIN type connector) (Wiki)

Component Video (Red, Blue & Green RCA Jacks) (Wiki)

Fig 8	Fig 9
Cable for either Red, Green & Blue or YPbPr.	YPbPr RCA Jacks

HDMI (High-Definition Multimedia Interface) (Wiki)

TOSLINK or Optical Cable (Wiki)

Fig 12

480i

Conventional color TV is 480i where the "i" means interlaced.  Interlaced means that there is one frame with the odd numbered lines that takes 1/60 second then there is another 1/60 second frame with the even numbered lines.  This system also knows as NTSC has a frame rate that is fast enough to not flicker and minimizes the bandwidth required to transmit the signal over the air.  The aspect ratio is 4:3.

1080p

This is the current high end digital video format where the "p" means progressive scan.  The complete frame is displayed in 1/60 second.  This image has about five times the bandwidth of the standard TV image.

1080p comes in two flavors.  1080p/60 Hz is a TV type standard and is the oldest.   1080p/24 Hz is a movie type standard and the older 1080p monitors may not support it.  If you want to watch Direct TV HD movies you want 1080p/24 Hz capability.

Note that to get 1080p a HDMI cable needs to be used for all of the video path between the source and monitor or a converter like the HDFury (HDFury2, etc.).

Movies

The most common film format is 35mm 24 fps (Frames Per Second) and the U.S. video rates are related to the A.C. power grid frequency of 60 Hz (Cycles Per Second).  So when a movie is transfered to a video fromat (Wiki: Telecine) using awhat's called "2:3 pulldown".  Most equipment that processes prograssive scan video has some capability of up converting the video from a standard DVD into a progressive scan format.  The simplest of these is to convert 480i to 480p.  This can double the quality of the image and makes a very noticable improvement over a stock 480i image.

The point is that you should not throw away all your DVDs and replace them with Blu-ray disks since when played on modern equipment the DVD will look much better than it did on 480i equipment.

The Sub Woofer adds the non directional low frequency sound that home sized speakers typically do not reproduce well.  This is a bottom firing speaker which makes the sound less directional than a front firing unit.  The pioneer receiver has 90 Watts per speaker so this one was chosen to have a little more (250 Watts).  The MCACC was run again which will turn on the Sub Woofer channel and readjust the equalization of the other speakers and set a crossover frequency.  If the volume knob is turned much higher than 50% the MCACC fails with a message that the sub woofer needs to be turned down.

I have had no luck with the "audio standby".  It's supposed to turn off the main power and turn it back on when sounds that the sub woofer should be processing.  The controls that effect it are the OFF-LOW-HIGH switch and the HIGH-CUT knob.  No combination I've tried works.  The problem being that it turns off OK, but then never turns back on.

23 Dec 2009 - The audio standby problem was related to allowing the A/V receiver to assign the left and right speakers as LARGE.  That means that the left and right speakers are getting the low bass frequencies rather than send them to the sub woofer.  Once all the speakers are set to SMALL or to THX (depending on which flavor of MCACC is used) causes the bass frequencies to be sent to the sub woofer and the audio standby works with the switch in the low position.

Also the system sounds much better with the sub woofer now doing it's thing.  The reason that the A/V receiver does not assign the speakers to small automatically is that there is provision for Bi-Amplification of the left and right channels where there would be two sub woofers.

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Yamaha Patents

Tanaka and Yoshida, "Active Servo Technology", Oct. 1990, Japanese Publication: Yamaha YST-SW 1000 Super Woofer Tone Quality, pp. 1-3,--Radio Technology--p. 91.
4908870Motional load driver, Katsuo Nagi (Yamaha Corp.), Mar 13, 1990, 381/96 ; 381/59 -
4943956Driving apparatus, Masao Noro (Yamaha Corp.), Jul 24, 1990, 367/137 ; 333/217; 381/96 - electronics matched to speaker and enclosure
4987564 Acoustic apparatus, Kenji Yokoyama (Yamaha Corp.), Jan 22, 1991, 367/140 ; 181/160; 181/182; 181/184; 381/96 -
5280543Acoustic apparatus and driving apparatus constituting the same, Kenji Yokoyama et al (Yamaha Corp.), Jan 18, 1994, 381/96 ; 381/59; 381/76 -
5313525 Acoustic apparatus with secondary quarterwave resonator, Michael A. Klasco (Yamaha Corp.), May 17, 1994, 381/350 ; 181/156 -
6731765Loudspeaker device, Hiromi Sotome (Yamaha Corp.), May 4, 2004, 381/160 ; 381/182; 381/186; 381/300 -

Dolby Labs (in conjunction with Walter Murch during the making of Apocalypse) developed 5.1 surround sound.  The "5" refers to the Left, Center, Right, Left Rear and Right Rear speakers and the ".1" refers to the sub woofer.  Later 7.1 Surround sound came out where there are Left Side and Right Side speakers added.  The Dolby Home Theater Speaker Guide web pages currently have information about 2.1, 5.1 and 7.1 Sound schemes.

Left and Right Speaker Location

Small vs. Large Size Speakers

Crossover Frequency

This is a photo of one of the pair of speakers I bought around 1970.  The photo was taken by my son who now has them.  To put some scale on the photo remember the woofer is 15" and the cabinet is 52" high x 30" wide x 24" deep and weighs 170 pounds.

They were mounted into recessed boxes designed into the house by George Cody (architect )and a frame holding special speaker grill cloth was in front of them.  They are not designed to be pretty furniture. 

In my first home "Hi-Fi" system the speakers were Altec Lansing Voice of the Theater.  The key design idea is that at the crossover frequency of 900 Hz the sound from both the horn and 15" woofer are in phase.  To get that to happen the woofer voice coil and the horn diaphragm are in the same vertical plane.  That requires the woofer is mounted back from the front of the box and the gap is filled with an exponential horn.  There was an option in horn placement, either the horn is mounted inside the box or mounted on top of the box and a filler strip is added to be woofer reflex port opening.  The filler makes the effective reflex port opening the same area as when the horn is inside the box.

These speakers will produce a 1 kHz tone from a 1 milliwatt source that can be heard across a living room.  They are correctly advertized as having "Outstanding Efficiency".  This was a problem when the audio amplifier was an H.H. Scott (forget the model, but it was the best then available) because the hum and noise specification is based on full power output.  Don't remember the details but the idea is say a 100 Watt per channel rating and a hum and noise spec of -80 dBV.  So 100 Watts -80 dBV is about 20 milli volts which is very noticeable.  The dynamic range of a speaker system depends on the difference between the lowest and highest sound levels of sound it can produce with some specified distortion.  These speakers have a huge dynamic range.

The cure was to return the Scott and get MacIntosh electronics.  It took two boxes, one for the AM/FM radio phono and tape pre-amplifier and one for the audio power amplifier.  They had frames that could be installed on the wood panel of my house and by pressing a couple of buttons either box would slide forward. 

Connecting to the router is straight forward.  It finds my home wifi network and shows that it's WEP.  Pressing ENTER brings up the password screen.  Then the network is active.
ng an HDMI cable that probably sent 1080p video to the Philips monitor which it can not dispaly.  So copnnecting the BD390 to the receiver using component video and optical audio allows watching on the monitor.

When YouTube is watched the video is 1080i and the monitor convergence needed to be adjusted.  This was the first time since the repair that 1080i video was used.
YouTube works fine, but Netflix will not work with the Starband 1500 serivce.  Netflix says you need a miniumu of 1.4 Mbits/sec and this service is specified at 1500 bits/second, but it starts out slower so Netflix never starts.

Borrowed the unrated version of Hancock on Blu-ray.  It will only play using the receiver DVD input, i.e. with component video not HDMI because HDMI feeds my monitor 1080p which it does not support.  BUT, it does feed the monitor 1080i on the DVD input.  1080i looks FANTASTIC compared to 720p or 480p let alone 480i (normal TV).

The BD-Live feature on the Hancock BD does NOT play on Starband.  Probably the same data rate issue as for Netflix movie downloads.

So the only good thing about the internet connection to the Blu-ray player is that it updated it's own firmware.

When a DVD is played and a HDCP (copy protection) HDMI monitor is connected the resolution of the HDMI output can be controled by the BD390 at up to 1080p.  To get this to work I've ordered the HDFury2 that converts HDMI inputs to composite outputs.  Note that DVD movies have enough information in them to allow upconverting to much higher resolution.  When the source is not copy protected the BD390 does use 1080i output on the composite jacks, that's why YouTube runs at 1080i.  But when playing a Netflix DVD the composite output is only 480p.

April 19, 2010 - Received a PAL DVD from Austria "Azorian: The Raising of the K-129".  It plays in this Blu-Ray player with no setting changes or adjustments, but does NOT play in my neighbor's Denton Blu-Ray machine.  The label is marked: Dolby Digital 5.1, PAL, 16:9, Region:0.

The Philips 60PP9202 rear projection set does not support 1080p video and is very bulky, i.e. takes up a lot of space in the room.  By upgrading to a flat panel display that will fit above the fireplace mantle (37" max height if tight to the wall, much larger if in front of the mantle) the viewing distance will be increased from 12' to 16'.

Supports 480i (normal TV), 480p, 720p, 1080i. (not 1080p but maybe others below 1080i?)
When the HDFury2 HDMI to Composite converter (above) is used with the Philips 60PP9202 the image is much better than the 480p image it was getting from the DVD and Blu-ray players and now I no longer see a need to get a flat panel display.  I've heard a rumor (Jan 2010) that the next thing will be 3-D displays.

There are four display technologies for home theater:
1. Projection - Comes in rear, like the Philips, and conventional projector and screen systems.  The image forming device might be an LCD or the TI tilting mirror method.  There are some multi screen movie theathers (Wiki: Digital Cinema) that are using electronic projectors instead of 35mm film.
2. LCD - lowest cost and performance.  Limited viewing angle.  The common back light is Cold Cathode Fluorescent Lamp (CCFL) which is very energy efficient. 

Samsung LN40B540 40", 1920x1080, 60,000:1,  60 Hz $  650
Samsung LN52B610 52", 1920x1080, 80,000:1 120 Hz $1500

3a. LED matrix backlight LCD

Sharp LC-C52700UN 52" 1920x1080,2,000,000:1, 120 Hz, $2000 <- this is a LED backlight LCD panel NOT an OLED screen
Samsung UN55B6000, UN55B7000, UHN55B8000 all get very good reviews and have excellent contrast rations (many million:1) but a narrow sweep spot for deep blacks.  They get that by controling the brightness of the LEDs.

3b LED sidelight LCD

4. Plasma -medium cost and high performance (power hungry, needs alignment)

Samsung PN58B540 58", 1920x1080, 2,000,000:1, 600 Hz, $1600

5. OLED - high cost and high performance (lower power than plasma, better image)

Prototype Nov 2009 with 7 inch diagonal

An automotive drop light from Home Depot was lower in cost than the Harbor Freight drop light and came with a 25 foot cord.  It reaches from a switched outlet to behind the monitor and with a 25 watt lamp lights the room enough to easily walk around but does no make a reflection on the screen.

My theory is that they are so close to the same most people can't tell the difference.  That's why the forced downgrading of the image quality built into HDCP for analog outputs.  i.e. when you watch a DVD and use an analog connection for video you will be seeing a 480p image not an HD image.  Note a single layer DVD is 4.7 GB and holds a movie and not much else.  A Blu-ray disk holds 25 GB which is only 5 times the capacity.  Blu-ray typically has special features so the ratio of the storage used for just the movie between DVD and Blu-ray is probably less than 4 times.  For most things like this a barley noticeable change is 4 times and so the difference is in the barley noticeable area, not in the wow category.

I got "The Cell" on Blu-ray to see what the difference is between DVD and Blu-ray.  Just looking at the Blu-ray I didn't see any difference.  Next to pause them both at the start, one in the DVD player and one in the Blu-ray player, then start them at the same time to allow switching back and forth.  On second thought it would be better to offset them in time by maybe 10 seconds so you could see the same exact images.

Jan 2010 - Got a 19" Samsung TV Model 933HD+  ( the lowest price Samsung at Costco).  I choose this one because it's a Samsung and their top of the line sets are often cited as having the best images of all sets.  The idea is to see if the difference between 1080i and 1080p.  And with the factory settings there is some improvement in the image when seen at a distance, but when viewed closer there are some artifacts related to the basic screen resolution being 1366 x 720.

When reading the reviews of the various LCD sets on the Costco web page it's clear that almost all the people writing the reviews have not adjusted or calibrated the set they are reviewing, i.e. they're using the factory default settings.  The problem is that there isn't a single set that will have excellent images when used for watching movies, sports, computer games and as a computer monitor.

Lasers

The wavelength of the laser light used to read/burn optical disks determines the size of the "pit" the represents a data bit.  The shorter the wavelength the smaller the pit and the more bits per disk.

System	Wavelength nm	Color	Pit nm
CD	780	IR	1600
DVD	650	red	740
Blu-ray	405	Blue	?

This 18½" HDTV is being wall mounted using the 75x75mm VESA hole pattern (either 6-32x½" or 4-0.7x12 mm screws into the back of the TV).
The instructions said to drill a 3/16" dia hole 2½" inches deep for the two mounting screws, but that's way too small a drill, ended up with a #6 and can just tighten them.

	Sanus Vuepoint Model F10 TV Wall Mount Small VESA TV wall mount at Wal Mart. The two bars and the large black nuts and bolts are only used for a 100mm hi x 200 mm wide VESA TV set, not used for this small set.
	Samsung 933HD with F10 Mounted on back The white dust on the TV is from drilling the dry wall and stud.
	Harbor Freight 95914 Color Sound TV Camera
	Samsung 933HD mounted high on the wall Driveway image on screen