Usher In A Home Theatre

The Age

Thursday January 15, 2009

Rod Easdown

I GO WAY back with sound and vision equipment, back to the days when VCRs were drop-dead sexy. If I had a dollar for every story I've written on the ins and outs of home theatre I could make a movie about it with Brad, Angelina and baby Shiloh. I thought I'd seen it all. And then I went and bought one; or, more accurately, another one.

My first was nine years ago for a timber terrace house and I learned enough to figure I'd know what to do with our move to a double-brick house with a concrete floor. So how come I kept running into problems I'd never heard of? And just how did my $10,000 theatre wind up costing $14,345 and still have no subwoofer?

We decided to get rid of the carpet in our new house and put in timber flooring, and I figured an installer could hack a channel in the concrete floor for the rear speaker cable run, cement it over and voila. Easy. Cheap.

After one look he refused, pointing at the gas cock on the wall. Somewhere in the concrete was a gas pipe. If he hit it with his concrete cutter the best possible case was goodbye house and worst was goodbye suburb.

So he excavated the cable run up a single brick internal wall, through the ceiling and down the double brick rear wall, routed the aerial cable alongside and put a four-point power outlet on the wall for the electronics. He could do this because he is one of those rare installers who is also a licensed electrician.

It sounds so straightforward. Actually, it took three visits - one to oh-my-god about the gas, another from his boss to convince him that going up the brick wall into the ceiling without damaging the irreplaceable cornice was possible, and a third to do it. The second visit was free and there was no call-out fee on the third, but it still cost $543.

Laying the new floor took twice as long as planned, which meant the guy who sold me the plasma screen kept ringing to see when it would vacate his warehouse. He hated me. I insisted the screen be collected, delivered and fitted by specialist plasma installers because the bulk of problems encountered with plasmas are the result of mishandling.

When its time finally came, it was beautifully installed and fully explained to me. Best $250 I've ever spent.

The speakers and electronics came a day earlier and although it was mostly just a matter of connecting cables and tuning speakers, it took two hours. The guys cheerfully explained that the speaker stands I'd ordered hadn't turned up so they'd brought loaners (ugly things they are too) and the Blu-ray player I'd agonised over was out of stock so they'd "upgraded" me to a different brand.

Some upgrade. The recommended retail price may have been $50 higher but the player was slow and unintuitive, and thoroughly mediocre. And occasionally everything went dark and it flashed an error code suggesting my expensive HDMI cable was faulty.

I've been mucking about with stereos since I was eight. I have suffered countless crook cables, most of them new.

I rang the store and asked for a replacement. Nope, they said, it wouldn't be the cable, they'd send their man to figure out what I was doing wrong.

Of course he arrived just as everything started working again. He grilled me, he fiddled, he tested with little sensors and LED lights, he even replaced the Blu-ray player with another one. He did everything but replace the cable. The problem persisted. I rang again. They gave me a new cable. Problem solved.

A few days later, I took back the awful $400 Blu-ray player and paid the difference to go to a $750 one. Another budget blow-out but the improvement in picture quality and colour balance was palpable.

Following my own law of home theatre, I budgeted as much for speakers and electronics as for the screen, roughly $5000 apiece. I've been advocating this since DVDs made home theatres a proposition a decade ago and despite the plethora of cheap surround-sound systems that has built up since, it's still the best way to get sound and vision that complement one another properly.

I love my theatre. It blew the budget, it was a hassle from start to finish and it took weeks to work out the bugs, but then the course of true love is hardly ever smooth. It's exciting, immersive and totally engaging, and it sends me every bit as weak-kneed as my first kiss behind the shelter shed at Birregurra State School.

There was just one outstanding: my $750 Blu-ray player was supposed to come with six movies, but when I opened the box, not a sausage. I went back to the store (again) and without hesitation the salesperson opened up another one and handed me the movies from it, adding that they were pretty average flicks. Maybe, but they were mine.

I take two things out of this. One, the person who complained before me got the movies out of my box and two, the last person to buy one, when there are no more boxes to open, loses.

The 10 commandments of home cinema

Don't try to install it yourself. Again: Don't try to install it yourself.

The best time to install is when the house is being built or renovated.

Spend as much on speakers and electronics as you spend on the screen.

Budget blow-outs mount fast. When your installer tells you that you need a surge protector and he just happens to have a good one in the truck, hesitate. Every competitive price will be lower.

It helps a great deal if your installer is a licensed electrician. Many are not.

Check how your installer will leave the job. Insist it include a clean-up at the end.

Ask your suppliers to take the empty boxes away. They're more than your recycling bin can handle.

Measure everything. Then measure again. Many receivers need more space than standard cabinets allow them. Remember that electronic equipment needs ventilation space.

A wall-mounted screen takes thieves much longer to steal than a stand-mounted screen. Some wall mounts allow padlocking of the screen to the mount.

Use good-quality speaker cable that's traced, so you're certain you're connecting positive to positive and negative to negative.

Rod Easdown's 11th commandment:

Develop a plausible response to "Turn that bloody volume down."

Or get headphones.

Some painful lessons

After they have hewn channels up brick walls, installers leave the refilling of the channels to painters and plasterers; painters and plasters you must find and pay. They don't mention this. You simply come home to find a channel in the wall and brick dust ... everywhere.

Don't take partners when choosing a cabinet. The one I liked cost $600, my partner went for the $3000 one from a boutique manufacturer in Bendigo because it matched the floor. Ordered in November, it will be delivered maybe February, maybe March.

Do take partners when auditioning speakers. If they hate the sound or the appearance of the speakers, they'll hate the whole system - and they'll keep telling you so. My partner and I eventually settled on some rippers that were inevitably more expensive than I planned but I clawed back some budget with a half-price receiver in run-out and, a big concession here, leaving the subwoofer until later.

When your dealer says he is upgrading your Blu-ray player free of charge, be deeply, deeply suspicious. My "upgrade" may have cost a little more but it was an older model that performed nowhere near as well.

Good in-wall speakers can solve many problems but they're impossible in double-brick houses and moving them to the ceiling can create some weird acoustic cues, especially with action movies. In-ceiling subwoofers, however, work nicely.

Cables, even new, expensive HDMI cables, are not always perfect. And by the way, while equipment manufacturers make much of all their HDMI connections, you never seem to find HDMI cables in thebox.

Deal with local retailers because you'llbe going back there a lot.

In all matters pertaining to aesthetics you are wrong, your partner is right.

What to call what you want . . .

BLU-RAY High definition DVD format with sharper pictures and vastly improved sound. Blu-ray players and discs are more expensive than conventional DVDs.

HDMI A digital cable yielding better definition. One HDMI cable can replace several conventional cables, reducing clutter.

PLASMA The original flat panel screen format later joined by LCD. To our eyes plasma still yields a brighter, sharper and better-balanced picture.

SURGE PROTECTOR Device that protects equipment from power spikes caused by lightning, short circuits or inconsistent power generation. Some even handle lightning strikes on TV antennas.

SUBWOOFER Movie makers use sub-bass sound to generate atmosphere and subwoofers - large, single-speaker units - are designed to reproduce it.

© 2009 The Age

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