The Gehring Home Theater (baby steps)

[WillGehring]

What do you do when you live in college housing and don't have room for a home theater? You try to cram one in anyway. Here are my efforts to date. I've had modest surround setups in my house for years but this is my first attempt on my own with my own hard earned money. So it's an exercise in sticking to a budget. What do you all think? I'd love to hear your comments and suggestions.

View the gallery here.

Equipment (Home Theater):
Yamaha RX-V471 Receiver
Sony SS-CN5000 Center Channel
Sony SS-U610 Front Speakers
Sony SS-B1000 Surrounds
BIC America F-12 Subwoofer
Panasonic DMP-BD75 Blu-ray Player

Equipment (Two Channel):
Pioneer PL-530 Turntable
Modular Component Systems 3248 Receiver
Cerwin Vega RE-25 Speakers







I followed the suggestions I received on here and went with the Panasonic DMP-BD75 as a simple budget Blu-ray player. It's time to begin my collection!



To test it out I ordered Planet Earth on Blu-ray. What a wonderful series!

[Lush23]

Very nice setup!!

[WillGehring]

Thanks! I forgot to post a pic of the 2-channel setup I have back home. You can see it in the gallery but here's a glance.

Next up on my upgrade list is the TV. I hope to buy a new one in the next month or two and then I'm going to focus on doing whatever I can to bludgeon my dorm room for next year into an acoustically acceptable space (lol who am I kidding).

[DangeRuss]

Good Morning and ..............

Welcome back ......

[WillGehring]

Originally Posted by DangeRuss

Good Morning and ..............

Welcome back ......

Thanks! Yeah I just now got around to re-uploading pics after the data loss. Good to be back.

[WillGehring]

And we're back! New dorm room, which means here I go again attempting to make something out of nothing.
The acoustics are absolutely abysmal. It's never going to be a great listening room, but I am going to try to improve it a bit.



View out my window.

I'll post pics of my progress soon! Thanks for viewing.

[WillGehring]

There's still work to be done, but here's what I've come up with so far! Check out the rest of the pics in the gallery.





Text step is to build some room treatments to try to mitigate the terribleness of those cinder block walls and tile floor.

[i007spectre]

I bet your popular in your area.

[WillGehring]

Update time again! Stumbled on a pair of massive custom made 4-way tower speakers and thought I would cram them into the map room back home. My old Cerwin Vegas that I use as 2-channel speakers are sitting on top for now just for the fun of it. They aren't hooked up to anything, but I might wire them as a height channel to see what would happen.

I know very little about these speakers. They have no markings to suggest who made them. They are well made and produce a lot of sound though.





There's another pic in my gallery. Hop on over!

Now that I have a little free time for building things (albeit in the cold), I'm turning my attention to some room treatments.

[WillGehring]

Took advantage of some free time to build a basic sub riser.



Some cheap plywood, carpet padding, and carpet. Plus staples and adhesives came to a grand total of $15 with enough scrap leftover to cover a second riser.



The legs are wrapped in padding and carpet as well to (hopefully) totally isolate the sub from the floor.



I'm pretty pleased. Next up are bass traps for the corners but I have to special order the insulation. Nobody sells the right stuff in-store where I live.

[lulanok]

good info to me, that very beautiful, i like that, thanks for your sharing, good luck.

[WillGehring]

It's been a while since I've been able to post an update, but I'm in a new room again (moving twice a year while in school), and I've made my first step towards what will hopefully become a killer theater once I have room to spread out a bit.



I picked up a pair of Paradigm Mini Monitor v.7s at a local dealer today after a couple of good long auditions. Right now I'm using them as mains for movies and games and stereo speakers for music (both still all run out of my Yammie receiver for now).



I still have the Sony center channel wired up, and although it doesn't sound that bad I'm probably going to run a phantom center out of the Mini Monitors until I can pick up a matching Paradigm center later in the year. Eventually (once I have a dedicated room to set up a proper theater) I'll move the Mini Monitors to surround duty and drop the cash for a pair of big towers for up front.

[onyxbfly]

Your pics are a narrative of the evolution of your home theater. You mare making progress with each step. Your home theater is coming along nicely!!

[WillGehring]

Thanks! I posted these in the gallery too, but here's a more in-depth look at the speaker stand build:



Base and top were cut out of good ol' MDF, beveled, and painted. The posts were cut from PVC pipe and surface-treated to give them a less plasticy texture. They are put together much like other stands I've seen on this site.



I added an extra step and built in binding posts at the bottom of the stands so that I didn't have speaker wire running up the back.



The stands are held together with a tensioning rod rather than brackets or glue. They are solid and more than strong enough to support the 25 lb Mini Monitors. I attached feet to the bottoms of the stands and acoustic foam to the top to isolate vibrations and make them as acoustically inert as possible.

[DangeRuss]

Great job on the stand build ...