[Frederick_Falk]

Just name a time and place and I will try and make it. Just remember weeknights are kinda bad for me if we are planning on staying up late as I have to get up at 4 AM the next day. Friday evenings and Saturdays are good for me. I will even host another party at my place and we can go play at the lake. Might even get Dave Elliot to join us. Hey Dave, we could even have a build meet at your place to knock out those risers for you and then have a movie night to cap it off. Just a thought.

Anyway, I really enjoyed the last movie night we did (Sahara) and am looking forward to doing it again in the near future.

[Dave Elliott]

Frederick,

I'll definitely try to join you guys.

My HT is now up and running in the new room. Watched a few movies last weekend. Its pretty cozy at 14x11' but the light control and an enclosed room make all the difference in the world.

I don't mind hosting. But I can only have maybe 6-7 folks in the HT room. However, the living room is a nice HT on its own with a 42" plasma HD, 5.1 wharfedale speakers, DVI upscaling DVD player, and a decent Denon receiver. And that room would easily hold 10 people. I've had as many as 20 people in there watching movies.

The riser is all planned out, I'm just waiting for my seats to arrive to confirm the positioning. My Berkline seating is tentatively scheduled to arrive the 2nd week of May.

The only major things I have left are the riser and the acoustic treatments. I've done enough research on the treatments to have a pretty good plan of what I'll need, but any help from the experts is certainly appreciated. I'll probably hold off on the treatments until the seats and riser are finished. But we could make another DIY meet out of that project.

-Dave

[Humphrey]

The 'Jungle Sounds' Scene with the Huey copter is on the THx demo disc. I've got a copy as well if someone wanted to hear it. It has ALL the THx trailers on it as well as selected scenes from Raiders and various Star Wars movies (including the Pod Race). The disc is the Lucasfilm THx Surround EX Demonstration and Test Disc and was never available over the counter. It even includes the WOW! montage a lot of the old LaserDisc guys used to drool over. You'd need to isolate that one VOB file (It's about 1 gig). You'd have to strip out the other stuff in it. etc...

On a side note, last couple of weeks my HT space has started coming together. I think I'm in the running for the smallest dedicated HT in Austin. The micro-Theater, if you will. Roughly 12 x 10 and will never seat more than 4 unless they're on the floor. I'm in the hunt at the moment for a smallish 5/6.1 setup and curtains to cover the TWO arched entrances to the room. Any suggestions would be helpful.

Hank -

Yes, I'm still around, just busy with a lot of things. I changed jobs in December and have been getting settled in. I'll keep an eye on this thread to see how plans for the next meet develop.

I can attend a meet any time in the coming month except for Saturday, May 7 or Memorial Day weekend. Probably won't be able to host this meet, but I may be up to host the next one...

[Hank Frankenberg]

Colin, good to hear from you and I hope your new job is a great "fit" for you. Whenever you get ready to host, I still suggest doing your HT acoustic treatments. The venue can be whatever the majority wants - either constructing the treatments or installing them and taking measurements to compare with Doc and Igor's "before" measurements, or whatever.

See ya.

Any more interest / progress on the meet? I'd be up for a processor shoot-out, as long as we don't let it get too tedious (which it can if you listen to the same 5-10 audio clips on 5-10 pieces of equipment throughout the afternoon). I'd say we should pick no more than 3-5 film / audio clips of different styles and spend about 20 minutes per piece of equipment.

I can bring my Theta if we do this type of meet, though I may get an upgrade bug...

I also like Jonathan's idea of a meet comparing CD audio to lossless compression (FLAC) and various "lossy" codecs (WMA, MP3, etc.).

Have there been any advances in projectors lately? A walk through some stores seems to suggest nothing has changed in projectors for almost two years. All the manufacturers are still pushing 4:3 1024x768 DLPs for $2K+. I thought we would be seeing true 1280x720 DLPs in the high 2000s by now. I think there may be a few LCDs in that price range now, but those aren't enough of an upgrade over my 10HT just yet...

Edit: A note about my decreased involvement as of late... I've taken up some new hobbies in addition to home theater. I'm trying to work out 5-6 times per week, learn to play the piano, and am just beginning to experiment with digital photography. So I haven't devoted as much of my time and energy to the HT hobby as I did 4-5 years ago when I was researching and buying lots of HT equipment.

Also, once your HT gets to a certain level it gets too expensive to upgrade another notch. Until a technological advance improves performance in the price range of my components, I think my HT is pretty much done...

[Nils Luehrmann]

Quote:

Have there been any advances in projectors lately? A walk through some stores seems to suggest nothing has changed in projectors for almost two years.

I think there may be a few LCDs in that price range now, but those aren't enough of an upgrade over my 10HT just yet...

I'd be happy to offer a side by side comparison of your 10HT and a Panny AE700. I think you'll be very surprised how far LCD technology has gone over the last couple years. I've already done two head to head comparisons between the 10HT and AE700 and both times the owners replaced their 10HTs that same night. I also did a head to head comparison of the InFocus 4805, the popular value minded DLP projector, and all those in attendance including the owner immediatley agreed that the AE700 produced a significantly better PQ including even contrast!

As for DLP, they have released four different chip sets in just over a year, including their latest 1080p chip. So I would not at all say that technologically speaking things have slowed down. In fact, projection technology has never been moving at a greater pace than in the last few months.

DLP prices have also dropped by a significant amount over the last couple years. While LCD continues to be the best value, $3,500 will get you a superb 720p DLP that outperforms models that were selling for as much as $10,000 two or three years ago.

[Jonathan DA]

The new Toshiba MT700 is an HD2+ DLP selling for $2500. And the BenQ 7700 goes for less than $3000 as well. They're the exact same projector except the Toshiba uses Faroudja deinterlacing while the BenQ uses a lesser known chip and adds in their own SensEye technology.

[James Phung]

The Toshiba mt700 seems like the 720p version of the Infocus 4805. The downsides to the BenQ and Toshiba are that they have a 0% offset, not very ideal for high ceiling setups.

Maybe a projector shootout is in order then, even if my 10HT will be a sacrificial lamb.

Anyone still up for a meet? I think a mid-June meet would be a good way to kick off the summer. Summer in Texas is the time to stay inside and watch movies!

I ran into Jeff Meininger in Rudy's BBQ on Thursday. Jeff was really active on the DIY threads a year or two ago when he was building speakers, and still drops in on these threads from time to time.

From my conversation with Jeff, I gather that he too is looking forward to a new HTF meet, though he too has gotten involved in new hobbies (piloting and/or building small aircraft, driving Audis).

In the interest of moving a meet forward, we currently have a few ideas...

- Dave Elliott has proposed having a HT meet at his place later this spring / this summer. Not having seen his dual HTs yet, I like this idea.
- A new pre/pro shootout. Whoever hosts should have a good HT setup that's easy to swap equipment in and out of. Is John Prator still around and willing to host another meet? He had a really good HT with really good power amps and Martin-Logans all around, which I think would be perfect for this meet.
- A new projector shootout. This way some of us with older projectors can see what new developments have arrived on the scene in video projectors: improvements to LCDs, DLP HD2 projectors, etc. Whoever hosts this one should plan on an evening meet or have really good light control in their room. (If we select this one, I may end up hosting this meet since I have a floor-standing pedestal for a projector, which makes it easy to swap projectors in and out.)

[Jonathan DA]

I'm always up for a projector shoot out, but I don't know where we could get our hands on most of the new projectors. I know we can get a Panasonic AE700, and I know someone with a Sharp Z2000, and I believe James has an InFocus 4805, but I don't know anyone the other recent budget projectors, e.g. Toshiba MT700, BenQ 7700, or Sony HS51.

A fourth idea might be an HTPC comparison. I was talking to Humphrey the other night and he mentioned he has a new G5 Mac with Tiger. It would be interesting to see how a Mac with Apple DVD Player 4.5 compares to a wintel box with TheaterTek 2.1.1. Or maybe it's just me.