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efzauner

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Everything posted by efzauner

  1. Klipsch fans. Knowing that we respect other respectable brands, the Polk audio site has many pics of peoples home theater setups. It is a good place to look for other ideas when planning your own custom HT rooms http://www.polkaudio.com/forums/showcase/index.php
  2. you can get he AE-900 for unde 1500 see audioholics http://forums.audioholics.com/forums/showthread.php?p=143844#post143844 also on the main page
  3. Lets not leave the manufactureres blaimless. They often will turn a blind eye to grey market goods. It is also easy to track where a grey market product came from by tracking SNs. Manufacturers make their money no matter where it is sold, and legally there is not much they can do. Most manufacturers will not cancel contracts with dealers and distributors that sell a good amount of product because they dabble in a bit of grey market. It depends on how big you are. In Canada for example, much of what Costco sells is grey market! They buy in bulk from Sony, Pioneer, Panasonic etc in the US and ship it up to Canada, circumventing the Canadian distribution. Everyone knows it, at least Costco is upfront and covers the warranty itself. Do you think that Pioneer will cut Costco off? Come on! Money Talks! They structure of discounts, incentives, end of year rebates also encourages dealers to buy more than they can sell in order to get the discounts and rebates, but then sell of excess thru grey market. Hey, it is anothe form of price competition that keeps everyone honest.
  4. It is understandable that one has financial problems from time to time. If he cannot pay you on time, the right thing for him to do would be to return the TV. End of story. He says sorry, you shake hands, have a beer, listen to some musik on Klipsch speakers. Friendship is more importand than a damn TV. Lending money to friends is a difficult thing if things go sour. I would say you need to make a choice between your TV and your friend, but even if you decide to let him keep the TV without paying, there will always be a bad feeling. Yet, If he cannot figure out that the right thing to do is to pay you or return the TV, then maybe you need to find a new friend. Trying to fool him into thinking that the TV is broken is also NOT the right thing to do! Be a man and tell him that you feel uncomfortable with the situation and let him come up with a solution, with a commitment from him. Make a clear deadline so it is very clear the he has renegged on his commitment if it falls thru. Dont let him make you feel like the bad guy! Real men tell the truth and do the right thing. Real men are humble and say sorry when they do the wrong thing. Oh, and real men also can drink beer and have fun with their buddies, but they don't make their wives clean up the mess. Sorry if I sound like Dr. Phil. Maybe I should start a TV show called " Real men love Klipsch... and let other real men love Bose too"
  5. I wonder if the TI Led source for he DLP eliminates the need for a color wheel. If you can instantly turn on and off the RGB color of the led, then you do not need a color wheel. TI article on LED lighting in DLP shows a diagramm of a DLP systeme with 3 indivitual led sources and NO color wheel! : http://www.dlp.com/dlp_technology/images/dynamic/white_papers/167_LED_TV_white_paper.pdf
  6. Unfortunately that is the sad reality about a lot of new technology. Look at the car! It is mass produced so cheeply after 100 years that any alternative is going to be way expensive until until it matures, and it may not last. I bet Toshiba is looking for partners and is planning huge low cost production in China. Toshiba is about the only producer that does NOT have its own in house techology. It does not make LCD pannels, No plasma, No DLP/LCD/LCOS technology of its own.Their forray into LCOS a few years back flopped miserably to the point that the industry thought it was totaly dead and JVC and Sony refuse to call Idla and SXRD Lcos. If it cannot make SEDs work, it may not have much of a future because it cannot vertically integrate to have control of the business. But I love all these alternatives. 10 years ago you really only had crt, now you have plasma, lcd, lcos-dlp-lcd projection, and now SED. Love the competition! who would have though! Remember when flat panel plasma was THE future technology that would make our living rooms look like futuristic space station lounges! Go Toshiba GO!
  7. Now that's enthusiasm! Great work! We all manage to have fun with our hobbies no mater what they are. Of late I have concentrated on my car audio system. Company provides a Ford Freestar minivan. Ho hum. But I alrady upgraded the speakers, replaced the transistors on a real expensive 5 channel car amp I got on Ebay for a song and dance. ( I was replacing smt transistors all evening . Boy I love the smell of rosin core solder at midnight!) I am about to build a sub box that houses the amp and a new cd deck as well allowing me to bypass all the original crap that comes with the car. To each his/her own. As long as we have fun doing it and keeps us out of trouble... with our wife/husband or the neighbour's wife/husband...
  8. To replace a 32"? Is this in a great HT room or the family room for everyday viewing? If it is for everyday viewing, I would buy a cheap 42" plasma or other cheaper 42" rear projector and wait till this whole HD, HDMI, Broadcast flag, HD DVD, 1080i vs 1080p settles down, and then buy a biggie for the super HT room. You do NOT want to lay down the big bucks for an Sony SXRD and then find out that it can only take 1080p over component video, in ED, because the broadcast flag does not send HD to anything but HDMI. But if you think that all will work nicely together in the next 5 years then go for the Sony!
  9. To answer your question about a bigger box directly, yes, a bigger sealed box will give you lower bass, but again, compare to the car. A bigger box is a weaker spring. Give a car a weaker spring, and it will wallow down the highway at a lower frequency. Make the spring too week and the suspension will bottom out. So you have to be carefull. WinISD also has the ability to calculate cone excusion if you add xmax and Qes and power handling. But stay at a Qts of betwee .7 and .9 for a sealed enclosure and you should be OK. Others may want to comment on that. Oh, by the way, there is a certain car wallowing frequency that will make you sick. Car makers stay away from that!
  10. Indyjeep: DrWho sent the link for you to use! It is a very easy to use software to design speaker enclosures. It comes with a good data base of drivers and it is very easy to add new drivers to it. There are a lot of TS parameters, but the only ones that it really uses is Qts, wich is the combined Qms and Qes. Fr resonant frequency, and Vas, wich is is a measure of how springy the suspension is stated in terms of the compressability of an equivalent volume of air. The other one that is good to enter is SPL the efficiency in dbm/W. Be carefull as some woofers are spec as dbm/2.82 Volts, wich would be the same as 1 watt into 8 ohms. So if you are comparing a 4 ohm car subwoofer at 88dbm/2.82 volts, that would actually be 85dbm/watt. Just do the math Watts=V^2 divided by ohms. 2.82^2 = 8 watts and 8 watts divided by 4 ohms = 2 watts. So it takes 2 watts to give you 88 db. With only 1 watt, that is half the power, it would output only 85dbm You can quickly try out different woofers in different enclosures and see how they respond. You can build sealed and vented (stay away from bandpass for good quality sounding DIY subs). You also do not want a big hump in the low frequency response because that comes from a very high Q combination of driver and enclosure. A higher Qtc (shown in the sealed BOX tab) means that the woofer will keep on vibrating after the signal stops. For Vented enclosers, it is QL that is uses. WInISD will do the basic design automatically for you with optimal Qtc and QL. You can change them a bit but do not go overboard. Compare this to a car suspension: A speaker is like a car: The weight of the car is the mass of the speaker, the spring is the VAS, and the shocks are the damping. You do not have a direct spec for damping, but Mass, Vass, damping and QTS are related. Basically the Q (or Quality) is how much damping or shocks you have compared to the spring. So putting that all together, a heavy car with weak springs and bad shocks will keep on moving for a long time at a very low frequency. As you make the car lighter, or make the springs harder, the resonant frequency goes up. Bigger, heavier cars need stronger shocks that light cars etc. Woofers are design for different purposes and thus have different masses, Vas, and Q just like cars are designed for different performance. The speaker cabinet is the last part that you can actually design. A sealed cabinet just adds an extra spring, like making a car suspension stiffer. A vented cabined adds an extra spring and mass and you now have a second resonant frequency lower than the speaker itself that you can play around with. A bandpass designs add more combinations of mass and springs to add resonances above and below the resonant freqeuncy of the speaker. By using the car suspension analogy you can understand why subwoofers that go lower in frequency have heavier mass, but also need more damping, or shock. The result also means that it takes more power to move, and thus less efficient. If you compare to Klipsch speakers like the Heresy, it uses a light cone for more efficiency, but sacrifices bass. Tweeters on the other hand are very light, but have stiff suspensions in order to resonate at very high freqeuncies. Have fun. I gave you the basics.
  11. Hey. Welcome to the forum. Do you have all the parts except for crossovers? Did you gut a set of Klipschorns? A bit of background on where they are from would be fun to hear. What are the exact part numbers that you have. Is it the K77 tweeter, K400/K55 midrange horn and K33 Woofer? As for making speakers. If this is your first project, may I suggest a bass reflex design such as a Cornwall, or what is also known as a cornscala: 15" woofer and K77 tweeter in a ported box the same size as a Cornwall, but with the K400/K55 midrange. It will be much much easier to build, and you will have speakers much faster. Then you can spend some time researching and slowly, and carefully building a set of LaScala or Klipshorns. You could even try this: Build a top section from the Lascala/Klipschorn (basically the industrial LaScala top), and build a vented bass section like a cornwall. Then you can take your time to build a LaScala or Klipschorn bass bin and when it is done, you can mate it to the top section. You may also try to be patient and watch ebay or this site, there are sometimes empty LaScala industrial bass bins for sale.
  12. I never had a benz, did own a bmw though, after i did a lot of bmw (bus-metro-walk) in university. I do think that the bmw took the bends better than b-m-w. I tell you, just sue the hell out of Klipsch, get treble dammages, millions of dollars! They need to put warning labels on them. Just like McDonalds had to put warnings on coffee saying not to dump it in your lap because it is hot.
  13. I think it is a matter of balance. The Pioneer unit looks ok, but, the Techniques speakers, are, um, not really considered HiFi to put it mildly. They are from an era where companies just tried to put systems together to sell to the masses, and bigger speakers meant better right? There is more to it than that. Are you looking for loud bass or to improve the overall quality of the sound? A good $500 sub would blow the Techniques out of the water really. If you are into good sounding HT for the long run, consider replacing all the Techniques speakers with a 5.1 speaker setup in the 500-1000 price range from a reputable speaker manufacturer like, er Klipsch maybe? You will be amazed in the vast improvement in sound... and keep the Techniques for the garage or outdoor parties. Sorry, truth hurts sometime.
  14. JJKIZAK. The choice of 600 ohms, or 50 ohms, or 75 ohms has to do with compromise between cost of cabling, power capacity, characteristic impedance, loss, technology available etc. Lets just say that their are historical and technical reasons for the different impedances found in various gear, and yes, if you are transmitting signals over distances that are a good portion of a wavelength or more you do need to use cables of the same characteristic imepedance as the source/load in order to transfer power and not have reflections. Sending audio over many miles of landlines does indeed call for proper impedance matching and correct characteristic impedance of cable. But not for short distances. While microphones source/loads may be 600ohms, the characteristic impedance of a hundred feed of microphone cable is not important. Sure the overall capacitance/inductance is important, but not Zo for such short runs. Even at microwave frequencies, you do make sure that cabling is 50 ohms, but a sort wire bond on a 10GHz chip is considered a lumped inductance and a capacitance, not a distributed transmission line Yes, adding a pad to inputs of equipment will improve the VSWR, it will also protect it from overloads, and if it is measuring equipment, reducing reflections will also reduce missmatch uncertainty and improve measurement accuracy. It reduces the amplitude of the signal and the noise by the same amount. It also adds its own KTB noise, and since it reduces the signal going to the next stage, a 20db pad will also reduce the overal Signal to Noise ratio by the same 20dB.
  15. Hi Stephenp You can download the owners manual at http://www.yamaha.com/yec/customer/manuals/PDFs/HTR-5990_e(U).pdf Page 20 has a diagram and explanation of what this unit can do. page 83 has a more detailed explanation: you can basically convert 480i Composite Video and S video and component video to 480p Component video and HDMI. THis is a nice feature to be able to connect any source and have it switched and upconverted to HDMI. Only the monitor out jacks upconvert. THe record out are direct connect. They also say "unconvetional video signals" cannot be upconverted. What ever that means? I guess it is a disclaimer that the receiver is not perfect. Also, on page 106 it says that analog audio is NOT converted to HDMI, so you still have to connect analog audio from our cable/sat box, vcr, dvd etc to your TV etc. Bummer. Can your TV take HDMI video and analog Audio separately? Or is this assuming that all audio will go thru your HT receiver. This stuff is complex. I think systems should always have an EASY mode that allows wife and kids to turn on the TV and watch without having to turn on and fiddle with the HT receiver. You may end up connecting HDMI and all the svideo,component video and audio any way to your TV just so that others can watch and listen directly. HDMI cannot be used for SACD or DVD-A. Bummer... The industry has to get their act together! There is too much to post here, I suggest you read thru the relevant sections of the manual, and then ask additional questions here. I am presuming that it will convert component 480i/480p/720p/1080i to the corresponding HDMI, but not to 1080p. There is no mention of converting 480i/480p/720p/1080i HDMI to 1080I HDMI. This is very confusing. There is also another disclaimer stating that component 720p and 1080i converted to HDMI may result in worse quality. Fun isnt it? Keep in mind that any 1080i or 1080p TV will upconvert anyway. The issue is convenience and which unit has the better upconversion. So, having fun yet? Is the average consumer supposed to read and undersand all of this? Let alone connect it all up? As much as I love to hate Bose, they hide the consumer from all this stuff. Sure the Bose units are not infinitely flexible, but it does not take a PHD to connect them... I would not buy a Bose, but I would get one for my 79 year old dad.
  16. So, all is ok now! Great. I still am currious why you think the left channel was out. How do you know when a speaker should push and when it should pull when you are listening to music. You can check polarity by connecting a 9 volt battery to the speakers, or your house wiring without the amp connected. When the positive of the battery is connected to the positive speaker terminal, the cone should go out. Dont worry you cannot blow a speaker this way. You are not giving the speaker more than a watt, if that much.
  17. The Infocus 4805 is nice, but also consider the Toshiba TDP-MT200. I had both on demo and the Toshiba was my choice. It had much better resolution, finer pixels. Whatever it was, it looked better.
  18. Pauln, like most of you, you hide behind your snake oil by pretending that you cannot do a double blind: I have the solution: 1: shave your head 2: make 2 identical wigs, cut the hair short over the ears on one, keep it long on the other. 3: Freeze your ears and have your wife or other significant other randomly put on one wig or the other. With frozen ears you will not be able to detect which wig is on. Otherwise you could feel the long hair over your ears. Listen to musik and write down which wig you think you are wearing. 4: do a statistically valid sample of about 50 random listening test. Make sure you take breaks to re-freeze your ears. Now count the times your correctly guessed which wig you where wearing. If you where correct more than half the time, you win, if not you loose. After that your earlobes will be frost bitten and no longer properly image the sound into your ear canal...Then you can sell your Klipsch setup and buy some Bose. Buy a new wig with the money you saved. Your wife will love you for it!
  19. DrWho. One of the problems with all the snake oil is that they often quote or refer to perfectly valid electromagnetic theory, but avoid saying that at low frequencies these phenomenon are insignificant. Things like skin effect come to mind. Its like saying: Einstein's theory of relativity states that time slows down as your velocity increases up to the speed of light, therefore, you should only record CDs at the slower record speeds because recording at higher speeds like 48x slows down the waves and results in audible frequency shifts. True on the Einstein thing, garbage on the rest. A big part of an engineer's job is to shift thru the theory and decide what is relevant, what do I need to take into account. So, Electromagnetic theory defines transmission line theory, but is not important at low frequencies and short distances. However it is very significant for power companies because 60cycle power lines are very long transmission lines. The big problem is that unless one has a degree in electrical technology or engineering one is not equiped to fend of the snake oil salemen. Few consumers are so equipped, thus lots of $1000 HT systems with $500 monstercable sold at big box stores. Its the little guy I feel sorry about, not the guy who buys $100K of gear with the $1000 power cord. If you have that sort of spare cash, you can spend it however you like! Have a good evening. I am on a conference call with China...Learning about Wimax
  20. DrWho. Yes, I do agree that designing with impedance in mind is important, but in Audio, you do not care about the characteristic impedance of the wire that connects the source to the load. You care about its resistance, but not characteristic impedance. They are not the same. In RF, the cables are a good portion of a wavelength or more and therefore the voltage along the line changes with the phase of the wave. But at audio, the wavelegth is so long that the time difference and therefore voltage difference along a speaker cable is so small to be essentially zero. Thus we can consider a speaker wire a lumped LRC network. Tube amps typically have out put transformers to match a high impedance tube output stage to a low impedance speaker. This is not needed with transistors because their internal impedance is so low already. Also at RF, generating power and amplifing is very expensive thus there is a huge effort to impedance match power devices to loads so as to have maximum power transfer, that is, to have a conjugate match. Also power reflected back into an RF transistor because of a badly matched load can blow output transistors etc. At audio we can think of things in the same terms: A short causes all the power available from the output transistors to be reflected back with a 180deg phase shift so that the positive outgoing wave is cancelled by the reflected, inverted incomming wave to give a zero volt sum. A good writup on RF load matching and other stuff that is relevant at RF but not at audio can be seen at http://www.microwaves101.com/encyclopedia/maxpower.cfm There are lots of other good writeups on impedance matching in interconnects such as preamp to amp, 600 ohm balanced vs unbalanced etc. I am sure there have been many such links before on this forum, and on audioholics etc.
  21. JJKIZAK I presume you are joking here right? Maybe I am naive and think that this is a serious post. Just in case it is: characteristic impedance is only usefull at high frequencies where the cabling is a about a wavelength or longer and we care about distributed impedances. At audio frequencies it does not matter, everthing can be considered a lumped element. Your statement "In VHF/UHF applications this is reduced almost to "0" by using abnormally high input signals reduced down to operating parameters with a 20 db resistive pad" makes no sense. What is reduced to zero? In RF applications it is important to have things impedance matched, that is why there are converters to convert 300 ohm twinlead to 75 ohm coax etc. Pads attenuate the signal, but also can have impedance converters or matching networks included. Since pads do attenuate the signals, they will also attenuate any reflections that are caused by impedance missmatches. Again, all irrelevant at audio frequencies.
  22. what you need to do is a double blind test: You have the 5 people, So 4 of them sit in the listening room with a scorecard. The 5th I will call him the technician, runs the test. Maybe you can put the cd player in another room or something. Just devise a way to randomly put the pieces under without the listeners knowing. Devise a way (with a bell or something) that the technicial can tell you when to listen without telegraphing his knowledge. You all close your eyes and the technician rolls a die. If it is 1-3 he puts the wood pieces under the cd player. If it is 4-6 he pretends to place the wood pieces under the cd and covers it the same way. You sit back and use the remote to play the music for 5 minutes and individually score the sound. Your technician then rolls the dice again and changes the sutup depending on the result, and you listen again. technician keeps score and at then end tallies the result. Do this 10 times or more and see if can properly judge if the wood feet where used or not. See if you where better than 50% correct. This is a simple way to do a double blind test. The only on that is valid. Another way is to get a second identical CD player with a second identical CD. Connect one to input A of the receiver and the second to input B. Cover the receiver and CD players so you do not know which one is playing. First do a check to make sure there is no difference in the inputs, cds, and cd players by running a double blind test by randomly switching the cd players with the dice. If you get the 50% correct then they statistically sound the same. Then put the wood blocks under one and run the test again. This way it sould be much easier and faster to switch the source. Make sure the mechanical sounds of the cd player do not give it away. Of course make sure the A-B levels are the same. But most important these tests will only be valid with Klipsch speakers and a case of good beer.
  23. What do you mean by "out of phase" . You have to say "out of phase" with respect to something... How do you know it is not the the other channel that is out of phase. What do you hear? Did you try to connect some speakers directly to the amp and listen if you hear the same problem? Try to isolate what you think is the culprit and replace it and see if you where right...
  24. Hi The web link for the celtic cloth makes no mention that it is acoustically transperent. Did I miss something here?
  25. I read thru the first link and there is quite some detail. I love to DIY on many things, but I still stick to stuff that I cannot buy at a reasonable cost. Some things are for DIY others not. I dont know if a projector is the right DIY project. Things to consider: 1: Used projectors just 2-3 years old are on ebay for under $500. Compare that to the cost and effort of making your own. 2: Can you really make a better one yourself: The overhead projector route seems to leave a lot of stray light out. That will destroy your contrast ratio. The thing is kludgy and not very portable. Taking an LCD panel appart is risky, there are thousands of fragile contacts on the egde that have to be mated perfectly. 3: OK, so you got good resolution, but what is going to take care of the deinterlacing, scaling, etc etc. Cheap DVD players do this well already. You need a darn good graphics card in a PC to do this well. DVDs are 720x480 only anyway, and many very good projectors such as the infocus 4800 have no more than this. Why do you need more? 4: What about keystone and other setup issues. 5: How will you handle component video?
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