AV Education on RHT Installing LCD TVs Everywhere Written by Bryan Dailey Why is it that the best ideas always come in the bathroom? From the first moment I laid my eyes on a small wall-mounted LCD TV on the wall above the urinals at a high-end golf course in Las Vegas several years ago, I knew that someday my dream home was destined to have TVs like this in the bathrooms, too. When I first dreamed up this idea, even the smallest of LCD TVs were well over $1,000 and the picture quality was marginal at best. As prices have fallen and the quality of the picture of most LCD panel TVs has gone up, the idea of having several rooms with wall-mounted TVs began to creep into my mind as well. Having moved into a new town home a few months back, I decided I would have things pre-wired for my harebrained ...

RHT How To: Whole House Audio How-To: A Homeowner’s Guide to Planning a Whole-House Audio Distribution System By Joe Hageman March 2005 In Part 1 of this How-To adventure, I discussed the various types of audio distribution systems available. But which one is right for you? Do you have to spend upwards of $50K and rewire your entire house to accommodate dozens of pairs of speakers and LCD touch screens? Of course not, but as is the case with most things in life, you get what you pay for. Choosing the right audio distribution system for you depends on many different factors from the size of your house to how long you plan on living there. More important, it depends on your lifestyle and how often you plan on using the system. If you never entertain or lead such a busy work life that you’re rarely at home, spending a small fortune on a distributed ...

AV Education on RHT Protecting Your Software Collection Written by Jerry Del Colliano Introduction With consumers flocking to all sorts of new server-based storage systems, ranging from Apple iPods to Media Center PCs to video servers like Kaliedescape’s $27,000 system, one truth remains: we still need to find a good storage solution for our physical CDs and DVDs. While some throw caution to the wind and simply trade in their discs as soon as they get a new server, those end users are playing a high stakes game of poker. Anyone who has seen a hard drive fail or a record company sue a consumer knows it is best to keep those discs as a backup in the event that someday you will need them. From the early days of the compact disc, consumers were told that CDs and DVDs are virtually indestructible. I think the marketing line was “perfect sound forever.” The truth is that ...

RHT How To: Whole House Audio How-To: A Homeowner’s Guide to Planning a Whole-House Audio Distribution System By Joe Hageman February 2005 The dream: To own an affordable whole-house audio system that effortlessly pipes music throughout your home, where all the components “talk” harmoniously to one another as if they were one symbiotic unit. Reality: This stuff is expensive, can be down-right tricky to operate and even though we can beam back images from the Red Planet, we can’t seem to figure out how to get audio/video components to talk to one another without a virtual argument ensuing. Welcome to the wonderful world of custom home audio distribution, where the homeowner is a slave to a bunch of temperamental black boxes often run by proprietary software that even the most ardent computer whiz would struggle to figure out.

AV Education on RHT Darkness: A Theater's Best Friend Written by Michael Levy As a child, Sundays were frequently spent at the local Lowe’s Paradise Theater. It truly was a paradise for me. How little I knew back then that I was watching a medium at the height of its glory. The screen was huge and often opened into panoramic width. There were dimly lit stars on the ceiling, feigning a midnight sky as I watched the stars on the screen. Everything was dark maroon. The seats and the walls were velvet. The only lights during movies were dimly lit guides to your seat on the floor. My first memories of it were from when I was very young. I was small enough to sink into the plush seat and in love with movies enough to be lost in the new world on the screen projected through the darkness. Yes, darkness, an important ...