My new man cave

[naughty]

im sure that everybody knows that my interests lean heavily toward Hi-Fi audio and music and lean slightly toward PC tech as well in terms of having decent rigs that generally would look different from being a standard beige or white box

so i have combined these interests in making my bedroom into a "man cave" that is a pretty decent place to be if those are your interests - and the result is pretty good to be a basis of a pretty incredible gaming experience too - even though im not a hardcore gamer by any means

but im confident that no-one wants to read me prattling on too much so on to the pics (note im going to discard the work in progress pics since i did not create a project log here - but im just going to concentrate on describing the finished product)

the view as you enter the room - the first thing you will see is my modded PC



the equipment rack - HP microserver at the bottom - this is going to contain all my media on a bunch of hard drives and i want to add one more there



the screen is a 40" 3D LED TV which has been tilt wall-mounted



a few more pics of the screen





at night in the darkened room



the front speakers are wall mounted as depicted above and here is what the rear speakers look like

left



right



subwoofers

[naughty]

lots of trunking went into making the wiring of this setup especially neat





now a setup like this is useless without a chair and also is pretty much useless if you have nowhere on the rack to place a keyboard and mouse and given that the screen is a 40" model (maybe soon to change to a 55" LED because 3D looks better on a bigger screen)

so i gave my chair a bit of a makeover too - i extended the armrests like so with a bit of wood



and i placed a platform on those extended armrests using them like rails - like so



so no matter how thin or fat you are you can slide the platfform to a place where its comfortable to type ..... and yup before anyone asks .... i am a bit of a fatty so when im seated that platform moves closer to the edge of those rail extensions

just to give you an idea of how much cable the trunking is hiding

this



became this



okay - so to complete it i still have to plug in the gigabit switch and ADSL/3G router and route the network cables but thats a small job to complete - just need to get a bit more cat5 cable before im ready to complete the job

the rig is ready for gaming as well as music playback and movie playback and i also have HD DSTV connected to it via splitting the HDMI output at the main DSTV setup in the lounge so yep its pretty close to being an ideal all in one entertainment setup and when the network setup is completed its going to add multi-room functionality to the mix ie the lounge system will do everything as above as will my mom's room and also my bothers room and all the media will be shared over the network and DSTV extraview

[naughty]

the lounge setup looks pretty much like this



and it caters mainly for stereo music and the large plasma is mainly for the big football games (plasma is better for sport due to less motion blur)

the equipment rack



only thing really left to more-or-less complete the lounge is some acoustic room treatment to prevent reflections of sound waves from the walls

and im going to either add a mede8er to this setup or maybe get another microserver here too to receive all the media via the network to play it back here

[StarBound]

Cavemen cooked their meals with fire (if they could make it) while ManCavemen cook their food with the overclocked hardware (if eskom doesn't blackout).

[hamin_aus]

I think naughty is a pretty cool guy, eh coverts rooms and doesn't afraid of anything

Also, jelly

[Tribble]

I don't know anyone who isn't jelly

[SykomantiS]

Me...?

Mine has a sleeper bar in- though admittedly not much more (yet) - one day, hopefully not too far in the future, there will also be an entertainment system with a beeeeeg tv


But still- nice going

[naughty]

with a beeeeeg tv

i was just looking at one of those last weekend - Dion wired is demoing an LG 84" 4k ultraHD at R170k ...... if those prices remain i might be able to afford one in maybe 10 years time

[Molean]

Awesome setup! and great work on the cabling...if it is one thing I can't stand, it is a big pile of messy cables!

[naughty]

Awesome setup! and great work on the cabling...if it is one thing I can't stand, it is a big pile of messy cables!

im hoping to avoid that when i do the network cabling - i was considering getting Cat 5 cables made up to exact sizes but the problem with this is if i decide to move something then im stuck with a cable that gets to an exact spot only so i decided to buy a few ready-made cables of regular sizes - so i have to hide the extra leftover cable

so hopefully this lot doesnt turn into a mess

heres all the stuff that i need to actually now install and hide in there somewhere during the course of this weekend

the router and switch .... the Sitecomm gigabit switch is the white unit on the left and the D-Link ADSL router with 3G fallback is the unit on the right



the cables



i used double sided tape to tape up the router and switch together - i copied all the serial numbers and passwords etc all printed on the back labels of the router first



viewed from the rear - it looks like its just one unit which is going to allow for all the network connectivity ie wired and wireless (the router will handle the wireless as well as the internet connectivity while the switch will handle all the components that are wired to the network)



hopefully i can get a lot of this stuff into the trunking and whatever slack there is can go under the rack and be hidden - so while underneath the rack may be a wiring mess it wont be seen at all

[SykomantiS]

Aren't you covering the ventilation slots on the router and switch by taping them together?
Not sure where you live but in Pta I've had issues with a Netgear router and heat- and that wasn't taped to anything

[naughty]

Aren't you covering the ventilation slots on the router and switch by taping them together?
Not sure where you live but in Pta I've had issues with a Netgear router and heat- and that wasn't taped to anything

if it does start becoming an issue i will just remove the double sided tape and keep these things separate - thats not hard to do

[naughty]

So this weekend i was going to sort out the network aspects of the system but there were a few other things that i was unhappy with - if you look at some of the pics up above the TV and the speakers are sitting a bit highish and also the rear surround speakers are too far apart to actually give a satisfactory surround effect - so i decided to rectify these issues instead.

i had to buy around R300 worth of double sided tape to actually get the trunking back on at the corrected places - and basically i am far happier with how the system looks now - the speaker wall mounts are lower and dont need as much of a tilt - so i actually put in the bigger Ikon 2's in the front and got the Ikon1's at the rear as they should be

the original TV and front speaker height



i dropped the TV by 250mm and now you cannot see much of a gap between the TV and the centre speaker - also i tried the centre speaker forward right to the edge of the rack and back like this - and it actually sounds better at the back like this



then i also decided to try it out with one sub only - and it doesnt make much difference in having one sub a wee bit louder or having the two subs both a wee bit softer since this room is actually just only around 10 square metres ie 3m x 3.3m so its just more-or-less a cubicle .... if i dont use the sub i have a buddy who is building up a system and has been begging me to sell him one of these - so maybe i might let it go if i dont actually use it



the speaker wall mounts have been dropped by 400mm and hence as i have mentioned they dont need to be tilted downward as much - plus i have placed the bigger speakers at the front - these sound a fair bit better in stereo mode .... and after taking this pic i noticed that i did not clean the lowest shelf of the sawdust left over from all the re-drilling i had to do on the wall

the rear surrounds were absolutely too far apart and were actually as wide as the rear speakers and this is normally incorrect - so i basically got them closer together as well by moving them around 400mm toward each other - so the gap between them is around 1.2 metres only now



and while i had the trunking opened to shorten the length i ran some of the smaller bits of network cable that have to plugged in for the network aspects - just got to run the longer cables into the other rooms and then i will connect up the router and switch

[americantsm1]

Very nice may the man cave bring you much happiness!
I really like how you ran all the cables and 'hid' them as best you can. Nothing more annoying than falling all over cables all the time especially when you have guitars and amps all plugged in all over! I shall try to remember this in a few months when I make-up a mancave ... let me explain:

For my husband's 30th birthday my gift to him is going to be making him a man cave when we move into our new house with his drum kit, guitars, amps, subs, and some sort of hi-fi set up so that he can record things that he plays (he writes music), a poker table, and of course a bar fridge (who wants to walk all the way to the kitchen to get a whiskey?). So do you by any chance no anything about sound proofing? I am just a little worried about having all that noise with a newborn around lolz so ... any advice on sound proofing would be helpful and no, I do not want to use egg cartons as it always ends up looking messy and I want it all to look awesome.

[naughty]

So do you by any chance no anything about sound proofing?

not really too much since i never ever had to sound proof anything

i know a bit about sound treatments regarding absorption and diffusion and bass traps - but that isnt really to prevent sound from being transmitted to another place but its more about treating the walls of the place so it does not affect the actual sound that you hear by causing reflections

having said that you may find that what you want done is mostly absorption of sound - so in that respect for some basic stuff you can use carpets on the floor and also large curtains at the doors and windows (you also get some absorptive backing if you search for acoustic curtains)

other than for that i cannot suggest much by way of actual soundproofing - since i have a few ideas of how to do it if im scratch building a studio but how to sort out a pre-built room is a little beyond my rather limited knowledge - i do know that if you are serious about it then its going to require false ceilings and double walls with insulation materials inbetween layers etc but i dont wan tto suggest things like that since it is likely to be very expensive

i think the cheapest way with a decent effect would be to actually carpet the walls too since that would create a huge amount of absorption and then use the curtains on the windows ...... but alas im afraid if you want better information you may be better off looking at Google cos that may be more reliable than what i would be able to tell you

[americantsm1]

lol ok thanks hun! I will look into it!

[doo_much]

www.genesisacoustics.co.za

They advise and supply everything you might need and you install it yourself. Or get a handyman to do it.

[naughty]

i have tried using a two way HDMI splitter to split my HD DSTV signal in a way that i could either watch in the lounge or in the bedroom setup - and for this purpose i had an ellies 2 way splitter. The issue with this splitter was that when i switched the TV in the lounge off and put on the TV in the bedroom it began to have HDMI handshake issues whereby every 10 to 15 minutes the signal would get completely lost and the screen went blank for around 2 to 3 seconds and then came back on again

the funny thing was that if you had both TV's on at the same time for some reaon or the other it worked perfectly but the idea was to split the signal so that i could use either one or the other but not both at the same time

the solution was that i now ordered one of these



this is an HDMI matrix switcher splitter - you can connect 4 sources and have all of them playing on two two TV's either simultaneously or select whichever source you like for whichever TV you want it to be playing on SO for example if you wanted blu-ray in one room and HD DSTV in another then you simply select the relevant source in the relevant split selector on the remote control

the idea is to eventually have an HDMI 1.4 version which is going to be a 4 x 4 switcher capable of splitting to 4 different TV's but this might mean a whole bang lot of long HDMI cables all over the place - so one of those versions which work with ethernet cables may do the trick better but these are pretty expensive ie around R7300 so for now i am just going to try this 4 x 2 version just for the DSTV

i could get a bit more ambitious a little later and take the actual decoder into my room and then use this to switch between the AV receiver and the DSTV decoder - so i can take either whatever source is connected to the AVR and playing currently into the lounge or have it in my room - and i need to just sort it out so that the ellies remote blaster works for all my source and amplification equipment

the network is sorted but for now im having a slight issue because im using win 7 64 bit in my main PC as well as in the PC in my brothers room and then im using win 7 32 bit in the microserver and this is causing some user permission issues so i just need to sort it out so that i format and install win 7 64 bit into the microserver and hopefully this will allow all forms of content and media sharing without permission issues but once i get that sorted then the network is fully operational and the last thing to do there is when my 3G contract expires im going back to uncapped ADSL and allow that to also share over the network

[naughty]

okay - the matrix unit from HD Cabling arrived - got it setup so that i took the DSTV decoder into my bedroom secondary setup and this is what it looks like



so now i have the HD DSTV decoder as source one and the AVR connected as source two - so i can select between whats playing on the AVR and DSTV in both the bedroom as well as the lounge and while its playing in the lounge i have the remote blaster connected to use so that i can actually use the remotes in the lounge and have them working properly (works perfect)

so i dont actually need any network functionality in the lounge since i can have a a different source playing in the lounge via the HDMI matrix unit as compared to the bedroom setup all from the one location using that HDMI matrix for the multiroom aspects

the 20metre HDMI cable also works absolutely perfectly ..... i was inititally worried cos HD Cabling states that the matrix unit was designed for a max cable length of 15 metres and would probably require an amplifier - but the TV in the lounge looks as good as it did when the DSTV was in the same room ..... so im a happy camper and the system is beginning to take shape ...... only issue is the amount of cables i have running in the trunking now - even though i have trimmed those down to size its a bulky and cumbersome lot to administer .... once i get that sorted though the functionality of the systems has just increased in large magnitudes - only just need a 3D TV in the lounge on a decent extending fully adjustable wall mount bracket now and im close to having a complete top notch home entertainment setup

[naughty]

i was just playing around with the HTPC and i took some photos of how the systems are working now

XBMC open in the bedroom system on the LED TV



XBMC open in the lounge system on the plasma TV



DSTV in the lounge system transmitted via that 20 metre HDMI cable playing as source 2 in the lounge system while the bedroom system is still playing the HTPC



old XBMC interface - the batman folder is not showing a picture because its a folder with the box set in there ie all three of the new Batman movies ripped from blu-ray - so i still have to see if theres a way to actually show one of the fanart covers ..... preferably the first of the series



then i got tired of using this interface and i downloaded some new skins for XBMC - so its a much better looking result





also an interesting GUI overall as can be seen from the following ie the interfaces for :

MUSIC



MOVIES



TV SHOWS - though im not likely to be using my 3G to view TV shows available



so now i have all 3 PC's in the setup configured to operate like this - so im basically now going to seriously consider moving one of the PC's into the lounge because having two in my bedroom is a waste - so i might just move the microserver into the lounge and hopefully the location wont matter due to the speed of the gigabit LAN

also heres how the lounge looks now with all the wiring neatened up and the only visible cables are those monster MIT biwire speaker cables that are thicker than your average hosepipe .... those are never going to fit into any trunking that i know off - other than that the room is in a perfect state to start with the room acoustic treatments now ie its all working properly and looking as good as it can given whats there therefore nothing else that i can do it besides the room treatments