Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater Nine Questions (With Subparts)!

Thanks everybody for wading through my post and providing your thoughts. They are very helpful and I very much appreciate it.

SK -

Regarding cable runs, if you have any way to run conduit (i.e. PVC pipe or soft corrugated tubing) from your TV location to your AVR/equipment location, do it. When running your wires from one location, run them all through this tube so that they are easy to pull through in the future if you need to replace one.

Secondly, and more importantly, run two or three thick strings (or rope, or thick twine, etc.) of some sort through the tubing so that you can pull through additional wires in the future without needing to get inside the walls. If you can't find a string/twine strong enough, you can also just use a spare length of speaker wire that goes through the tube. In the future, when you need to make an additional cable run, you just tie the string/speaker wire to the new wire you want to pull through, then tape it together just to be sure and pull it through from the other end. If you are running conduit, run something that allows for future cable runs so that the tube is not so tight that you can't pull anything else through.

It works like a charm and will save you from trying to run every conceivable wire you can imagine now and allow for future upgrades.

Re: HDMI cables - I have a 30' run from projector to equipment rack and purchased BlueJeans Series 1 cable for this run only due to it's thicker wire and better rating for longer runs. It is definitely more expensive than some of the thinner runs, but considering I was going through ceilings and walls, I really didn't want to have to do this run again soon (even with my conduit path from point A to point B). The cable also supports HDMI 1.3, which isn't important now, but may be sometime in the future.

For all of my other HDMI connections I used Monoprice cables to save money as my max length for anything else was 3-4'.

Have fun.

Jason

Thanks Jason. "I" (i.e., my contractor) will definitely do that.

Again, thanks folks for wading through my questions. I really appreciate it.

RE: HDMI cables. This is a pretty good artical....

http://www.audioholics.com/education/cables/long-hdmi-cable-bench-tests

Thanks Mdrew. I ended up buying the blujean series 1 HDMI cable, as it seemed the safest bet. I also bought a subwoofer cable from them. I probably paid more than I should have for that, but their site claimed their cable could help with hum, so again I just erred on the side of caution. I decided the additional cost wasn't enough to worry about for a bit of peace of mind. Everything else I bought from monoprice, including a mounting bracket for the T.V., wall plates, and banana plugs. Frankly, I didn't know that they sold the mounting plates (i.e., I thought I'd buy that from Best Buy). The money I saved on that alone pretty much paid for everything else (i.e., I am rationalizing potentially paying more than I should for some of the cables).

Again everyone, I really appreciate your responses. You all are a very nice and helpful group of people!

Well, don't feel too bad about it. I have some sub cables from BlueJeans too. They're definitely more expensive, but they're one of the few places I could find that sold white sub cables, so I paid the extra $$$ too.

In the future if you're looking for a huge selection of wall plates and interconnects, Parts Express is very good for that sort of thing as well.

Jason

Hi skimble,

Just a few comments (I might have missed some details because I skimmed through this thread). If the ambient temperature above your fireplace is in the 90 to 100 degree F range when a fire is burning, don't mount your plasma above the fireplace. The latter also may place the TV too high for comfortable viewing.

Is your plasma's native resolution 720p or 1080p? That will affect how close you can sit without seeing individual pixels. I find sitting as close as 6 feet from my 50-inch 720p set a bit too close. An ideal range for 720p 50-inch is about 8 to 12 feet.
If the display is 1080p, you could view it from 6 feet and it would look great.

You should set your cable box's internal menu so it outputs the native resolution of your display--720p and 16 x 9--or, if the display is 1080p, then set the cable box to output 1080i. You want the fewest scaling and conversions possible for the best picture quality, and HDMI isn't necessarily superior to component video. If you get superior image quality going directly from the cable box to one of the inputs on your display, then use that connection.

Regards,
Alan

Thanks Alan. The TV is actually 1080i. So, it sounds like I have the cable box set right: 16X9 and 1080i. On the distances from the TV to the couch, sounds like I'll be o.k. as I have about 14.5 feet to play with.

I am not happy about the TV being above the fireplace. What I was trying to avoid by using that configuration was having the back of the couch too close to the fireplace, as the only other option is to move the TV to the opposite wall of the fireplace (and thus have the couch "in front of" the fireplace). However, it sounds like I can have the couch much closer to the TV then I had planned. If I put the couch at about 8-9' from the 1080i 10", that will leave 5-6' between the couch and the fireplace. Having that setup actually is much better for a lot of reasons.

I'm so glad I posted my questions!