Home Theater Upgrading
January 2nd, 2010, 1:25pm by MikeThis past week, we started the chain reaction that’s been building for about the last 5 years.
We just installed built-in cabinets and shelves in our living room, and as a result, we’ve moved our TV from the media cart that it was on before into the shelves. The upsides are that there’s a ton of room for components and gear underneath, out of sight and out of Adam’s reach (we hope). Our 32″ TV fits perfectly, and has a nice slider/rotator thing that will allow us to see it from all over the room. The downsides are that we don’t really want to put our sizeable bookshelf speakers on the shelves (how ironic), and since the TV is way off to one side, the setup of the room isn’t really conducive to a full-on home theater setup.
So, all this creates an upside — I’ve had to reconfigure our home theater system! Or, you might say, create our home theater system, since the basics (the receiver and two speakers) I bought back when I was in high school! Basically, if you’re reading this, these were at least 6-8 years old before I even met you!
I started looking around for some solutions, and found that technology has progressed to the point that sound bars seem like a pretty good alternative to true surround systems. I ordered one of these, and it’ll be here this week. It seems pretty cool — it’ll go on the shelf above the TV, and includes a wireless subwoofer than can go anywhere in the room. Also, it has a built-in amp, so doesn’t need a receiver. It connects to the RCA audio out jacks on the TV, and with some Y-cables, I can connect the AppleTV’s audio out so I can listen to music without having to have the TV on (if that doesn’t work out for some reason, I can get an A/V switch). So with all this, I don’t need a receiver!
Next, since these all live in a closed, opaque cabinet, I needed a way to get remote control signals in there. Ordered this, which should allow control of anything we put in the cabinet. I thought about a universal RF remote, but they were too expensive.
The final piece is network-related. The AppleTV is great, but there’s interference with our baby monitor, so that sometimes the network connection cuts out. This is particularly bad since we usually watch TV while Adam is asleep, so there’s lots of cross-over between baby monitor time and TV/music time. The monitor works on a 2.4GHz frequency, and the AppleTV can handle 802.11n (5 GHz), so one option is to get a new router and connect to the AppleTV via n. A second option is Powerline networking, which Kelvin experimented with back in 2003 (thanks, Pyslent archives!).
So, recommendations? I’m leaning toward a new router, since that would also solve issues with using laptops and other networked gear while the monitor is on (the powerline option obviously only helps whatever is plugged into the powerline network). The other (maybe more obvious) solution is to get a new baby monitor, but that’s no fun, and I don’t want to re-enter that world.
January 3rd, 2010 at 1:55 am
The cabinets look great Mike. I’m pretty curious how the sound bar works– are you concerned about the wireless sub (and in particular, about adding yet another 2.4 MHz radio interface into the air)? Maybe you should try to fit the speaker under the TV if you can– that’d be cool, so the speaker moves with the TV if you need to swing it out!
The Powerline network was a pain in the butt to set up, but once it was up and running, it performed problem free for a couple years. I thought the throughput wasn’t great, though; sufficient for web surfing, but probably not for decent video streaming. Does the monitor interfere with networking your other devices? Do all your internet devices support wireless N?
January 3rd, 2010 at 9:18 am
Hopefully the wireless sub will be OK, guess we’ll find out. It’ll be close enough to the TV that hopefully the signal strength of the transmitter for it will overwhelm the interference from the monitor.
As for networking, I was impatient and went ahead and bought an N router (I actually bought the Apple one — I know, probably could have gotten the same thing cheaper). I spent about 3-4 hours last night struggling to set it up, with no real luck — I had all the settings just right on my Linksys router, and I just wanted to paste them in manually.
So this morning, I got up and decided to do what I NEVER do — use the setup wizard and just see what it did. And it worked beautifully! In about 1 minute I was on the internet, and in about 5, I had all my port mappings reestablished. And I felt like moron, but whatever, it works.
The only things we have that aren’t wireless N compatible are our iPhones, my netbook, and our old Airport Expresses (our work laptops and the AppleTV have n). The Apple Airport Extreme base station can run simultaneous n and g networks with the same name, and things are just supposed to connect to whichever network is better for them. I’m wondering how simultaneous music streaming to the AppleTV (over n) and the Airport expresses (via g) will work — that’s something I do a lot. I’ll try it out later and report back.