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HDMI cables, you got to love them.  The question:  Is a $100 HDMI cable better than a $5 HDMI cable?  Also, because HDMI is a DIgital cable, it either works or it doesn't work?

For a long time the "HT Guys" say don't spend the money on expensive HDMI cables.  And to date I have not.  But they are not the only ones who say this.  On the "AVRant Home Theater Podcast,

AVRant #82: Monster Madness Infinity Posted on July 10th, 2008 there is a report on a test of over 50 HDMI cables and how they rated.  This is a good episode to listen to to understand when you need to spend money on HDMI cables.  The text article is on this link:  http://www.audioholics.com/education/cables/long-hdmi-cable-bench-tests

 

This is what I based my HDMI purchase decision on.  One company I have heard nothing but great review on is "Blue Jeans Cables "  I needed to purchase new HDMI cables so they could be routed through the cable management arms.  The new cable length would need to be 15 feet to route through two sets of management arms.  What I decided to go with was the Tartan Cable 28 AWG HDMI Cable.  I was also able to purchase 1 cable in each color.  Now I will be able to color-code each device to make it easier to identify which cable goes to which component.  Five cables with shipping costs $36.  

 

The cables showed up today and look really well built.  I have not had time to hook them up yet, but should have it done this weekend.

Well this is another weather day off for me.  A snow storm started Sunday night and for another two days work has been called off.  The road south of our house has one lane open and a snow drift two thirds the way to the top of my escape.  It was not until about noon today when the snow plow went through so we could leave again.

Today I used my time off to re-route some of the speaker cables into the equipment rack.  Another task was to move the Dish DVR into the rack so I could watch TV again.  When Dish was here to install the equipment I had them leave enough Coax so I could move the receiver to the rack location.  They actually left so much I was able to shorten the cable and use what was left to connect back the RF link back to the distribution block so the other TVs in the house could watch the second receiver on channel 22.  That was the way it has always been connected. 

I also moved the two Ethernet connections from the old TV location to the rack as well.  This allowed me to connect the PS3 and the Dish DVR back to the network.  From an operation standpoint I now have everything hooked up that was working before the 42" was taken out.  Although the HDMI cables I currently have are too short to route through the cable management arms so for now they are directly connected.  I will need to order them shortly to clean up that part of the cabling.

As the projector is mounted beneath the ceiling grid I also spent some time putting back up most the the ceiling tiles.  I am thinking I will probably do something different with them.  The ceiling tiles should be black to minimize some of the reflection.  Looking at the local home improvement center they also had "Acoustical" tiles that could replace what is currently in place.  I am leaning to this option as it should cut down the sound that is bleeding upstairs when movies are being played. 

The last few days I have been thinking about options to finish the open sides of the screen and the top.  I have a few ideas, but it will take a shopping trip to see if I can find the materials I am looking for to do this.  That will have to wait for another post.

After Church today it was time to actually "Purchase" a Blu-ray disk.  "Star Trek" was my first choice, and I also picked up "Serenity"

Once home I took a little time to adjust the front speaker placement, and ran the room calibration wizard on my receiver.  Once that was setup it was time to see what this would all look like.

All the content I have looked at so far on the screen was formatted in 16x9 format, so the screen showed pillar boxes.  If you have been through all the posts you already know I built the screen in the 2.35:1 format which is a wider screen than 16x9.  When watching a movie in "Wide Screen" 16x9 TVs and Projectors show the movie in a 'Letterbox', the black bars on the top and bottom of the screen.  There are expensive solutions to show the movie without the letterbox, but I went simple.  When a movie is in letterbox, zoom the image to take the full screen.

My hope was that to change the screen size it would be just a simple adjustment of the projectors zoom.  Unfortunately it is not going to be that simple.  What looks to happen when the projector is zoomed in or out is that the top of the picture stays at the same place and the bottom, left and right sides of the image shrink.  Zoom, and lens shift controls are all manual on this projector, so unfortunately to switch from a 16x9 movie to a 2.35:1 image will take a little time to manually adjust.  No complaint on my part, as the alternative solutions exceed what I currently have invested in the entire cinema so far.

While watching Star Trek in Full Screen I had to keep reminding myself that I was at home, and not in the theater.  I am really happy with the screen size and distance for watching movies.  I expect the challenge will be now is to keep progressing with construction as there is still a LOT of work to do to finish it. 

My older daughter and her boyfriend came over tonight.  After supper I was able to finish the projector shelf and then enlisted my daughter's boyfriend to help pull new speaker cables while I placed and interconnected the Projector, Receiver, and PS3 to see what it would look like.  I forgot to label the speaker cables so after the speakers were connected to the receiver it took a little time to get the front and center speakers wired to the correct terminals.  He also mounted and connected for me the surround speakers. 

After power-up it took about 5 minutes to get the projector lens shift set to fill the screen the way I wanted.  At about 10:30 pm I put in the only Blu-ray disk I had, "The Hanna Montana Movie".  Probably not the best movie to test everything out with, but it worked well.  After about 10 minutes of the movie I switched over to the Netflix disk and streamed "War Games, The Dead Code" as I figured he would enjoy that better than Hanna Montana.  

At the full screen size it is pretty easy to tell the difference between Blu Ray and Streaming content.  What looked good on my 42" display looked fuzzy on the 130" display.  But once you were watching, it was OK.