My living room AV install. Work in progress with pics.

[muffking]

You'll never beleive me, but here goes.
£200 to have the ceiling plasterboarded and skimmed, then another £400 to have the all the walls bonded, plastered, including straightening the chimney breast ready for the fireplace to go on.
They were a couple of council plasterers who did it as a cash job on the side. They even threw in half an industrial sized tub of tile adhesive for me to fix the marble fireplace on with so I threw in a bottle of rum

 

[markvirgo]

very nice job.

where did you buy the speaker sockets from?.

 

[muffking]

TLC electronics. They started off as blanks, but I ground square holes with a Dremel drill and fitted spring clips from CPC.

 

[hughesey]

very nice muffking
wanna come round mine and set me one up in my barn?

 

[muffking]

Hey, it could be arranged.

 

[Koolvin]

hiya,

that's nice and well thought out!

Can you tell me where you got your curtains and blinds from?

Cheers,
Vin.

 

[Bazdaa]

Where did you see curtain blinds?

 

[toxictoad]

Where did you see curtain blinds?

nice job muffking, I notice you got a new speaker setup rolled in(with your projector/plasma?!)...looks like the money you saved by doing the job yourself was well spent

 

[Bazdaa]

Found it, had to go there manually!

 

[muffking]

Sorry for the delay guys, I changed my email address and forgot to update it in my profile.

Can you tell me where you got your curtains and blinds from?

The vertical blinds came from Argos, but the curtains themselves came from Dunelm Mill.

nice job muffking, I notice you got a new speaker setup rolled in(with your projector/plasma?!)...looks like the money you saved by doing the job yourself was well spent

I'm in the consumer electronics trade mate, so I spent much less than you'd think on the Plasma, Projector, speakers, amp etc. but this is my first house, so I had to stick to a budget as I had to get used to paying a mortgage.

 

[colindj69]

Hiya people, I must say it's nice to see someone do similar to myself, ie hiding wires, built in stuff's etc

I am a bit of an A/V fan myself and one thing that 'grinds my gears' is lots of big cables.... everywhere....
I got so fed up of it that I decided to take an angle grinder to my concrete walls and bury every single wire... Took lots of planning though as I wanted to keep mains away from signal wires but after much dust, my whole living room is virtually wire free... (that's on a 6.1 system so lots of cables, 3 speaker cables went over the door frame, not nice)
The really nice thing is that I have 8 cables going to my projector that were all flowing down the wall but not any more....

A tip for ya but you probably already know this, use decent cables... seriously, why bother having a 6.1 at all if you are gonna use cheap leads. Also cheap leads will probably go wrong in time and thats bad if they are buried in a wall.

 

[muffking]

In some respects I do wish that I had burried more cables into the wall as I'm replacing the projector with a HD Ready model , but don't have a HD connection going to it

 

[AdamW]

I've been holding fire on HDTV: The sets are pretty decent value in my opinion, and I was quite tempted by a 32" LG recently.

But I am yet to see any 1080-line hardware at anything less than super-premium prices. Certainly not in the UK at least (need that HDCP-compliant connector!)

I wouldn't want to buy an expensive screen if I couldn't make full use of the available signal. If you spend the best part of a grand on a TV you want it to last!

So, I'm going to hold on until there are 1080-line sets in the £1000 bracket, or until I suddenly find I'm considerably richer than I am now! Also I would have to find a place for my current Sony Wega and it is far too chunky to go in my bedroom.

 

[muffking]

When you say 1080 line sets for £1000 i'm guessing that you mean TV's that can process a 1080 line signal as there are no sub £3k screen that actually display 1080 lines with them usually having 768 lines.
Get a good one though as it's not the fact that the TV has a HDMI input and can receive 1080 line signals that make it a good TV, it's the processing and quality of the panel that make it a good TV.

 

[AdamW]

Noooo, I want one that will DISPLAY 1080 for that!

And I need the HDCP-compliant connector because any HD-DVD, BD or HD-SKY boxes will need it (well, first gen Sky boxes don't, but I would rather not limit the life of my equipment if I can help it0

So, whilst I wouldn't turn down a free HDTV, I will be saving my money until I can buy a full-spec set (i.e. 1080 lines) for what I think is a reasonable cost. I'm sure I won't really wait for them to be below £1000, but I don't think I'll buy one until I can afford 1080.

Apparently many HDTVs take the 1080-line signal, halve it and then multiply it by 1.5 (this might be the 3:2 pulldown you hear about), so in reality they are only displaying 540-lines when given a 1080-broadcast!!! Which is worse than the 576 lines of PAL! Sure there may be less artefacts due to better compression methods, but I would still feel cheated if my expensive HDTV was showing me effectively 540 lines.