Just wanted to shout out to anybody with nothing better to do than watch ER tonight (is it still even on?) that the Walkmen will be playing Bluecats tonight, and tickets are still hella available. The Walkmen are, in my learned opinion, one of the the best damn bands making music today, and the fact that they’re playing Knoxville for $12.50 a ticket almost made me buy two tickets so I could enjoy it twice as much.
Seriously, if you’re in Oak Ridge, or Knoxville, or whatever, swing by and treat yourself to a good show. 7:30, people. I’ll be the tall guy with the beer.
While I had the flu a few weeks ago, I had a vision of how I want to wire up our house. It is a mighty vision, and not for the faint of heart. I’m going to document here the entire process, good and bad.
And no, dammit, I’m not talking about this. This is something else entirely, and the fact that I have wires hanging out of my wall along with holes in the drywall are inmaterial to this conversation.
It was a lack of planning that caused this problem, so I’m going to plan this whole thing out. While I drink beer. Mmmm, beer. Today GAC and I are sampling some kind of nut beer, and it doesn’t really taste nutty.
I digress.
Now, this is how we have it working right now in the living room…
Obviously, this is all for the video. Audio is something different, but it all comes from the amp anyway, so it won’t be that hard to figure out. The video is goofy because we’ve had to mix and match all sort of old assed stuff.
So, the TV (50 something inch, but damn near as old as me) gets its signal from the amp through a component wire, because the coax barrel on the TV is broken. I took the bastard apart last Sunday, but only managed to get it put back together again. No saving it through DIY means that I can see. The amp distributes nearly all the info, which is nice because we just set the remote (oh yeah) to set the amp to the proper channel, blah blah blah. Recently, a problem has popped up in that my bitchin new video card only has an S-Video TV out, where in my current scheme the only S-Video input is on the TV myself. However, the TV doesn’t have an easy way to switch to the s-video mode from the component (aux 1) mode, which has been a bone of contention betwixt GAC and myself.
OK, so everything but the computer feeds to the amp. Why would we need the computer displayed on the TV, you ask? Ask me later.
The cable input from the outside world comes into the VCR, so we use it as a cable box, which it sucks at. Oh well, we don’t watch much TV anyway. The DVD player feeds into the amp through RCA wires for the video and optical (for the 5.1) for the audio. I could hook it up through composite wires, but the picture on the TV sucks so bad that any incremental increase in quality between the components would be lost in the quagmire that is the Magnavox 50something 20 odd year display. The CD player and record player feed into the amp through RCA (although the CD could do optical also, the amp only has one optical connection).
So, I’ve layed out the way it is. Thing is, we have the TV in the playroom, and eventually that bastards going to be in my bedroom (as soon as the kids aren’t looking). I want to be able to access the information in here, particuarly the TV-out feed from the computer, on the TV on the other side of the house. How to do that?
My plan is a signal splitter. When I was looking for a way to filter the s-video to the amp one solution they had was a splitter that would essentially do what the amp does. I could drop everything into one composite or s-video cable (or more than one, if I ever want multiple TVs in the bedroom. Who doesn’t?) and run it from right before it hits the amp over to the other rooms. Sweet.
Damn, this is getting long winded. I’ll buy a beer for anybody who can answer a 10 question quiz about what I just wrote.
The audio, tho, is where I really want to get up. I want to have every room hooked up to the amp, with individual volume controls on the wall controlling ceiling mounted two way speakers. I worked (briefly) for a structured wiring company, and the only problem with installing this stuff is cost and having a ready fishhook for fishing those wires through the wall…
Ultimately, the master plan is to have all of the functions running through a master control system. The technology exists in home theater PC’s, but what I need is a good terabyte or two of storage in a monster computer that could do everything from turning lights and AC on to giving me (vocally) the time of day. I’d love to rig up a system that would accept voice commands (already existing software, just not applied this way yet) and respond vocally. I’d mount a flat screen monitor at eye level in the hall for monitoring the system, and would be able to tunnel into it from this machine, but that’d be sweet.
t wanted to shout out to anybody with nothing better to do than watch ER tonight (is it still even on?) that the Walkmen will be playing Bluecats tonight, and tickets are still hella available. The Walkmen are, in my learned opinion, one of the the best damn bands making music today, and the fact that they’re playing Knoxville for $12.50 a ticket almost made me buy two tickets so I could enjoy it twice as much.
ision, and not for the faint of heart. I’m going to document here the entire process, good and bad.