07.10.06
Workin’ Again
Finally got to go back to work today. Can’t wait to find out what disasters I missed. And I’m sure the project we were a few weeks behind on enjoyed my absence as well. It is nice to not be in a bed half the day though. But I wouldn’t mind having a few more days to get the new pad in order. It’s a disaster right now.
The projector was a more complicated project then I thought. We have it setup and looking fantabulous, but the room placement is very odd. Projector has to be in the middle of the room, 8 feet or so away from the screen. And then we also need all the AV stuff with it. It puts out some serious heat too, so can’t have it stuffed in some hole. When Intendant gets up here maybe he can help me think of a better way to situate it. But for right now, it’s working and I am very happy with the projector. Played some games and watched some movies on it. Wide screen movies fit on it perfectly in LBX mode. Game Cube and PS2 fit great in 16:9 mode. In 4:3 they have a fair amount of room on either side, but that’s to be expected. It was frustrating at first, since every movie and game I put in seemed to run at a different resolution. But we managed to find the happy medium. Now we sit back and enjoy 92″ of goodness.
On the negative side, my receiver sucks nuts. One day, many months ago, it just stopped doing surround sound. Any digital input, DSP, Pro-Logic, etc was mute. Only way to get any sound out of it was plain old stereo. And LFE to sub woofer didn’t work either. So I had to do some tricky stuff to get that working. Sounds crappy though. The front panel says “DSP NG” all the time, which I assume means “DSP No Good”. Or maybe “No Ground”, but not sure I would fix that. So now I’m pissed that I have this glorious projector and about the lamest sound you can get.
I think I’m going to pick me up a new Yamaha receiver. I’ve been hearing good things about the Yamaha receivers and it was recommended to me a while ago when I was trying a Sony out. It has 5 AV inputs and 2 Audio only inputs, 3 component, 5 S-Video, 5 composite (like it matters), 5 RCA audio, 4 optical, 2 coaxial. You may think that sounds like a lot more then 5 inputs, but the inputs overlap. The actual video labels are DVD, DTV, DVR, VCR (s-video / composite only), then a S-Video / Composite on the front panel. It also supports an iPod docking station, which I might try out some day. We already have a component video switcher and planned to only use a receiver like this to handle the surround sound and up conversion. The projector doesn’t really support multiple sources very well. The component input is with an adapter on it’s VGA port. When using the adapter it covers up the S-Video input. So I really need everything to just go over component. It looks like this receiver will do that just fine and probably even remove the need for our current, remote-less component switcher. Right now I have exactly 3 component devices. If we do the MythTV box or satellite again, then that’s one S-Video. If I need another component input I can just start using the built in DVD player on the projector. It’s actually very nice, has optical audio out and everything, if I can just figure out how to disable the built in speakers.
Will be nice to be able to switch inputs with one click of a remote again. For a while you had to get up and manually switch the video, then switch the audio input on the JVC, then switch the video input on the TV. Then we got lucky and the JVC died, so everything was in crappy stereo. So that removed one step in that process.
Hopefully we’ll soon be sitting comfy, watching movies, and downing some tasty Asti.