I will probabley get shunned for saying this: Avia (1 Viewer)

[John Beavers]

Phil,

I may just try this for shucks and grins; though my set is now fully ISF calibrated. Even so, the AVIA color boxes still don't match what the ISF calibrator set my color numbers at.

 

[Jerry Gracia]

I merely plugged a $9 Rat Shack 75 ohm TV "antenna" attenuator into the Pr connector on the back of my DVD player and then plugged the Pr strand from my component cable into the attenuator.

Hmmm...you got my attention.

I'm going to try this too!

 

[Andy Anderson]

I liken Avia/VE Essentials calibration to tuning a guitar. If you're good enough, you can tune by ear. You get very used to tuning all 6 strings so that when you play your guitar, it sounds about right. However, when you pop your favorite CD in, and try to play along, are you in key with the rest of the album? Probably not (unless you have the ever-elusive and super-human quality of perfect pitch). You need a benchmark, and a way to fine tune everything so that you're faithfully reproducing your soundtrack. As far as speaker levels go, I can see how one could try to balance those by ear and be satisfied. As far as a subwoofer goes--this mystifies me. Sound pressure level of your LFE is so different than your other speakers, there really is no way to properly calibrate your sub level and crossover point without calibration tools. If you're running a sub/sat Home-Theater-in-a-box system where it's all preset and pre-dialed in for you, that's one thing--you probably don't have much to worry about. However, if you're running a typical home theater setup and integrating a subwoofer, reciever, and speakers--I can't imagine doing it "by ear". If you move that sub 2' along a wall, your bass SPL's can change drastically, and levels need to be adjusted.

Anyway, that's me. Bottom line though, if Joe is happy with the way he's got his system dialed in, that's all that matters.

 

[Phil Nichols]

Jerry,
You'll need the Rat Shack attenuator plus 2 right-angle adapters plus 1 male adapter plus 1 female adapter (all 75ohm and all at Rat Shack) if you want the cleanest installation. Cost about $20, total.
Plug in the attenuator but leave it on the minimum setting (no attenuation), then carefully set color and tint using blue glasses. Notice how vibrant and accurate all colors look - except people's faces - they'll probably look like they're sunburned (too much red in them). Now watch faces on the screen and begin to turn to attenuator up until you like the faces as they become natural looking. Notice your colors are still vibrant and accurate. Go back into the calibration screens with your blue glasses on and notice that nothing has changed, your color and tint blue-area match-up's are still OK. Now you have your cake and can eat it too - perfect faces and perfect colors!
At least the above is exactly what happened with me - the whole process took ~20 minutes!
Now ....... if I can figure out how to do this with S-Video cabling for my SAT channels and VCR .......
P.S. I'm going to install an attenuator in my HDTV Pr component line and do the same thing for HDTV - which already looks doggone good - but could use more color saturation (w/o making faces too red that is). :star:

 

[DaleBesh]

That's excellent, Phil! I have a Wega and have done internal adjustments to reduce red push, and calibrated the video more than once with Avia and VE, and overall the picture is stunning!
(The reds have never measured up to our 32" Toshiba which has the most natural reds I have ever seen.)
The skin tones on the Wega are good to very good most of the time, but I think the attenuator might be just the thing for that final touch.

 

[Jerry Gracia]

Phil,

It worked!

Only I didn't have to touch the setting on the attenuator. I left it on 'minimal' and my reds were right at about the 0% range in the color decoder screen on AVIA. I had about a 10% to 15% red push value before this.

My GREEN is about -5% to -10% though...it used to be at 0%. But the RED push is gone. Overall, I'm quite happy with this tweak.

I'm going to do some more tweaking toningt to see if I can find a better balance between my RED and GREEN push.

But using the attenuator deffintly helped my RED push.

Thanks, Phil!

 

[Phil Nichols]

Jerry,
I believe the attenuator reduces amplitude just a litte (a few "dB's") even with the lowest setting of the knob, so with some equipment combinations perhaps you can just leave it at this minimum position for the effect you need.
BTW, you also of course can put an attenuator in the Pb component line for even more precise calibration with the AVIA screens. You probably do not want to ever put one in the Y line though, as this may change your grey level calibration ....... I'm not sure on this though ..... I'll have to think about it some more. The green color in images is (primarily, but not entirely) carried embedded in the Y signal with other stuff, including enough red and blue to precisely create your grey (black and white)scale. Probably the best way to "increase" image green would be to simultaneously use attenuators in the Pr and Pb component lines to reduce Pr and Pb levels ...... but again I'll have to think about this. You can experiment all you want with AVIA (or the THX cal screens on DVD's) and attenuators in the component strands - as you can't damage anything in your equipment - just have a lot of fun making your images equal (or better!) to what you see in the theater. You MUST use the colored glasses along with your calibration screens, though - don't try to eyeball colors with the AVIA (or THX) calibration screens.

 

[BenK]

You'll need the Rat Shack attenuator plus 2 right-angle adapters plus 1 male adapter plus 1 female adapter

Phil, what are all the adapters used for? In your original post you mentioned plugging in the attenuator into the dvd Pr connector and the Pr cable into the attenuator.

 

[Phil Nichols]

BenK,
Yes, you can just plug the ~$9 Rat Shack attenuator directly into the DVD player's Pr RCA connector, but then you have this 3 1/2 inch attenuator sticking straight out perhaps stressing the RCA connector on the back of your DVD player. So....... I came off the RCA connector with a 75ohm right-angle from Rat Shack, plugged the attenuator into the right angle so it hangs DOWN from the RCA connector instead of straight OUT, thus not stressing the RCA connector as much as weight sticking straight out does. I then used another right angle on the other end of the attenuator to point straight backwards again to plug the Pr cable strand into ..... thus keeping the Pr strand kind of "parallel lined up" with the other component cable strands and as close to them as possible. I want to get at least 5 years out of my new DVD player so I'm trying to treat everything about it gently, including it's RCA connector mountings!
(I over-simplied in my earlier post by not mentioning the right-angles for the sake of clarity. The Rat Shack 75ohm "adapters" are to get the plug-receptacle relationships correct between the player, the right-angles, the attenuator, and the component cable strand.)

 

[BenK]

Phil, thanks for the thorough explanation. You really go all out

 

[DaleBesh]

I tried the attenuator this evening while watching Star Wars II
and found I needed just the slightest bit of additional attenuation to 'tune in' the flesh color. It worked fine!

 

[Phil Nichols]

Dale,
You should be careful using the attenuator to correct wrong flesh intonation on any one particular movie. The attenuator's "power" is in, IMHO, use of it after you have used calibration screens and the blue glasses to properly set color saturation and color hue to reference values (at least the best you can without using instruments, as ISF calibration professionals do). In my case after doing this faces appeared too red. Only use the attenuator to permanently correct for this over-redness to establish a better "reference" state for your system.
From then onwards, to make faces look normal in individual DVD's I'd use the tint/hue control from your display to temporarily adjust for it - and upon completion of the DVD return the tint/hue control to where I had it when I did my earlier calibration using the calibration screens/blue glasses. However, using the tint/hue control to temporarily tweak too-red faces does make inaccurate many other colors in the scenes, but hopefully not by very much because having to correct skin intonation on DVD's should only require very slight adjustment of tint/hue. An example might be the Star Wars TPM DVD, which some have stated appears to have very slight too-red facial intonation. I even found this to be the case in the theater when watching TPM. At home I tweak TPM slightly to correct this using my RPTV's tint control.
Remember that red-push need not come only from your display's inherent design and/or factory settings. It can also come from less than perfect match of the gains in your DVD player's component analog video Y/Pr/Pb circuits. It may also be possible, but rare, for some red push to originate from slightly mis-matched cabling signal paths. This Pr red attenuator approach can be used to compensate for too much red no matter where it's coming from in your system.

 

[Jerry Gracia]

Thanks for all the advice, Phil!

 

[John Beavers]

Phil,

I'm going to the Rat Shack today to pick up two of the attenuators. One for my digital cable box and one for the DVD player. I checked on the Rat Shack web site for the right angle adaptors but there were so many and they weren't exactly clear on which one was a 75ohm adaptor, for the application I want to use it for. Could you list the part numbers on those. Thanks