Home Theater Geeks 493 Transcript
Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.
00:00 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
In this episode of Home Theater Geeks, I share not a home theater of the month, but a living room of the month. Stick around.
00:12 - Leo Laporte (Announcement)
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00:28 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Hey there, scott Wilkinson, here the Home Theater Geek. In this episode, I want to share with you not a home theater of the month, but a living room of the month. Now, not everyone can put together a dedicated home theater room in their home that's separate and can be closed off and is all acoustically treated and sound isolated. I mean, that's all great if you can do it, but a lot of people can't. But what do you do? Well, you can install some really great equipment in your living room and still have a wonderful experience.
01:10
I profiled one of these living rooms on AVS Forum back in 2023. And I'll include the link to that article in the show notes. But I want to show you an alternative to a dedicated home theater. But I want to show you an alternative to a dedicated home theater. This is, in fact, the only living room I've featured on AVS. It was the result of a contest inviting members to submit photos of their living room and the winner was selected by the editorial team and they even got a prize, a JMGO N1 Ultra projector, which is JMGO is a Chinese manufacturer and this particular projector has been getting a lot of buzz, so I wanted to show you the winner out of 58 entries that were received in less than three weeks time. The winner was Conrad Castello, who lives near Chicago, and he was the one who won this JMGO N1 Ultra projector.
02:18
Now we start by showing you a picture of his living room in 2014, which is seen here. It's fairly nice, but it's not any kind of critical viewing environment and the technology is a little outdated. That big screen. There is a Mitsubishi Diamond 842, an 82-inch DLP rear projection TV Remember those? Again, this is 10 years ago, 11 years ago. Now the walls are this yellow-orange color and the curtains are somewhat translucent and the recliners are blue-green Not your critical viewing environment. Now, a living room is not going to be a critical viewing environment, but you could make it a lot better than this, and in fact, he did Take a look at the next picture, which is 2020. Boom, yeah, I'm liking that. A lot more Gray walls, a nice recliner, a projection screen, blackout curtains on the windows and acoustic panels Really really nice. Now he sent us a picture in an intermediate state between these two, the beginning and the end, shall we say. The next graphic shows us that the projector is up, the screen is up, the walls are gray, the curtains, better curtains are installed, but there are still no acoustic panels and we still have those recliners. So the design of the space has evolved since way earlier than that first picture 2004 in fact.
04:05
The owner writes in the early years there really wasn't a goal, I just pieced together what I thought would work. As time passed, I grew to understand many of the intricacies of home theater. Overall, I wanted a fully functional theater but still have the space, not stick out from the rest of the room Because, as you can see, this area, this viewing area, opens up into a larger room, which we can see in the next picture. You can see here that there's much more to this room than this viewing area, which is partly why I wanted to show you this, because a lot of people have this kind of situation. The most recent update took about a month to plan and three months to execute, and he did everything himself except running the electrical behind the screen and installing the projector. Running the electrical behind the screen and installing the projector. None of the room structure was changed, but he did cut some openings in the walls and ceiling for the surround and overhead speakers.
05:13
There's a picture of the equipment rack which is quite impressive. That's on the left. Here it includes a home theater PC, otherwise known as an HTPC, with 90 terabytes of storage, so plenty of local content. It also has a Roku Ultra streamer, an Apple TV 4K streamer and a Chromecast Ultra streamer. Also on the right here you can see one of the Focal Aria 948 speakers, which are the front left and right speakers. He also has a Focal Aria CC900 center channel and Focal 706V IC in ceiling speakers, two of them overhead for Atmos, and Definitive Technology DI6.5S, two of them for surrounds.
06:03
The subwoofers are two SVS SB13 Ultra subwoofers. You see one of them here. That's a 13-inch driver. Svs makes great subwoofers and other speakers as well, fairly value-oriented too. The Focal's that we saw before that one Focal speakers are really really high-end and much more expensive than SVS, but SVS has great bang for buck and these subwoofers are wonderful.
06:36
Powering the whole thing is an Anthem MRX720AV receiver which powers the surround and overhead speakers, and what we see here is the Anthem MCA325 three-channel power amp which powers the front, left, right and center. So having Anthem power everything is a really nice thing. Anthem is a higher-end brand that does a really good job, and having the same amplification for everything is good. More important is to have the same brand of speaker all around, and the fact that you have Deftek surround speakers probably means that he had those already. He had to save money somewhere. One interesting thing is that in the entrance to the living room he has a flat panel TV, mounted in portrait orientation, which displays movie posters that reflect what's playing on the screen. That's always really cool. I like that a lot.
07:40
Now the screen itself is from a company called Screen Innovations. It's the Black Diamond Zero Edge, and it includes LED edge lighting that can be programmed to match the colors on the screen. As you can see here, man, I am not a fan of this type of edge lighting. I think it's so distracting. If it were mine, I would set it to be a bias light, which means D65 white, a very specific color of white, with a brightness of 10% of the peak brightness on the screen. Then that way, when you're watching in the dark, your eyes are biased hence the name bias light so that they don't react wildly to changing illumination on the screen, which can cause eye strain and fatigue after a while.
08:37
The other things about this screen are that it measures 115 inches diagonal, with a 16 by 9 aspect ratio and it's not acoustically transparent, which is unnecessary because, as you can see, the speakers are all not behind the screen. None of them are behind the screen. So in the next picture we can see that he's also using it to play video games, and it's a great place to play video games on the Xbox One X and Nintendo Switch that he has. And in this picture I think it's nicer to see that just white. I don't know if that's reflecting or reproducing the white in the person's face, but, as I said before, changing colors behind the screen is really bad, in my opinion. I would never do that, I would just sure it produces a wonderful picture.
09:44
The JM-GEO N1 Ultra is a good projector, no doubt about it, but not the equal of the Sony by any means. However, the N1 Ultra is very portable, so if it was me, I'd use the prize to have movie nights outside or maybe elsewhere in the house, or taking it over to a friend's place, something like that. I would not replace the Sony with the JMGO, that's for sure. Now, conrad says that the cost was around $40,000 over the course of 19 years. That's a bit over $2,000 a year, so it's not so onerous. And it got him a really great living room system that he can enjoy for many years to come. So congratulations on winning the living room of the month.
10:35
So Conrad says that the cost was around $40,000 to do this, but that was over 19 years, which is a bit over $2,000 a year. That's not so bad, it's not terrible, and it got him a really great living room system that he is sure to enjoy for years to come. So I just wanted to share that with you because it's cool. Now, if you have a question for me, you can send it along to htg at twittv and I'll answer as many as I can right here on the show. And, as you know, all of Twit's shows are now available on YouTube for free, but with ads. If you want to go ad-free, join the club. Go to twittv, slash club twit and join today to get all of Twit's programming ad-free. Until next time, geek out.
11:39 - Leo Laporte (Announcement)
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12:09
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