For more than a decade, the arrival of high-definition television was trumpeted with all the bluster of a carnival barker and the sincerity of a contestant on a reality-TV dating show. But HDTV is finally here, fueled by an increase in programming, falling TV prices, growing availability over satellite and cable — and, oh yeah, a federal mandate that says broadcasters have to switch over to digital by the end of 2006. In fact, sales of digital TVs really took off this year, showing that people have begun to embrace HDTV.
Not surprisingly, this surge in popularity has had a big impact on custom installation, where people are always looking for the latest innovations. Installations of traditional analog TVs are increasingly rare, while big-screen HDTVs are becoming the order of the day. Since the people who go to installers tend to be among the earliest adopters of new home-entertainment technologies, we decided to check out some showcase high-def installations, choosing the best efforts of three specialty dealers: Magnolia Hi-Fi Design Center in Seattle, Ultimate Electronics in Denver, and Harvey Electronics in New York City. These efforts not only highlight the latest plasma and projection displays but also the challenges all of us face when setting up any HDTV.
Installation #1: Harvey Electronics in New York City
Installation #2: Ultimate Electronics in Denver
Installation #3: Magnolia Hi-Fi Design Center in Seattle
Photos by Lisa Quinones
City: Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York
Installer: Harvery Electronics
The homeowners — commodities traders and long-time Harvey Electronics customers — wanted to convert part of their open living room/family room area into a home theater, but with one considerable caveat: the theater had to blend in with the rest of the décor. Initially they wanted a front projector and a drop-down screen, but given how the room was laid out and how bright the ambient light was, Plante suggested that they go instead with a 50-inch Fujitsu P50XHA10 plasma display ($10,000), which he mounted flush with a wall.
“The side of the room that looks out onto the Hudson is all windows, which flood the space with way too much light,” Plante recalls. “Plasma displays are quite bright, so as long as they’re positioned so you’re not dealing with direct sunlight, ambient light is a nonissue. And the viewing angle is quite wide, so you can go 70 to 75 off-center and still see a nice, detailed image.” Plante put a picture frame around the display, creating a clean look that fits in with the room’s artwork.
Since the house is near the mountains and outside the range of over-the-air reception, Plante turned to a Sony satellite receiver and a digital cable box for high-def programming. “Right now we’re getting three or four high-def channels on cable and seven from DirecTV,” he says, “but when we started the installation five weeks ago, there were only three channels available. The increase in programming is encouraging — how long can you watch only HDNet? God bless them, though, because they helped put high-def on the map. HDTV has become a frequent topic of conversation with our customers; in fact, sales of traditional analog TVs have become pretty much nonexistent.”
To complement the video installation, Plante opted for a Boston Acoustics Reference in-wall surround sound system comprising three VRi593 Reference in-wall speakers across the front, two VRi553 in-wall surrounds, and two VRiSub82 in-wall subwoofers. A Crestron color touchscreen remote control is used to operate the gear, which includes a progressive-scan DVD player, S-VHS recorder, five-disc CD changer, and Dolby Digital receiver — all from Marantz, and all housed in a Middle Atlantic rack in the closet. (The owners plan to add a JVC high-definition D-VHS VCR soon.) The Crestron’s radio-frequency (RF) technology, coupled with repeaters hidden in the room, means commands can be sent without having to aim the remote at a specific component.
In the end, Plante’s HDTV installation — part of a $30,000 system — pleased both the homeowners and their interior designers. “That’s the beauty of plasma TV and discrete speakers,” he says. “We made everyone happy, particularly the wife, who got exactly what she wanted: a screen that’s virtually invisible until it’s in use, equipment that’s hidden, and a remote she doesn’t have to worry about pointing in a certain direction — she just pushes the button and it works.”
Photos by Eric Bakke
City: Denver, Colorado
Installer: Ultimate Electronics
A lot of people dream about having a dedicated home theater room, but Chris Mauzy’s customers wanted him to do something different: move the home theater out of the basement and into the more social environment of the main living space.
Mauzy, regional installation manager at Ultimate Electronics, says that a growing number of their customers don’t want to retreat to a dark basement room for TV and movie viewing. “The owner, an entrepreneur, said he wanted us to take some of the cool things we did downstairs and bring them up to the family room where he could entertain, throw football parties, or have people walk around and always be within view of a big, beautiful picture.”
Mauzy took an unusual approach to achieving that goal, installing both a 73-inch Mitsubishi WS73711 rear-projection HDTV ($6,600) and a Sharp XV-Z10000 DLP (Digital Light Processing) front projector ($9,000). The Mitsubishi, mounted in a rock wall and tilted toward the sofa, serves as the room’s focal point. The massive TV was elevated off the floor so the KEF Reference 204c center speaker could be flush-mounted in the rock below it. Floor-standing KEF Reference 205 speakers flank the set, while two Klipsch SCW-3 in-wall speakers handle the surround channels.
The projector is almost completely out of sight, hidden behind a cutout in the soffit molding near the ceiling. A 106-inch Draper screen drops down directly in front of the Mitsubishi set when the projector is being used. “When you walk into that room, you don’t even know there’s a projector in the ceiling,” observes fellow installer Trevor Jefferies.
The decision to go with both front- and rear-projection setups might seem like overkill, but Mauzy says the owners can’t get enough of large-screen viewing. Because the front-projection setup is more sensitive to ambient light, they typically use the rear-projection TV during the day, saving the front projector for movies and special sporting events during evening hours and at night. As Ultimate Electronics has grown — the 58-store chain now employs 400 installers — it has shied away from traditional three-gun CRT projectors “due to the complexity of setup and maintenance,” Jefferies says. “We now opt for LCD and DLP models.”
Mauzy calls Denver “one of the most challenged HDTV markets” in the country because no programming is available via cable, and the off-air reception is spotty due to the city’s proximity to the mountains and a local “anti-tower” movement. That’s why he wired the house for both satellite and off-air HDTV, in the hope that cable will soon come on board.
The owners’ high-def viewing doesn’t stop when they leave their home theater room. The $100,000 installation has HDTVs throughout the house, including a 50-inch Mitsubishi plasma display mounted above a fireplace in the adjacent living room and a 37-inch LCD screen mounted on a pivot in the wife’s office.
While this installation posed a lot of challenges, both Jefferies and Mauzy are pleased with their solutions, particularly the way they concealed the front projector and how Jefferies distributed the HDTV signal between the rear-projection set and the front projector using an MTI commercial-video distribution module. But one more job is still pending: the owner wants his laptop computer wired into the main entertainment system. “He wants to be able to play his flight simulator on both the rear-projection TV and the big Draper screen,” Mauzy explains.
Photos by Doug Wilson
City: Seattle, Washington
Installer: Magnolia Hi-Fi Design Center
So how do you handle the job when the customer, an entrepreneur, has a $300,000 budget and his only request is that you give him all of the latest and greatest gear? For Magnolia Hi-Fi Design Center, the answer was a distributed HDTV system that included three 50-inch Panasonic plasma displays mounted above fireplaces around the house, smaller LCD monitors in other rooms, and (shown here) a dedicated home theater featuring a DWIN TransVision 2 DLP front projector ($10,250) and a 110-inch Stewart projection screen. Miller says the DWIN is the best single-chip DLP projector they sell. They decided to use it here not only because it’s simple to maintain and calibrate, but because they could easily mount it in the rear of the room inside the cowling.
“We’d worked with [the owners] before, and they wanted everything they could get — HDTV, satellite, cable, terrestrial, and then some,” says Aaron Miller, general manager of Magnolia Hi-Fi’s custom division. Maybe the most interesting aspect of the installation other than the sheer number of displays was the customers’ request that everything be kept out of view. “As a result, you really don’t see much in the way of electronics. The plasma panels are framed and mounted above the fireplaces, and we hid the projector in the home theater by using a custom-made cowl that matches the columns in the room,” Miller explains. They even built the home theater’s Elan Via controller into the armrest of the theater-style seating.
The decision to go high-def was easy, Miller says. “The house is basically sitting on a hill staring at the HDTV towers.” But selecting the right speakers for the various high-def installations, says system designer Wayne Wray, “depended on the location of the room, what we had to work with in the room, and where the listeners were going to be sitting relative to the TV.” The home theater uses an M&K S-150 THX Ultra speaker system, which includes six bookshelf-style satellite speakers for 6.1-channel playback, and two powered subwoofers instead of only one, hidden behind a fabric-covered enclosure. The three surrounds are concealed behind wall fabric.
Wray says that there’s not much difference between installing and setting up high-def and regular analog TVs, “except that HDTV’s higher resolution means you can sit closer to the set, so you can have bigger screens in smaller rooms.” Miller adds, “For the same reasons, HDTV is more forgiving because the resolution is so much better and there’s so much more to look at. You don’t have to be perfectly situated like you did with older TVs.”
For Miller, this installation was the ideal job. “It was well managed from beginning to end, the people were easy to work with and open to suggestions, we had plenty of time, and best of all, it turned out great.” And the owners now have an HDTV installation that offers a glimpse of what more and more homes will be like as prices come down and digital TVs replace analog ones throughout the house.