Sander Wolf

There are a lot of decisions to make when putting together a home theater. Everything from the mundane to the technical is a complicated mess. What color should the walls be? Where does the couch go? What type of TV should I buy? How many watts should the amplifier provide? Do I really need 1080p?

But, as difficult as all those decisions are to make, the hardest two by far are where to place the surround speakers and how to route the wires to them. The problem of where and how to position the surrounds is what has kept me from installing a home theater until now. I’ve even seen people with all four speakers lined up at the front of the room just to avoid the trouble of running the wires. The speaker industry is well aware of the problem and has come up with some semi-ingenius ways to attempt to solve it. Polk has the SurroundBAR which carries the tag-line “Five channels. One speaker. Zero clutter.” Sony has a home theater system that uses infrared signals to feed the surround speakers eliminating wires altogether.

Not wanting to try either of those solutions because I think they both have serious sound quality trade-offs, I really only have two options (or some combination of the two): run the wires along the floorboards from the amplifier to the surrounds and tie them down along the way with cable clips or run the wires into the wall, up to the attic, across the attic floor, then back down again where the speakers are mounted. Either way can be challenging to make look nice and those that are good at it can (and do) make a nice living.

And that is why, for now, you need to watch your step in the home theater room — I’ve got cables running everywhere.

We took a little trip to New York City last weekend to see Great Lakes Myth Society play a show at Lit. We’d never seen them play live before and it was absolutely amazing. Not sure if I’ve ever heard five-part pop harmonies sound so good in such a dingy venue. (As an aside, I’d like to know why all the clubs in New York City seem so unsafe. Every time I see a band there I find myself heading down narrow stairs into a dank basement where electrical cables are held up to a cement ceiling by duct tape. Sometimes I’m too busy planning my exit routes to enjoy the show.)

While in NYC we stayed at the Tribeca Grand hotel. It’s a pretty swanky place. You can even get a room that includes a video camera and a complete Apple editing suite. The hotel is a big triangle with rooms on the edges and an open center with a bar/resturant at the bottom. There’s even a movie theater in the basement next to the gym. When we first got to the room it seemed a little stuffy, but it sounded like the A/C was on full-blast. Turns out there’s a speaker on the ceiling pumping out white noise (to mask the din coming from the bar?). Took awhile to figure out where the volume knob was. There’s also a speaker just outside the door that we couldn’t control. Our room also came with a bunch of indie-pop CDs (Aimee Mann, Ted Leo, etc.) and a couple in-house compilations to listen to on a Bose Wave Music System. I’d never heard a Wave radio before, but I’d seen the commercials touting the bass response — and there is a lot of bass, but it’s strange. It kinda sounds like the “LOUDNESS” button is fully engaged — there’s bass, but it’s artificial and way too present. The bass doesn’t extend very low and it sounds like there’s an octave missing between the bass that is there and the midrange stuff. Not a very well-rounded sound. In the Wave’s defense, I didn’t try to tweak the sound at all. I just ripped the CDs. They’ll sound better at home.

The first problem I have is that every time I decide what to buy something comes along to unconvince me. I thought I’d start by buying the Spectre 37″ 1080p LCD from Costco. It had all the right specs my research told me to look for. It supports 1080p, which I insist on even though there’s nothing that can generate that kind of signal. It’s an LCD so I won’t get burn-in from leaving the TV on the same channel or non-moving image for days on end. Its speakers are on the sides so I’ll be able to fit it into the height-challenged nook I have set aside for it, even though I’ll definitely be removing the speakers before setting it up. And the price is very right. Then, after all that, we looked at 37″ TVs and decided they were a little bit too small. So I’m still looking for a TV. Besides, I still don’t have anything to drive a TV. I’m a Dish Network subscriber and so I need to get a new box to hook up to the TV first. Well, second actually because before I can do that I need to have a dish that’s capable of receiving a signal from one of the satellites that carry Dish’s HDTV programming. Luckily a weird law and a helpful Dish employee helped me get that for free. See there’s a requirement that a cable or satellite provider provide all the local over-the-air broadcast channels in your particular area to you over their system. It’s the “must carry” provision. In Dallas the local religious channel and the Spanish channel are both coincidentally on the satellite that also carries the HDTV programming. And even though I’ll never watch either channel, Dish was obligated to come out and install a new dish that could receive them for free. Plus, the poor Satellite Guy who had to climb on my roof in near-freezing temperatures and near gale-force wind also wired up my guest room’s cable outlet just for the askin’.

It took five years to get started on this project. All planning initially ceased after some rough mental math tallied all the components necessary for a nice home theater setup at about $20,000. Since then pretty much all the technology has changed. DVI, HDMI, LCD, Plasma, 7.1, iTunes, wireless, optical, HDTV — all are things that weren’t really options five years ago but are now standard fare in every single store and an increasing amount of homes. Still, the price point for a top-notch home theater is basically the same. Of course, I’d like to do it for less than half of that high tally, including furniture and to do so I’m willing to make some compromises along the way. Admittedly, it’s easier to make compromises when I’ve set the ceiling so high and I’m sure I could walk out of Sears or Best Buy with something decent for $3000 and just be done with the whole thing. But would I still like it in another five years? And that right there is the biggest mental struggle. Is it possible to find gear that doesn’t scream out its limitations while not wasting my life savings on something so frivolous as television? Can it be done without making it the focus of my life for the next six months? Can I get decent sound and video without feeling like a pompous spendthrift? I don’t yet know the answers, but the time to find them has come. The walls have been painted, the furniture has been allen-wrenched, and I’ve got some shopping to do.

So I bought a pair of these. I figured I’d have enough to fill three of them, but after the big purge, I barely filled two. Cassettes are stored somewhere else for now and the few DVDs I own fit on the CD racks. And the fact is, I don’t really touch any of the CDs in the rack anymore. The procedure now is to just rip everything to the big hard drive and then file away the CD for reference, or to prove I didn’t steal it when the RIAA comes looking for me, or to see if the lyrics are to Death Cab for Cutie’s “Soul Meets Body” are really as goofy as they sound. A fair amount of the music I “own” doesn’t even embody a physical medium. That’s a fairly odd thing to think about and leads to a whole tangent about backup methods and drive mirroring that’s far too dry for a topic as emotional and lively as music. But it’s a topic that anyone who actively listens to new music will have to deal with. Oh, and I’ve got records too. Not a lot of them, but it’s just as well — the stylus on the old Fisher stopped working about a year or two ago so now I don’t have a way to play them anyway. I guess if I get the urge I could always re-buy them on iTunes. Maybe they’ll give me a discount if I cut out the UPC code and mail it in to them.

So I do some writing about music. Nothing too crazy, but every now and then I get to interview and/or meet one of my heroes. I shook Elvis Costello’s hand once. I hung out with John Popper backstage at the Orpheum in Boston — I’d prove it but the pictures I took didn’t come out. And over the last ten years or so I’ve also amassed a fair number of CDs and tapes that I’ve gotten mostly for “free.” As my collection grew I kept buying storage units to hold everything. So, before this whole “media room” project started, I had about four or five mismatched, unfinished wooden shelving units. Classy.

Now the tapes I don’t know what to do with. There were a few hundred, so I did some triage. I threw out the tapes that I also had on CD, the ones that really sucked and I couldn’t defend keeping, and the ones that were still shrink-wrapped. But I still don’t know what to do with the rest. I’ve got them arranged artfully in a moving box and, you guessed it, an unfinished wooden shelving unit. I figure one day I’ll convert them all to mp3s, I’ll get started on that right after I stain and finish all my shelves.

I’ve had the same stereo speakers since I was 13. They came as part of a FIsher component system I got at Sanger Harris with my Bar Mitzvah money. I had made about a dozen trips to the store with my parents until they finally let me spend my money on it. The speakers and the turntable are all that’s left from that system. Which is pretty good when you consider that the speakers are big, boomy, and have moved with me at least seven times to three states. Once I replaced a woofer all by myself (I had kinda implied to Howard Jones that it was his music that blew it out, but that’s another story). I had to replace the original amplifier/receiver with its built-in five-band graphic equalizer about a dozen years ago when something popped and my room started to smell like burnt metal.

I went down to Circuit City or Leachmere and picked out a decent JVC as it’s replacement. I had to get a matching dual cassette deck with it since the cassette deck on the Fisher didn’t have a normal power plug and wouldn’t work without the amp. The new amplifier came with a pair of white bookshelf surround speakers to exploit the system’s Dolby Pro Logic which was a big selling point. I’d read about surround sound and thought I’d try it out. I fired up the system and couldn’t believe what I heard. The only thing coming out of the surround speakers was the A-B differential (all the sound that wasn’t common to the main right and left speakers) — something you usually try to avoid with expensive room treatments or better speaker placement. I thought I had broken the amplifier or something so I called the dealer. He said, “Yeah, that’s the way it’s supposed to sound.” Don’t think I ever bothered turning the surround speakers on after that.

10. 50 Foot Wave — Golden Ocean
9. Howard Jones — Revolution of the Heart
8. Michael Penn — Mr. Hollywood Jr., 1947
7. Dar Williams — My Better Self

Seven through ten were the new releases I was most anticipating this year. But, as good as they were, I have to admit I probably listened to the artists’ older albums more. Not sure yet if that’s my fault or theirs.

6. John Mayer Trio — Try!
5. Death Cab for Cutie — Plans
4. Glen Phillips — Winter Pays for Summer

3. iTunes New Music Tuesday — Podcast

It’s about as mainstream as you can get, but if you want to keep up with what the kids are listening to the weekly podcast is a 30-minute pill worth swallowing.

2. Sarah Sharp — Fourth Person
1. The Small Stars — The Small Stars

You’d think the four years I spent at the renown Berklee College of Music would have prepared me for this, but unless that little square on the wall can tell me what a banana plug is, this is going to take a while.

It started out innocently enough. For our wedding anniversary I thought we’d steal a scene from “Trading Spaces” and spend a weekend and $1000 making the “media room” over our garage usable. Four gallons of blue paint, a couple wasted weekends at IKEA, and eighteen allen wrenches later and it’s finally starting to come together.

So, now that all the furniture is in place it’s time to add a TV and a stereo to really turn it into a media room.