Creating an acceptable home cinema, or listening to movies like music
A story about his own experience of creating a home "cinema" with great sound quality, convenient controls and good capabilities based on the Mac Mini. A lot of photos and text! Have a nice read!
The first thing I started building my own “cinema” was the choice of acoustics, no matter how strange it might sound. The fact is that initially I did not plan to collect the “cinema”, but I strongly wanted to listen to music in a very high quality, although I like movies before I go crazy.
')
It was in the fall of 2007, I went to the bank to receive my first credit card with a limit of 120 thousand rubles. This amount should have been enough for me to buy enough good acoustics and amplifier + I planned to wear a bit of winter. Actually, as if it didn’t sound “audio-masturbation,” I started practicing 10 years ago and, apparently, thanks to my father’s genes. At that time, I absorbed Hi-Fi and Stereo magazines in large numbers and with particular greed, where I often published reviews and tests of various kinds of acoustic and audio systems.
Since then, the increased earnings have finally allowed me to get closer to the realization of my audiophile dreams - the purchase of two Klipsch RF-52 floor towers. The choice fell on them after I accidentally walked through Eldorado in Moscow, not far from home, was searching for my flatmate an iron, in the corner where home theaters were shown was played by some kind of radio station, but with such a high-quality and natural sound that I decided to come closer and consider this miracle ... So I met an unknown to me before the American audio equipment manufacturer Klipsch. As it turned out later, Klipsch was available in stores at that time only in the form of warehouse stocks (as for the model I chose for the price range), that is, it was impossible to come through the amplifier properly. Thus, I made a pre-order "blind" in one trustworthy cabin and went to choose an amplifier.
The cabin was presented not too wide choice of amplifiers and receivers (at that time I still doubted whether to finish building the system to 5.1, or to stop at the amplifier). The order of prices spoke in favor of the amplifier, that is, judging that I would buy a receiver that was clearly not very sound in quality for the same money, the choice was made in favor of a two-channel amplifier.
It took me 20 minutes to listen to listening to several models, since some Cambridge Audio that I planned to initially pair with the full-fledged showed himself in the reference acoustics salon as a piece of metal, no more, I was as disappointed as possible: sound he was deaf, inexpressive, it’s not worth talking about the stage. Then I was advised to be more “alive”, but a little more expensive than the German Vincent SV-129 , after listening quite a bit I fell in love with him! Compared with the previous exhibit, he really lived music. Hooray! We made a purchase, chose speaker cables - Nordost Flatline Gold MkII three meters long - they are very convenient to lay under the carpet., And went home to wait for delivery.
It's been half a year or so ...
Initially, at that time, all the sets were connected to the MacBook Pro via the normal Minijack to RCA cable, which naturally did not satisfy me, as I increasingly began to listen to music at lossless, and through the integrated sound card you would not hear much, although I was very pleased with the acoustics paired with an amplifier. The sound in spite of the native sound card was quite dense and alive. But be that as it may, you need to go further, so I got the first DAC (Digital to Analog Converter), which is also the DAC - this is Apogee Duet
In essence, it is a semi-professional home tool for recording instruments, voices, and other things. I chose it mainly on forums, the reviews were impressive, especially since it works consistently on FireWire, though only for Mac, which is not particularly important in my case :) By the way, this thing in Moscow at that time was again difficult to get, As far as I remember, it was only on pre-order in one store, I had to wait 2 weeks, which paid off with a vengeance of very high-quality sound!
After the arrival, the long-awaited period of testing and enjoying music and movies began (so far, alas, on a small 15-inch laptop screen). I connected everything very simply: one end of the FireWire went from Apogee to a MacBook, the second output was connected via an adapter Jack-MiniJack to RCA and to the amplifier input. As a player, I used the most simple, in my opinion, VLC.
The very first film “War of the Worlds” showed what a horn acoustics means, thanks to which the sound is projected into the room. That is, you hear that everything happens around you, you are in the film! And no 5.1 is needed from now on. The scene when the lightning and the hurricane begins, the father and daughter are hiding under the table, the wind has risen and you can hear the kitchen pots jingle in the kitchen ... my neighbor and I looked at each other in suspicion that someone is crawling in the kitchen! That is, the feeling of full presence, the effects are quite accurately guessed in space, as if you can touch them with your hands. A huge scene in front of you, the sound went beyond the screen. And in spite of the lack of a subwoofer in my kit, there was enough bass to feel how something would start getting out of the ground now. I was very impressed with the capabilities of my new system.
I think it makes no sense to write about the difference that I felt when moving from a standard sound card to an external device. I think everyone who loves sound should try to feel it himself! It's trite, but "Heaven and Earth." You did not just take out the corks from your ears, removed all the noise and made inter-track silence really quiet, but also added a scene where you can accurately determine the location of both the vocalist and each instrument.
By the way, in spite of the fact that I used to love listening to music loudly, it turned out that it is not really necessary when you hear a clear sound, this is a merit of both lossless and high-quality DACa. After all, all sounds are audible without tension, and through the noise one does not need to try to listen to all the details of the work. Moreover, exactly in a year of using a quality set-up, my musical tastes changed exactly the opposite, that is, if I used to listen to 90% Trans, House, Break-beat, then today Trans and House are completely gone, Indy, Folk was added , Classical, Jazz, Vocals, Instrumental music and many other genres from the field of "live". But I listened to the previous styles for 10 years!
It is worth mentioning, on the way to my current system, I went through several DACs, because this is essentially the heart of the system, its voice. It was completely stupid to have acquired specifically DAC company Lavry , model DA10. Stuck is not cheap, brought to the hands of the United States (my boss :)). It cost 40,000 rubles at that time, which is 25,000 more expensive than the Apogee! Reviews about him and to this day go great, but when I dragged him home from the office and turned it on, I did not understand why I paid so much money. That is, the sound, though clear, is absolutely soulless, there is no music, there is just sound. Metallic such, though even, but not alive. And then I returned to Apogee, I don’t regret anything! But, now he honestly makes me happy in the office, paired with the Sennheiser HD650, and I chose a frankly, I’ll say, the Chinese VALAB NOS DAC .
The fact is that audiophilia is such a not very pleasant disease: when you want an ever steeper and newer sensation from the sound, you always want to upgrade your system to the maximum, so I was looking for something new to be inserted into the rack. I went to an American resource respected by me, asked me to advise a little more "lively" on the sound of duck, and I was advised to try a completely inexpensive one ( $ 170 ). Which was sold only on eBay, from where it was immediately ordered. Well, it just cost 2 times cheaper than Apogee, and judging by the advice on the forum, it was even “more musical”. After 2 weeks, the box arrived seemingly inconspicuous (it would pull at its price). Trust caused the filling (in the heart is the legendary TDA1543 , developed 20 years ago!). The subjective wiretapping showed a minimal difference in the sound, that is, the quality did not suffer, but the music played a little differently. More vintage chtoli. Bass has become much more ... more thoroughbred. But, I had to sacrifice the depth of the stage and lost some tools. In general, it sounds a little different, but overall very soulful.
Far from it, I still went broke for 15-17 thousand rubles and later bought a 32 "HD-Ready Samsung TV. Quite a good LE32S81B model that works every hundred rubles a hundred percent, the only thing that is not enough support for full-HD Yes, it’s too small. But in general, the impression is quite at the level, yes, it’s not a plasma or a Full-HD projector, but where we are, resources sometimes have to be redistributed. As a TV, I never used this panel at all, thus the concept of its qualities are both sound and signal by cable I do not have. About how the panel to display the video signal via HDMI fits perfectly.
There is a truth and a spoon of tar, although for such a price ... In general, the problem lies in the substantial slowness of the TV when it is turned on + the power button does not always work, it is necessary to press very accurately so that everything works out:
The TV connected to the laptop using the DVI to HDMI cord from DUNE, everything works quite satisfactorily to this day, but on Mac Mini, which is a little lower :)
There was a moment when I used the Apple TV as a multimedia set-top box, everything in it was fine and the interface, and integration with Apple services. But. There was a sea of ​​cons as well:
Honestly, I was not lucky with my first Mac Mini, I bought it last winter. The fact was that as soon as any movie was launched, any software, even the screen saver, started to work very loudly with coolers, I honestly did not know what to do with it. He stood in the room where I was sleeping, stayed on at night to serve as a torrent client, but the trouble annoyed me with a noise, but rather I didn’t understand what was going on and sold the baby. At the moment I use the new version of Mac Mini Mid 2009 with 2.0 Ghz Core 2 Duo, gigabytes of DDR3 memory on board, and so stuffing on the little things. Distributes Wi-Fi to a working laptop. For all the software is responsible last Snow Leo, for the Plex multimedia entertainment.
Plex was not chosen by chance, firstly: at that moment, he was the only one without a stutter who was playing Blue-ray Remux movies with AVC-1 codec; secondly: the interface is very pleasant, almost Apple-like.
Setting it up took me a full evening, the program is not quite easy to learn, that is, even adding a movie to a media library is not at all trivial at first glance. Apparently, the authors themselves admit this by adding video clips on how to configure this combine in Help. But as soon as everything starts to work predictably ... harmony comes.
But the plex must be controlled, and even preferably by the usual methods. Many people choose a keyboard connected via Bluetooth, but this is not our way, that’s it:
Remote controller! Logitech Harmony One : a little thing around 7,000 rubles. The magic thing is, if you learn how to use the bundled software, the benefit of the Wiki Plex is a detailed description of how to configure it for the program.
In principle, everything is simple: add all the equipment that you have and should be controlled from the console and create a list of actions. The beauty of universal remotes is that some of the buttons work for the amplifier (volume control), another part for switching channels, or act as arrows to navigate the menu in the Plex, the third turns the TV on and off. I have heard about universal control panels for a long time, but I didn’t guess so that they could do it! Very cool stuff.
Specifically, this mozheli has an LCD display on which the current preset is displayed, a list of actions available to it. Presets are created so that the console knows when to allocate certain buttons for the necessary tasks, that is, you can create a separate preset for playing the console, and when activated, it will redistribute the buttons to control the console instead of the Mac Mini.
Also, after the “fine” setting of the delays in the signal transmission from the console, I achieved a good result - it works great with an amplifier, without any delays:
But with the Plex it was not possible to do everything with a bang - the delays are present, though not very noticeable:
I received a wonderful home cinema and audio system in one bottle, all movies and music are stored on Western Digital external hard drives:
From left to right: WD Studio 2TB Raid 1 FireWire, WD MyBook 1TB USB, WD MyBook 2TB USB.
At first, I strained a long disk spillage when accessing, now I’m getting used to it, but I think about NAS with RAID 5, connect it via Airport Extreme via cable, and connect it to the Mac Mini ... In general, there is much more to upgrade, the field is not plowed. But at this stage, you can afford to spend the holidays at the TV getting real pleasure :)
As for the price, I will try to estimate:
In theory, you can save money by buying instead of the Mac Mini a modern nettop based on ION, thus keeping within 90 thousand by receiving an incredibly high-quality sound in both the cinema and music!
But in general, it will only be more expensive, the system will have to be distributed sooner or later (music separately, movies separately), the price may be just astronomical, but for now I have no plans to change everything for the next few years.
Thanks for attention! The post is dedicated to lovers of sound and music! Good luck and I will be glad to help with what I can.
PS My first post here, do not swear much, if something is wrong, I will be corrected. I photographed a soap box late in the evening, for which there is a separate sorry.
Acoustics
The first thing I started building my own “cinema” was the choice of acoustics, no matter how strange it might sound. The fact is that initially I did not plan to collect the “cinema”, but I strongly wanted to listen to music in a very high quality, although I like movies before I go crazy.
')
It was in the fall of 2007, I went to the bank to receive my first credit card with a limit of 120 thousand rubles. This amount should have been enough for me to buy enough good acoustics and amplifier + I planned to wear a bit of winter. Actually, as if it didn’t sound “audio-masturbation,” I started practicing 10 years ago and, apparently, thanks to my father’s genes. At that time, I absorbed Hi-Fi and Stereo magazines in large numbers and with particular greed, where I often published reviews and tests of various kinds of acoustic and audio systems.
Since then, the increased earnings have finally allowed me to get closer to the realization of my audiophile dreams - the purchase of two Klipsch RF-52 floor towers. The choice fell on them after I accidentally walked through Eldorado in Moscow, not far from home, was searching for my flatmate an iron, in the corner where home theaters were shown was played by some kind of radio station, but with such a high-quality and natural sound that I decided to come closer and consider this miracle ... So I met an unknown to me before the American audio equipment manufacturer Klipsch. As it turned out later, Klipsch was available in stores at that time only in the form of warehouse stocks (as for the model I chose for the price range), that is, it was impossible to come through the amplifier properly. Thus, I made a pre-order "blind" in one trustworthy cabin and went to choose an amplifier.
Amplifier
The cabin was presented not too wide choice of amplifiers and receivers (at that time I still doubted whether to finish building the system to 5.1, or to stop at the amplifier). The order of prices spoke in favor of the amplifier, that is, judging that I would buy a receiver that was clearly not very sound in quality for the same money, the choice was made in favor of a two-channel amplifier.
It took me 20 minutes to listen to listening to several models, since some Cambridge Audio that I planned to initially pair with the full-fledged showed himself in the reference acoustics salon as a piece of metal, no more, I was as disappointed as possible: sound he was deaf, inexpressive, it’s not worth talking about the stage. Then I was advised to be more “alive”, but a little more expensive than the German Vincent SV-129 , after listening quite a bit I fell in love with him! Compared with the previous exhibit, he really lived music. Hooray! We made a purchase, chose speaker cables - Nordost Flatline Gold MkII three meters long - they are very convenient to lay under the carpet., And went home to wait for delivery.
It's been half a year or so ...
Dac
Initially, at that time, all the sets were connected to the MacBook Pro via the normal Minijack to RCA cable, which naturally did not satisfy me, as I increasingly began to listen to music at lossless, and through the integrated sound card you would not hear much, although I was very pleased with the acoustics paired with an amplifier. The sound in spite of the native sound card was quite dense and alive. But be that as it may, you need to go further, so I got the first DAC (Digital to Analog Converter), which is also the DAC - this is Apogee Duet
In essence, it is a semi-professional home tool for recording instruments, voices, and other things. I chose it mainly on forums, the reviews were impressive, especially since it works consistently on FireWire, though only for Mac, which is not particularly important in my case :) By the way, this thing in Moscow at that time was again difficult to get, As far as I remember, it was only on pre-order in one store, I had to wait 2 weeks, which paid off with a vengeance of very high-quality sound!
After the arrival, the long-awaited period of testing and enjoying music and movies began (so far, alas, on a small 15-inch laptop screen). I connected everything very simply: one end of the FireWire went from Apogee to a MacBook, the second output was connected via an adapter Jack-MiniJack to RCA and to the amplifier input. As a player, I used the most simple, in my opinion, VLC.
The very first film “War of the Worlds” showed what a horn acoustics means, thanks to which the sound is projected into the room. That is, you hear that everything happens around you, you are in the film! And no 5.1 is needed from now on. The scene when the lightning and the hurricane begins, the father and daughter are hiding under the table, the wind has risen and you can hear the kitchen pots jingle in the kitchen ... my neighbor and I looked at each other in suspicion that someone is crawling in the kitchen! That is, the feeling of full presence, the effects are quite accurately guessed in space, as if you can touch them with your hands. A huge scene in front of you, the sound went beyond the screen. And in spite of the lack of a subwoofer in my kit, there was enough bass to feel how something would start getting out of the ground now. I was very impressed with the capabilities of my new system.
I think it makes no sense to write about the difference that I felt when moving from a standard sound card to an external device. I think everyone who loves sound should try to feel it himself! It's trite, but "Heaven and Earth." You did not just take out the corks from your ears, removed all the noise and made inter-track silence really quiet, but also added a scene where you can accurately determine the location of both the vocalist and each instrument.
By the way, in spite of the fact that I used to love listening to music loudly, it turned out that it is not really necessary when you hear a clear sound, this is a merit of both lossless and high-quality DACa. After all, all sounds are audible without tension, and through the noise one does not need to try to listen to all the details of the work. Moreover, exactly in a year of using a quality set-up, my musical tastes changed exactly the opposite, that is, if I used to listen to 90% Trans, House, Break-beat, then today Trans and House are completely gone, Indy, Folk was added , Classical, Jazz, Vocals, Instrumental music and many other genres from the field of "live". But I listened to the previous styles for 10 years!
It is worth mentioning, on the way to my current system, I went through several DACs, because this is essentially the heart of the system, its voice. It was completely stupid to have acquired specifically DAC company Lavry , model DA10. Stuck is not cheap, brought to the hands of the United States (my boss :)). It cost 40,000 rubles at that time, which is 25,000 more expensive than the Apogee! Reviews about him and to this day go great, but when I dragged him home from the office and turned it on, I did not understand why I paid so much money. That is, the sound, though clear, is absolutely soulless, there is no music, there is just sound. Metallic such, though even, but not alive. And then I returned to Apogee, I don’t regret anything! But, now he honestly makes me happy in the office, paired with the Sennheiser HD650, and I chose a frankly, I’ll say, the Chinese VALAB NOS DAC .
The fact is that audiophilia is such a not very pleasant disease: when you want an ever steeper and newer sensation from the sound, you always want to upgrade your system to the maximum, so I was looking for something new to be inserted into the rack. I went to an American resource respected by me, asked me to advise a little more "lively" on the sound of duck, and I was advised to try a completely inexpensive one ( $ 170 ). Which was sold only on eBay, from where it was immediately ordered. Well, it just cost 2 times cheaper than Apogee, and judging by the advice on the forum, it was even “more musical”. After 2 weeks, the box arrived seemingly inconspicuous (it would pull at its price). Trust caused the filling (in the heart is the legendary TDA1543 , developed 20 years ago!). The subjective wiretapping showed a minimal difference in the sound, that is, the quality did not suffer, but the music played a little differently. More vintage chtoli. Bass has become much more ... more thoroughbred. But, I had to sacrifice the depth of the stage and lost some tools. In general, it sounds a little different, but overall very soulful.
Television
Far from it, I still went broke for 15-17 thousand rubles and later bought a 32 "HD-Ready Samsung TV. Quite a good LE32S81B model that works every hundred rubles a hundred percent, the only thing that is not enough support for full-HD Yes, it’s too small. But in general, the impression is quite at the level, yes, it’s not a plasma or a Full-HD projector, but where we are, resources sometimes have to be redistributed. As a TV, I never used this panel at all, thus the concept of its qualities are both sound and signal by cable I do not have. About how the panel to display the video signal via HDMI fits perfectly.
There is a truth and a spoon of tar, although for such a price ... In general, the problem lies in the substantial slowness of the TV when it is turned on + the power button does not always work, it is necessary to press very accurately so that everything works out:
The TV connected to the laptop using the DVI to HDMI cord from DUNE, everything works quite satisfactorily to this day, but on Mac Mini, which is a little lower :)
Not quite him
There was a moment when I used the Apple TV as a multimedia set-top box, everything in it was fine and the interface, and integration with Apple services. But. There was a sea of ​​cons as well:
- To use the entire media library, a constant presence on the iTunes server is required, which tells us about the need to keep your working laptop on forever.
- “Right out of the box” the prefix does not support “heavy” video files, hence the high resolution, and the quality, roughly speaking, is prohibited.
- Looking at this, I was humbled and decided to rent movies in iTunes, downloaded “Dog Midday” for trial from there ... As a result, of course, everything went great, but forgive the quality, like a TV rip!
Mac mini
Honestly, I was not lucky with my first Mac Mini, I bought it last winter. The fact was that as soon as any movie was launched, any software, even the screen saver, started to work very loudly with coolers, I honestly did not know what to do with it. He stood in the room where I was sleeping, stayed on at night to serve as a torrent client, but the trouble annoyed me with a noise, but rather I didn’t understand what was going on and sold the baby. At the moment I use the new version of Mac Mini Mid 2009 with 2.0 Ghz Core 2 Duo, gigabytes of DDR3 memory on board, and so stuffing on the little things. Distributes Wi-Fi to a working laptop. For all the software is responsible last Snow Leo, for the Plex multimedia entertainment.
Plex was not chosen by chance, firstly: at that moment, he was the only one without a stutter who was playing Blue-ray Remux movies with AVC-1 codec; secondly: the interface is very pleasant, almost Apple-like.
Setting it up took me a full evening, the program is not quite easy to learn, that is, even adding a movie to a media library is not at all trivial at first glance. Apparently, the authors themselves admit this by adding video clips on how to configure this combine in Help. But as soon as everything starts to work predictably ... harmony comes.
But the plex must be controlled, and even preferably by the usual methods. Many people choose a keyboard connected via Bluetooth, but this is not our way, that’s it:
Remote controller! Logitech Harmony One : a little thing around 7,000 rubles. The magic thing is, if you learn how to use the bundled software, the benefit of the Wiki Plex is a detailed description of how to configure it for the program.
In principle, everything is simple: add all the equipment that you have and should be controlled from the console and create a list of actions. The beauty of universal remotes is that some of the buttons work for the amplifier (volume control), another part for switching channels, or act as arrows to navigate the menu in the Plex, the third turns the TV on and off. I have heard about universal control panels for a long time, but I didn’t guess so that they could do it! Very cool stuff.
Specifically, this mozheli has an LCD display on which the current preset is displayed, a list of actions available to it. Presets are created so that the console knows when to allocate certain buttons for the necessary tasks, that is, you can create a separate preset for playing the console, and when activated, it will redistribute the buttons to control the console instead of the Mac Mini.
Also, after the “fine” setting of the delays in the signal transmission from the console, I achieved a good result - it works great with an amplifier, without any delays:
But with the Plex it was not possible to do everything with a bang - the delays are present, though not very noticeable:
Eventually:
I received a wonderful home cinema and audio system in one bottle, all movies and music are stored on Western Digital external hard drives:
From left to right: WD Studio 2TB Raid 1 FireWire, WD MyBook 1TB USB, WD MyBook 2TB USB.
At first, I strained a long disk spillage when accessing, now I’m getting used to it, but I think about NAS with RAID 5, connect it via Airport Extreme via cable, and connect it to the Mac Mini ... In general, there is much more to upgrade, the field is not plowed. But at this stage, you can afford to spend the holidays at the TV getting real pleasure :)
As for the price, I will try to estimate:
- Klipsch RF-52 = 29,000
- Vincent SV-129 = 27,500
- VALAB NOS DAC = 6,000
- Mac Mini = 38,000
- Samsung LE32S81B = 17,000
In theory, you can save money by buying instead of the Mac Mini a modern nettop based on ION, thus keeping within 90 thousand by receiving an incredibly high-quality sound in both the cinema and music!
But in general, it will only be more expensive, the system will have to be distributed sooner or later (music separately, movies separately), the price may be just astronomical, but for now I have no plans to change everything for the next few years.
Thanks for attention! The post is dedicated to lovers of sound and music! Good luck and I will be glad to help with what I can.
PS My first post here, do not swear much, if something is wrong, I will be corrected. I photographed a soap box late in the evening, for which there is a separate sorry.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/79752/
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