Although I'm a little embarrassed to admit it, I was a high-school A/V geek. Some kids go out for track or baseball, others for student theater. But I, along with my (still) best friend Burt, found my haven in a small interior office full of rolling TV carts and overhead projectors. Following our 2 years of dedicated service, Burt and I were singled out at our graduation ceremony to jointly receive — no kidding here — the Murray Berhang Memorial Audio/Visual Award. I still don't know who Murray was or what he did to deserve such distinction, but I'm still grateful that someone had set up a scholarship fund attached to the award. It amounted to a whopping $26 — which Burt and I dutifully spent on beer and munchies on graduation night. The framed award certificate now hangs in my office at Sound & Vision.

Which is, I guess, my roundabout way of saying that we get what we ask for in this life — and if I've always enjoyed being around TVs and sound equipment, I'm fortunate to have made a career of it. I was reminded of that recently when CEDIA — the Custom Electronic Design & Installation Association — invited me to return to its Indianapolis training center for one of its newest courses, the Electronics Systems Technician Advanced Residential Boot Camp.

As you might recall, Making the Grade (October 2006) recounted my first trip to the CEDIA EST Basic Residential Boot Camp. That was a crash course in the mechanics of home theater installation — reading project documents, running cables, mounting speakers, and generally avoiding little mistakes that can lead to big trouble later.

Advanced Boot Camp takes installers "the last 10 feet," which includes (among other things) hooking up A/V components, calibrating HDTVs, and measuring and optimizing room acoustics. As such, it's the ultimate feast for an A/V enthusiast — even a smartass like me who thinks he already knows everything — and a critical link for install technicians. You can do a terrific job on the stuff behind the walls, but if the room itself doesn't look and sound great in the end, what have you got?

As we introduced ourselves on the first morning, I was struck by how many of the guys had been drawn to CEDIA by their own passion for audio/video and their intent to start a custom-installation business. With eight students, this was a small Boot Camp (15 to 20 is typical), but it was still easy to find excited career-forgers.

Bruce Copp, for instance, is a retired airline pilot from Austin, Texas, who built sound studios about 30 years ago, then decided to return to his first love when he found himself back on the ground. But most of the students were in their 20s or early 30s, just starting out. Among them was Ron Barak, a licensed electrician in upstate New York who has a growing side business hanging plasma screens and is now ready to combine his "high-voltage" and "low-voltage" credentials into a full-tilt install biz.

Other guys also handed me business cards declaring themselves owners and presidents of their fledgling enterprises. Jeff Ruttenberg, a high-school math teacher from Bend, Oregon, admitted he was prompted in part by my prior Boot Camp article to take a string of CEDIA courses and launch his own company. When I announced my affiliation, he declared, with a half-smile, "You're the reason I'm here spending all this money on training." Oops! Like I said, we get what we ask for . . .

As with Basic Boot Camp, the advanced course runs a very solid 3 days: You start at 8 o'clock every morning and run until 5:30 p.m., with a brief break for lunch. Each session is a mix of classroom work and "lab" time in the attached warehouse. In "Making the Grade," I wrote about the cool lab booths CEDIA created to mimic a real home, with both open studs and sheetrocked areas to play in. But for Advanced Boot Camp, the organization went further and built four acoustically isolated theater rooms, each measuring 17 x 14 x 9 feet and trimmed out with carpeting, molding, painted walls, and a single home-theater easy chair.

As explained by CEDIA's then-director of technical training, Dave Pedigo (who now heads up the group's new Technology Council), our 3-day lab project involved breaking into two groups, each of which would turn a stack of manufacturer-donated high-end gear into a fully operational home theater. Each room had a motorized Draper projection screen, a Runco DLP front projector, a 61-inch LG plasma TV, an AudioControl surround sound preamp/power-amp stack and multichannel equalizer, a Key Digital video switcher/processor, a DirecTV HD receiver, DVD players from Arcam and Marantz, B&W floorstanding and bookshelf speakers, a Universal Remote programmable remote control, a Furman power conditioner and APC backup system, an equipment rack/closet from Middle Atlantic, and various Auralex room-treatment panels for the walls and ceiling. Ultimately, the two teams would be assessed on both the installation appearance and the audio/video experience. Oh, and by the way: This was indeed to be a competition for bragging rights to the best-sounding and best-looking install. Or, as Dave put it: "One group will win immunity, and the other will be kicked off the island."

As with all Boot Camps, two industry volunteers shared duties with the CEDIA instructors. This time, they were Frank White, a manufacturers' consultant with a long history of CEDIA involvement, and Brian Collins of Paragon Technology Group, a prominent installation company in Denver. Along with Dave, they were joined periodically by CEDIA's Jeff Gardner, who was transitioning into Dave's role as training director.

As the first lecture got underway, we received a detailed review of all the audio and video signals that installers work with today, from your basic composite-video all the way up to HDMI, as well as all the analog and digital audio formats. The different audio and video components — receivers, amps, processors — were also covered.

After lunch, it was on to equipment racks and mounting. Frank made a valuable point to the class about the importance of properly dressing the rat's nest of cables behind our equipment racks. He likened an install client to the buyer of a luxury car who might look under the hood only once but expects to be wowed. "How often does your customer look behind your rack?" he asked. "Maybe just once. But that rack needs to mirror the perceived performance of what they're buying." Later on, when we moved into the lab, we could see what he meant. Getting cables from Point A to Point B in a complex rack is tough enough, but making it look pretty is an art form.

We closed out Day 1 with a lecture on speaker types and placement and on the basics of room acoustics. I found this last part fascinating: I'd never had explained to me the simple science of absorption, diffusion, and direct reflection that can so dramatically affect the home theater experience.

"The room is the most important element of the sound," Dave reminded us — and it was proved later when we tested our systems prior to room treatments, only to discover muddied mids and highs, unclear dialogue, and boomy bass. The general rule for a good room, he said, is to achieve 25% absorption, 25% diffusion (in which sound is reflected in many directions, something you want in the rear for good surround sound), and 50% direct reflection. We also learned to calculate the low-frequency room resonances, helpful for achieving good bass.

Day 2 started with an overview of modern display technologies, which led to calculating appropriate heights and distances for front projectors, as well as instruction on video calibration.

Then we went back to the lab to mount our plasmas and projectors and place our speakers. Brian reminded us that, despite industry guidelines for hanging flat panels at 44 to 46 inches from the floor to the screen's center, good installers do a little research. "My boss is 5'1" — he's not going to be even with a screen 44 inches off the floor, and in fact, his TV is a little lower," Brian said. "In a theater install, that's going to depend on the client and the seating."

One of the great things about Boot Camp is getting to use the specialized tools and instruments. This time, the heavy artillery included a Sencore HDTV video generator and color analyzer for calibrating displays and a Sencore audio analyzer. Although I'm experienced with video calibration, the audio analyzer was an awesomely cool tool: It could generate noise tones, function as a spectrum analyzer to measure our room's frequency response, and even capture room reflections and reverb times. Our team used it along with the equalizer to tamp down frequency peaks in each speaker's output. But the best way to mitigate the room's boomy bass was to tap the tried-and-true method for subwoofer placement as recommended repeatedly in Sound & Vision: Place the sub on a chair in the listening position, pump pink noise into it, and then crawl around on the floor until you find the spot with the smoothest sound. (It turned out to be on the right sidewall.)

By the end of Day 3, with both rooms fully tuned, our instructors came in to judge the installations. It was a split decision, with our team taking honors for the best sound but the other team winning for best overall install. Our big mistake was that we had placed the stands for our surround speakers about 2 feet off the sidewalls, out in the room — where they would not likely pass the Wife Acceptance test. The other team had not only put theirs against the wall (at a modest sacrifice in sound quality) but also ceiling-mounted their front projector as far back in the room as the Runco's specs would allow. Our projector, being more centrally placed, was more obtrusive. Lesson learned: Along with maximizing performance, you have to make the equipment work within the environment and the client's needs. Touché!

As with my first Boot Camp, I left Indy with a wealth of knowledge and all charged up to practice my new skills. And as before, I met some great guys who share not only my passion for A/V but also the desire to earn their living around something they love. For them — beyond the incredible service CEDIA provides in the promotion of commerce and the Electronic Lifestyle — the ability to do that might be this organization's greatest gift of all.

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