[Phaseshift]

Hi to everyone,

I am new to this forum and wanted to say hello to all the folks here.

While I am not the home theater enthusiast that some of you are, I do have some experience with it and came to learn as well as share when I can.

Actually, I make my living in the audio industry as an engineer and have done a number of video related projects as well. I enjoy watching movies and videos as a pastime and have the benefit of a very nice theater setup at the office; maybe less of a family type theater and more of a voicing lab, but still a good theater environment. Just wish I could justify the cost to do this at home as well.

I hope that I can post here as a professional and sort of worry that facts may sometimes fly in the face of the marketing folks and the common beliefs. I will also have some questions- particularly about things not related to speakers, amplifiers / integrated products and screens. For instance, making a good demo DVD for my theater environment or opinions on products like remotes and so on.

Anyhow, hi to all and hope to make friends and acquaintances here.

Phase

[Steebrad]

Welcome!

[shockemags]

Hey. Cool Job.

[Phaseshift]

Quote:

Originally Posted by shockemags

Hey. Cool Job.

Thanks- It pays the bills and in general is pretty neat. Can't say that all of the time; typical stuff comes into play as with any profession. One frustration is that disclosure of what we work on is not normally what our clients pay us for, so most of the time, we are hidden from the development picture.

When I need to do a "me" job, having the machine shop, lab and acoustics environments + all the test gear to play with is certainly nice. Paying for all of it was certainly painful though. When I run across things that I can post, will; particularly if they are company internal use only or strictly disposable projects. We recently refitted our theater environment and I think I may take some pics of that and post them.

[Wayne A. Pflughaupt]

Nice to have you on board, Phil!


Regards,
Wayne A. Pflughaupt

[bassman99floyd]

Since you were able to build HT at work, and with their money, what kind of equipment did you end up with? Are you using expensive inter-connects, or standard stuff?

[Chris Moe]

Welcome to the forums!

[Phaseshift]

Speakers- Mostly one-off, prototype or DV run stuff; we are constantly going through speakers. We do have what we call a "house" system which is pretty cool. All handmade, exotic cone mix and geometry as well as some pretty cool componentry in the filters. Nice tweeters, basic cabinets. Krylon black. The rear and surround speakers are actually spiffy little Polk units - RTi 4's; they are very good in my opinion for that size of speaker. These are the only permanently mounted speakers in the place. If we show photos of the room with a consumer setup, we actually use Polk gear as well. RTi 12 and CSi 5 speakers in the front and one or the other subs, I believe a PSW 1000. All cherry finish veneer and very snazzy looking.

Subs- We have a lot of subs to choose from. Pick your poison. Our default sub is a one-off unit that was built using a very high power servo amplifier and a pair of 12" woofers. Others range from the mundane, low performance in-wall subs to 15" earth-buster rigs. We have done a lot of subs.

Electronics- Our base equipment right now is Denon. I believe the receiver is a 4306 and the source unit is an A1XV or something like that it is SA-CD which means nothing other than it was probably 5 X more for the same stuff.
For audio only, we use Threshold Stasis 8.0 amplifiers and a Stasis 5.0 preamp. These work OK I suppose, but as anything tweak-ey, you pay a lot for the name. We mainly have them on hand as flash product for visitors doing final tune up on systems etc...
Audio CD player was a Levinson but it was even more unreliable than the 4 series amps, so I traded it to a repair shop in Mong Kok for a mini hi-fi system and a set of Sennhieser headphones. Terrible reliability. We have had some reliability issues with the Stasis stuff as well and I am considering trading it off; perhaps going with Krell this time around.

Probably the coolest stuff are the nic-nacs like the speaker stands. Having a 4 axis CNC on hand to make stands and panels and other stuff like that is pretty neat. We build them heavy- I believe the plain old stands weigh in at about 65 pounds a piece- about half aluminum, half steel; very solid and really nice in terms of not digging into our measurements due to reflections, unwanted resonances etc...

I believe that our marketing department is going to revamp our website in a month or so and there was talk about displaying some images from the lab and theater. If we do, I will post a link here.

[bassman99floyd]

It must be fun to have and play with all this equipment everyday? I had the PSW1000 sub, when I was building my HT. I worked my way up to my B&W sub. I now proudly have a B&W ASW825 sub. If you haven't heard this one yet, you should. This is the first sub I ever heard, that sings! This is one of the few subs I found, that has a voice coil built in. So it actually plays deep voices. All my other subs just went thump. It's a beautiful piece of furniture too. All my B&W Nautilus speakers are in a dark cherry red cabinet.The sub has a rounded top, which keeps people (and wife) from putting things on top of it.

I added this sub to my system, and it was my first B&W product. My wife didn't notice it sitting there at first, but when I had her sit in the living room and listen to a CD, she noticed immediately how much better the system sounded.

Here's a link to check out this sub...

http://www.bwspeakers.com/index.cfm/...Model%20ASW825