My AV Revival, When It All Comes Together.

The 64 inch Samsung PN64D7000 Smart TV dominates the AV set up, based in my family lounge measuring about 18 x 25 x 12ft(W x L x H). My sitting distance from the display is about 20ft away, but the nearest seat in the house is probably more further than 10ft from the screen, but the picture quality is still ok, without the screen pixels being visible just yet. 

In my last post, I've introduced the new building blocks chosen for integration with the existing speakers for my renewed AV system. You may have spotted that they are practically all last year's model! I think if if one is looking for value performance and not necessary must have the latest specs, then last year's models at clearance prices can make great buys, for those on a limited budget like me.

For me at least, all the best equipment is pointless, as I must still find a way to integrate them in to my family lounge. The trick is in the AV rack, which I've chosen to by pass all those performance enhancing specialty rack for this lovely looking, solid hard wood AV rack, which softens the overall hard edge look of the display and equipment, to fit in to my domestic lounge decor, mostly made from similarly warm tone lacquered hard wood too. It took me a while to do furniture shopping while all the equipment arrived and awaiting to be set up.

Astro cable TV decoder made by Philips and Pioneer BDP-140 represents the source of my home entertainment.

The Denon AVR1612 receiver is a reasonably powerful sounding workhorse, and actually sound like it's got more to give than it's modest power specs would indicate, provided you sort out the power cord issue. It runs cool too, which its why I could get away with such a tight fitting ventilation space. After more than 2 hours of high power rumbling my lounge, the Denon only felt slightly warm to touch.

With the arrival of the AV rack a week or so later allowed me to proceed with setting the system. A good buddy, who is an authoritative figure in the industry came to lend his pair of hands and expertise in helping me do the initial set up. The whole process of connecting all the cables and making doubly sure that everything has it's place took nearly 3 hours of hard work, including using the Audyssey as starting point 5.1 chanel calibrating but when the first disc was ready to play, it was testing time.

We used a variety of Blu-ray movies to reference the sound calibration, including Avatar, Transformers 3, and Lord Of The Rings Trilogy. Some of my older reference DVDs, like Black Hawk Down and Terminator 2 were also used to familiarised my self to the new system. The remaining fine tuning was for the 5.1 chanel surround set up was completed over a course of two weeks, with more movies and pop corn sessions. It doesn't really feel like work actually! 

The ol' skool Bose 301 Series II dates back to 1988, when I bought my first hifi set, the fact that it still serves my home entertainment today speaks volumes of it's quality. The Velodyne VX-10 is another blast from the past, since 2003. It's a 10 inch sub woofer with a self powered built in plate amp, wired with Monster sub woofer cable from the Denon AVR 1612. The Velodyne produces enough low rumble during movies, courtesy of the corner enforcement placement.

The Bose VCS 10 center chanel speaker is probably the weakest link in my AV set up for now. Plans are in place to do something about it. Stay tune to find out.

The Bose VCS 30 installed with wall mount brackets. I place them about 1 feet higher than ear level when seated, for most effective surround panning results. I had my family lounge wired in wall with tin plated Belden speaker cables, to maintain the wire free look, prior I moved in during 2003.  

The final result I got was brilliant pictures and big sound quality to match. The system went pretty loud too, and seemingly able to rumble the family lounge when the movies call for it. The surround panning effect works seamlessly to immerse the movie experience that bit more satisfactory. I get a kick when kids and some un suspecting adults turn their heads towards the back as the surround effect pans out, only to realised I've got a pair of really small Bose VCS-30 speakers around the back, while watching movies. The element of surprise is relevant for one to get totally absorb in to the movie one is watching.  Dialogues are highly intelligible and clear if a little weedy sounding, compared to the big, full bodied sounds of the front and surround effects. For me, this is an area that needs to be further improved, at least to get as tonally seamless with the big Bose 301 Series II as possible. I've figured out the improvement plans, which will need a bit of time to materialised. Also on my mind is that 10AWG power cord for the Denon AVR 1612 receiver, which can still be heard to be performing on the edge when loud explosions and dynamic sound track passages. The symptoms manifest it self as the sound just one the verge of breaking up on the near max volume.

Remote control heaven! From left: Astro, Samsung, Denon and Pioneer.

A scene from Lord Of The Rings Trilogy. Mood lights are dimmed for best viewing pleasure.

It's been a fun and satisfying experience setting this AV system, which is my fourth project(my first AV project was under taken in the early 1990's. It was a full fledge projector based, 5 chanel(there was no.1 yet at the time!) Dolby AC-3 system, comissioned by my dad in his home) over the years by the way. More AV adventures to come as I set about to unleash the full potential of my AV system.

My AV Revival, The Building Blocks.

Let's face it, no matter how superb sounding our hifi can make music sound, I think sometimes we need some movies too. As you may have guess from the equipment list on my previous 5.1 AV set up, the system was sound performance biased. I admit that at the time, the sound sometimes gets bigger than the picture it self. However, given the prohibitive cost of good big screens at the time, the choice was obvious.

I decided to set up a more balanced 5.1 AV system this time, paying equal attention to sound and vision. The task is less daunting this time round, due to the falling prices of big screens, and the relative affordability of Blu-ray players now days, couple to the more mature HDMI hook up format, reducing cable needs dramatically.

As my AV ambitions are less demanding compared to my stereo aspirations, I decided to go the budget route, yet the AV system must not dominate the family lounge, but rather serves to gather the whole family together for weekend pop corn and movie sessions. The kids just love it!

The system component selection reflects my thinking, and must work with my existing Bose 5.1 speaker set up already installed previously, along with the Velodyne VX-10 sub woofer. The existing Bose 5.1 speakers comprises of the 301 Series II for front chanel pair, and VCS-30 surround and center chanel set. It's imperative that the AV receiver have enough power to rumble the Bose speakers!

Pioneer BDP-140 Blu-ray player

This Pioneer BDP-140 Blu-ray player will soon be replaced by the newer BDP-150 model. I am not sure at this point the specifications of the newer model, but it surely looks very similar to the BDP-140. This is the entry point for Pioneer Blu-ray players, but the picture and sound quality is anything but budget. The build is light weight, but like everything else from the Pioneer stables, it well screwed together and come with a remote of overly large button count, majority of which I'll probably never use. For playing DVDs, the BDP-140 has impressive picture up scaling quality, much to the surprise for many of my buddies who came to view my new AV set up. There are now quite a few Blu-ray players from other manufacturers priced below the sub RM$500/unit market, but I believe if you're serious about movies as much as I am, then the Pioneer BDP-140 is quite likely to be the minimum entry level, even if it's just paying a bit more for the extra quality. This player is not fussy about disc quality, and has so far only rejected two disc of the hundreds that I've fed it.

Denon AVR 1612 AV Receiver

The Denon AVR 1612 AV receiver is something of a dark horse, as I initially wanted the older AVR 1611 instead, because the older model had more power on specs. The newer AVR 1612, is a 5.1 chanel only receiver, but comes with Airplay function for Apple iPod users, which I've not used. The AVR 1612 also has Audyssey Multi EQ to make initial setting up a doodle, followed by further fine tuning for the 5.1 surround chanels. Again, the Denon is well built, if somewhat light weight, thanks to it's five chanel class D power modules coupled to linear power supplies, which means it runs supremely cool, even with the most demanding of movie sound tracks. What surprised me was the highly detailed, yet musical nature of the amplifier section when I played some 5.1 chanel decoded SACDs, fed by the Pioneer BDP-140 on HDMI 1.4 connection! The remote is again of the buttons overload variety, but comes with night reflective white buttons(which glows light green when in the dark) for those commonly used. I had one issue when setting up the Denon, is when I substituted the rather short(but rather thick) original power cord supplied, with one that was longer which I had previously used to power my PC, and the receiver struggled to cope with loud explosion scenes during movies. The sound was breaking up and pictures were jittery too. I believe the power current draw is high and a big bad(10AWG at least!) power cord would be needed to get maximum performance out of the AVR 1612. Oh... by the way, the KLIAV 2012 show just saw the launch of the Denon AVR 1613, which looks surprisingly similar too.

Samsung PN64D7000 Smart TV

I never really taught my budget would stretch this far, but a buddy on the up grade path made ownership of this Samsung PN64D7000 Smart TV possible. It's a pre-owned item, but well taken cared for and most importantly, it fit's my budget. It's a 64 inch plasma TV framed by rectangular glass at the seams design gives it a futuristic look. I must say this Smart TV does so many things, to the point that I sometimes feel it's smarter than me! Like for instance, Astro has an annoying habit of pumping up the volume during advertisements, that I always have to tone down the volume by remote when using my old TV. The Samsung Smart TV does exactly the same, but only automatically. The volume restores to it's original setting when the actual program continues after the commercials. Still on Astro programs, which I am using the oldest 1st generation Philips decoder(non HD subscription), yet the built in picture up sampling feature of the smart TV brings picture and sound quality bang up to the top. Again those whom have viewed my Astro program chanels were amazed that I am not subscribing to the HD chanels, based on what they've seen. The titanium satin finished remote is just as smart, as it's soft touch buttons lights up when one presses any button and the layout is rather intuitive. The smart TV also does 3D pictures with very vivid results, provided the optional active 3D glasses are used. I only have one 3D featured Blu-ray disc at my disposal so couldn't test more of the effects. My buddy has a habit of having all his displays, regardless if they are projector or screen based calibrated to ISF standards, which renders balanced tonal colours and very realistic flesh tones. Well calibrated ISF standard screens have an uncanny ability to render picture depth layerings and details with exceptional ease. Another thing to note is that one can sit relatively close(about 3 feet) to the screen, and still don't noticed the pixelated effects. The screen also has great blacks(in my opinion, second only to the once mighty Pionner Kuro screens) This makes movie marathon sessions possible, because the eyes do not suffer from fatique or stress. While at it, I noticed the screen runs only moderately warm, even after hours of use, which is a far cry compared to earlier generations of plasma screens. This Samsung Smart TV is the smartest move as far as high quality screen choice is concerned.

I proceeded to assemble the whole system and integrate the new components with the old Bose speakers. And the results?

Stay tuned to find out!