Audio-Video Photos
Living Room / Home Theater
Audio-Video Equipment
Applied Digital Leopard
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Living Room / Home Theater
A 10' diagonal pull-down screen is fed by a Sanyo PLV-70 wide-screen projector.
Moving to a Stewart GrayHawk automatic, electric screen is always on the agenda... but hasn't been a priority.
The room is hardly a good audio environment as it is has a lot of hard surfaces, but with the open back and plenty of direct power to the Thiels, it works out fine. The rear surrounds are in-ceiling NHTs; they don't show in any of these pictures.
The screen - even with the handle sticking down - is barely visible.
Note the absence of any electronics equipment. Everything is located in another room and all controls are by touch-screen controller.
Once the screen is fully down, it dominates the room.
While the acoustics of the room are hardly ideal (hard-wood floors, eight foot ceiling, glass across the viewing wall and to the side), the open back and side keep it from being much worse than it could be. We considered light- and noise-blocking curtains, but the views through those windows kept us from doing it. We overlook Newport Beach's Back Bay and have a view that ranges from the San Bernardino mountains (occaisionally covered in snow in winter) to the bay and extends far enough to enjoy ten or so fireworks shows on Independence Day. The acoustics will have to suffer for now - though we've considered adding a large "theater" room in the future.
The lighting is dimmable and pre-settable. A home automation "theater scene" activated by choosing a movie from the touch-screen controller lowers the lights, turns on the projector, and sets the audio to all the appropriate settings. The electric screen would give it that final touch, as well as improve the picture quality that much more.
The Audio / Video equipment is housed in the downstairs "office" room, with all wiring feeding up the wall and through the attic to the speakers, projector, and automation equipment. Control of the equipment is via Pronto NG IR/RF touch-screen remote controller and Progear / Main Lobby touch-screen computer controllers.
The equipment pictured is (top down):
Sony CX-777ES 400-Disc DVD/SACD Changer
Old Pioneer receiver, serving as temporary zone amplifier
Rotel RSP-1066 Pre-amp / Processor
Panasonic DVD-F85 5-disc DVD/DVD-Audio player
File storage and home-automation server (3GHz P4 HT, 1G, 1T RAID-0)
Audio/Video and storage server (3Ghz P4 HT, 1G, 2T RAID-5)
Rotel RMB-1075 5-channel x 120W Amplifier (driving surround speakers and bedroom zone)
Rotel RB-1090 2-channel x 380W Amplifier (driving Thiel CS-3.6 mains)
After a few questions asked about the servers:
11-Drive-Bay Case from Comupte-Aid
Soyo Dragon 2 Motherboard
Intel Pentium-4 HyperThreading 3.0Ghz processor
1GB Kingston RAM
Silent cooling with a MONSTER Zalman CPU fan in silent mode
and an adjustable speed 5-1/4" fan on the front intake of the case (blowing directly on the hard drives)
and quiet Enermax three-fan 500-watt power supply with adjustable fan speeds (turned way down) for sound abatement).
2 Mirrored 250G boot drives
8 Maxtor EIDE 250G drives in the RAID5 array
8-Port (3WARE 7506-8 RAID-5 Controller).
The 3Ware system alerts me by email every time there is a verify done (every 12 hours) and notifies me of any failures.
M-Audio 410 PCI sound-card with four analog and a digital out
(Any sound card would do... but I wanted multiple outputs for multiple simultaneous audio streams at high quality.)
All equipment is monitored for temperature and failures with Motherboard Monitor and emails me if there is an issue.
Case temp is solid at approximately 125F and CPU temp solid at around 120F.
Going from just two drives to ten drives drove the overall temp up by about 10F (to 125F) after fans were readjusted.
Both servers maintain active copies of all crucial data.
Data is synchronized four times a day using Cordes Development's Backer software.
Failures in a backup trigger emails to me.
Antivirus is Eset's NOD32 which notifies me if there is an issue.
The rack is an EAS rotating rack. It pulls out about 18", then rotates.
I tested it with 300 pounds fully extended. It is a rather stout little device.
The wiring may look a bit messy, but that is actually what I'd consider REALLY good.
There are two feeds of component video and multi-channel audio from the two DVD players,
component out to the projector, four zones of audio feed, three VGA outputs from the two servers
and serial and IR controls all over the place. I'm pretty pleased with how well it came out.
Below are some pix of the ADI Leopard touch-screen home controller mounted in the livingroom.
It serves as the primary controller for more "mission critical" systems, such as the sprinklers,
security system, basic lighting controls, and basic audio / visual controls.
The HomeSeer system is used for more complex programming work, but is not as reliable or consistent
as the Leopard. This is not to say HomeSeer is not reliable, but even the best Microsoft server technology
requires much more maintenance than a true controller-class system.
The Leopard is a dedicated computer / controller system that runs a ladder-logic loop of proprietary code
in solid-state, non-volatile memory. This makes it a very reliable system which requires no reboots or patches
and can be powered on or off at any time with no adverse effects. That said, it has seen ZERO downtime in three
years. The only time it is not processing is when it is receiving new code, which is coded and tested in an off-line
environment, then up-loaded to the Leopard to begin processing.
The installation was done by routing the power and control lines through the wall by drilling through the header
from the attic. Diana was gracious enough to allow me to cut a huge hole in the wall to mount it.
I think the final installation came out very professional looking. Functionally, it is the most solid, reliable
piece in the house and it is simple enough to use that most people can stumble through how to turn a light on or off
or turn sprinklers on or off. I'll have to post some screenshots of the system running. These are very old.
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