We spent and afternoon taking most everything down and labeling it with a nice label maker (better than tape and marker I hope). I also put some nice speaker end caps on so that the wires may stay in the crappy zone 2 speaker splitter. We now have all our channels in the den as well as kitchen and deck! The center channel was totally disconnected at the amp. A rear channel was not working, but I was smart enough to go look at the speaker knowing it was near an area where the kids play before I took all the speaker wires off the amp looking for a problem.
Everything went back well, but we are still having troubles getting some HDTV channels. We can't tell if it is the cable card (we have a single M-card in the Tivo) or the Tuning adapter or the signal. We get encrypted channels, so you would not think it was the cable card. We get some HD SDV channels, so you would not think it was the channel adapter. They replaced all the wires into the house, and now think it could be the tap at the street. The TWC guy said the tap was fine! What is going on?
Anyway, the PS3 looks great. We can only run at 1080i instead of 1080p due to a limitation of the Onkyo amp or we get flickering. Blu-ray looks great. I did not know this, but can tie into a PC for access to movies, music, and photos very easily. Tivo and Wii can do this as well, but the speed and quality were terrible. The PS3 is wonderful! Now in the bedroom I am not running any HTPC software, just a simple TV application from my USB PCTV stick (which I got from woot for $30). It is slow to start, but it does TV well. And we can still Slingbox from the den. But no nice front-end application in the bedroom.
As for Guitar Hero, the main thing I did was cable tie a USB extension so that a singer hopefully won't rip the Wii off the stack.
I put a little board under the amp to help hold up the many cords. If I had to do this again, the table itself would have a triangle extending behind the main riser to help support and hide cords. I may put something in the side so you don't see so many wires as you walk past, but maybe nobody notices unless they are really inspecting it. It looks fine from den.
We replaced the old box in the bedroom with a newer faster bigger box. It seems to be working better than the old one. It can even run the Tivo Desktop server (upgraded), Tiversity to stream to the PS3, and ORB to stream to just about anything (laptop online, cell, etc).
Also, the Wii sensor bar had been giving me fits. The one we had was too small for our room, so when you sit on the couch it would jitter a bit. The solution is to get the IR LEDs a little further apart. I bought a cheap plastic bar from monprice and with my FIL we cut it in half, rewired it with some extension wire, and hooked it into a transformer. It actually works! It also seems to look a lot cleaner, as each side sits right in front of a TV riser. However, I just just some electrical tape to cover the cut-away ends, but that actually looks ok the way I did it. The area under the TV looks much cleaner than it did once the wires are pushed back. The old bar is still there, just turned around so the LEDs are not seen. I left it there in case our hack job does not last.
No comments:
Post a Comment