Downsizing The Entertainment Gear - part 2

Those who read my earlier post about the entertainment stuff know the situation.

What has gone on since then is pretty simple, really.

I followed through on the HK equipment and got a set of freestanding Elfa shelves to use as a new rack for it and the few things I am keeping.  The rest of the old gear has been hauled off to a place in San Jose that will go over it, fix what they can, and sell it all on consignment.  No idea what I will get for it all, but it is out of the house and we have much more air and floor space as a result.

Other than the HK receiver requiring that the TV be on when you change input sources (I guess it has to tell you it is doing something via the screen, even though the front panel notifications are more than adequate) it works perfectly, and sounds great.

I did a lot of digging on wall mounts for the speakers as well, and that is a project coming soon.  There will be a picture in the end, I suspect.  More when I know it.

Downsizing The Entertainment Gear

As per my previous post from sometime back in the dark ages, we are remodeling our kitchen.  In fact, we are almost done, and the results are great.  But, of course, once you start something like this, you discover a slew of other things that need doing.

This post is (I think) the first in an ongoing series of posts about a very specific problem... making a big, ugly, but reasonably nice entertainment system much smaller and nicer, without blowing the budget too far out of the water.

For that to make any sense, you first need some background.

I was an audiophile at one point in my life.  While I never spent thousands of dollars on most of my gear, I own reasonably nice stuff that dates back to the audio equivalent of the Cretaceous period: aka the 1980's and 90's.

Well, that over simplifies, because not everything I have from then still functions or is used.  I long ago gave up entirely on vinyl.  (Why it is making a come back I have no idea.)  I never wanted or liked tubes either.  (Distortion is distortion.  If you like the way your tube amp sounds, that's fine with me, but I don't really care about it.  Solid state amps might sound a tiny bit different than tube amps - particularly when pushed hard - but at my age, and with my ears - the idea that I will hear any difference is laughable.)  Tape is dead, too.

Digital is the way to go, and I remember the days when people were happy to buy albums that were recorded on digital masters.  Now no one talks about that era... and everyone who cares about high fidelity is doing vinyl and tube amps and (maybe) putting green marker on the edges of their CDs (Google that one if you're too young or your brain is failing an you no longer remember it.  Snopes.com is a good place to start.) and other things I think are bogus.  Just give me reasonable quality gear and simple lamp cord to connect the speakers.  That's all I want.  (No, really.  Anyone buying high end speaker wires, power cables, or power conditioner boxes is being ripped off.  A fool and his money, you know.)

Anyway, despite going digital, life is more complicated now, particularly in the area of video, which isn't something I have had to mess too much, but that is changing.

Enough rambling.  Here's what we had in the big pile of entertainment gear when the kitchen remodel started:

• A Rotel receiver.  About 100 watts per channel (only 2 channels).  Irritation: stand by mode (rather than being totally off) and an annoying pop that is emitted to the speakers when you first power it up from being fully off.  It's done that since it was new, alas.
• A Marantz 5 disk CD changer.  (I have chewed through and spit out so much Sony gear, particularly CD players that whine after a year or two, that I will never, ever, buy anything made by Sony.  That is irrational of me, I know, but I simply won't go there.  Every single thing I  have bought that was made by them has irritated me in a big way, except a phone answering machine that we finally ditched because we wanted to avoid the tape.  Yes, really.)
• An LG blu ray player.
• A Philips DVD player.  (We keep this only because somewhere in our DVD collection there is one disk that causes the blu ray player to choke.  Everyone tells me I am crazy and that should never happen, but it does.  The problem is that we don't know which disk it is now.  We might just ditch the DVD player and the problematic disk when we find it, but that hasn't happened yet.)
• A Nintendo Wii.  We are not big gamers, but some of what is available for this machine is fun.
• A Philips 32" somewhat high def CRT TV.  1080i was the best it could do.
• A Sanza Fuze mp3 player.  (I have a long standing hatred of all things Apple because they have hacked me off in a manner similar to Sony, as mentioned above.  I don't buy Apple gear as a result, and thus will not and do not own and ipod or an iphone.)  For the Fuze I also have a dock sort of thing that will let me connect it (via 3.5mm or RCA jacks) to a stereo device.
• A pair of KEF 105/3 speakers.  These were the biggest single investment in anything audio related in my life.

Note that I have spared you the ancient separate integrated amp, the separate tuner, the turntable, and the cassette player.  All junk now, and all gone (or going).  And you can learn more than you want to about me by noting that I never bought a separate pre-amp and power amp(s).  Could have.  Didn't.  Money has always had better uses for me.

So, the first thing that happened during the remodel is that we had to move entirely out of the upstairs for a week while floors were being refinished.  That meant that the TV had to move too, and being a CRT it was big, heavy, and did not fit on top of the dresser in the bedroom.  Too deep to go there, and there was nowhere else to put it.  That meant we got rid of it and replaced it with a Samsung 40" LED TV.  Low end Samsung... this isn't expensive stuff... I think it cost $600 or something.  Cheap in the modern world.  Amusingly, though, the Samsung has a very narrow bezel, and the old CRT had a very wide bezel.  As a result the new TV is only about 1" wider and 1" taller than the old one, but increases the viewing area substantially.

We are happy with the new TV, which has worked, looked, and sounded just fine (to us) so far.

Next up, the floor refinishing ended, and we moved things back upstairs.  Very quickly we determined that things had to change up there.  (Remember, we're tearing up the world, and change is a given.)  The first thing that was obvious to us was that the TV had to be wall mounted so we could get rid of the TV cabinet that had been under the old CRT.

I researched for a while and selected a Cheetah mount that gives me 26" of extension, so I can move it a fair distance, and mounted up the TV on it.  Not bad, but now the sound quality is poor.  Dialog in movies is hard to make out.  (Note, we aren't running the sound through the stereo... just using the speakers in the TV.)  It turns out that when the TV was on a stand and sitting on a dresser or TV cabinet, it sounded good, but when hung from a wall mount nothing deflects the sound towards the listener, and the net result is less than ideal.  Grrrr.

In addition to that problem, the KEF speakers, while they sound wonderful, are way too frigging big for us anymore.  We barely use the stereo as such, and having those huge things taking up floor space and looking gigantic is just not what we want.

Time to downsize.

The first step was to do a ton of digging, looking for ways to simplify life.

Every manufacturer has moved to HDMI these days, which I guess makes sense, but neither the Wii nor the old DVD player have HDMI outputs.  Now, depending on the choices we make as we go forward, the DVD player could just disappear, but the Wii we'd like to keep.  That means making it cooperate with the new TV setup, however that works, and that is something of a challenge if we put an AV receiver in the mix.  (Most AV receivers that cost less than, say, Greece, don't do video upscaling or convert non-HDMI inputs to go out over the HDMI cable. So you wind up connecting everything from the source to the receiver, and again from the receiver to the TV, creating a rats nest of wires and having to tell the TV to change input sources every time you change input sources on the receiver.  PITA.)

Looking at this logically, the first problem was the Wii.  How to make it talk simply is step one, and today, finally, I found a cheap answer.  I hope.  There is a Chinese company named Lenking that makes inexpensive video conversion equipment.  Among other things they make this Wii to HDMI converter.  It plugs into the back of your Wii and gives you an HDMI port.  No power supply, nothing funny, just convert the composite video and RCA audio outputs of the Wii into HDMI, and upscaling to 720p or 1080p.    Reviews on Amazon vary about how well this works and how well made the device is (or isn't), but for the $21 I just paid, I will give it a try.  (Most amusing are the reviews from people saying that the converter from company X failed, so they tried one from company Y. They are all clearly made by just one original source, folks:  Lenking in China.  The US distributors merely silk screen on a logo and sell the things.  Get a grip.)

Anyway, assuming that Wii converter works when it arrives, then the next step will be to replace the guts of the world.  At the moment I am leaning towards replacing nearly the entire setup (receiver, speakers, blu ray and DVD players) and going with this blu ray AV receiver from Harmon Kardon.  This would do everything we need and has AUX inputs for the CD changer and mp3 player, so it may be the answer.

If we go that way I also need three adjustable shelves on the wall below the TV mount, but that is trivia.  I'd need to arrange to attach the center channel speaker to the TV mount, which should be possible, I guess, and wall mount the left and right channels.  The entire thing is much smaller than the current setup, and should be much nicer to look at, while still having reasonably good sound quality and all the features we need.

I think.

But one step at a time.  First we try the Wii adapter to see if I can make it work, which means I can avoid AV receivers which to video upscaling, which is good.  Then I reassess the world and see where things stand.

If anyone reading this has any comments please feel free to leave them.  I know I am out of my depth here, and any information is appreciated.

Up on the roof

When we had our house painted - last January, for reasons I won't go into here - we had all the seams in the vertical siding caulked up.  (Vertical siding is a PITA.  Yet another lesson learned only after buying a house with that particular "feature".  But I digress.... )  When the spring came, though, and the siding dried back out, a lot of the seams popped open, which looked ugly and was going to let water into places I didn't want it.   So a major project to complete before the rains return is to recaulk and repaint all the seams that opened up.

Most of that effort involves only paint, a brush, and a ladder of one sort or another, but there is one wall over a fairly steeply pitched roof which took a bit more care.

That roof is shingled with Hardishake (another product that sounds a lot better than it actually works out to be, sadly, and another lesson learned only after buying a house using it, but again I digress.  Oh, and the picture shows day two of the effort.   I have already been up there to recaulk the seams, but yet again I digress.)  Hardishake is slippery and fragile, so climbing on that slope without safety gear seemed like a bad idea.  The above picture shows the roof with that gear in place.  Here's what it looked like to my wife, from the ground, while I was working up there:

That's about a 10 foot fall off the roof onto concrete - if it happens - and I really wanted to avoid that particular fate.  Alas I am not a professional climber of any kind and my gear is pretty limited.  I have two good - but not locking - carabiners, some cheap rope, some nylon webbing, and I bought a climbing harness specifically for this job.  That's it.

The rest of this writeup is for Chief Alex, who wanted to see pictures of what inanity I was doing to keep myself from being his next 911 response.  The rest of you may wander off or read on as you see fit now that you've seen the above pictures.

First, I anchored my safety rig to the house, around a half inch threaded rod that is exposed and goes through multiple redwood beams before being held in with nuts & washers.  Two independent webbing anchors (orange and yellow in the picture below) are tied with doubled webbing on either side of the beam.  Each terminates in a loop tied with something similar to, but not actually, a figure 8 knot and several safety knots.  Through those two loops I tied in my safety ropes.  I had only one, but it is 100' long, so I doubled it, and tied a figure 8 knot - the world's ugliest, I admit - with a loop that went through the loops in the webbing, and then a safety not or two and then tape.  Here's the resulting mess:

The webbing anchors look like this up close:

It's not obvious - our house is an architectural oddity - but the beam and threaded rod seen above are about eight feet above a flat roof, so I can easily get there to do the setup.  Then the lines go up and over onto the roof you cannot see from those pictures, and trail down on the shingled side as seen in the first picture above.  A pad is put over the corner of the roof just above the beam to protect the ropes.  Next I put on my climbing harness and clipped in like this:

Note that each rope is paired, and that each pair ends in a figure 8 knot with a loop and a safety knot.  The white and green tape seen above was for me to track which was which if needed, and each loop is really a pair of loops, so it's all redundant.  The carabiners clip each of the loops to the harness independently.

The goal was that for nearly all the time I was working any one thing could fail and nothing bad would happen.  If I lost a webbing anchor, I had a spare.  If I lost a single rope, it was doubled to the harness.  If I lost both ropes in a pair, I had a spare pair to catch me.

As the second picture shows, the risk was that I could slip, fall, and slide off the roof.  What I needed was something to stop my slide if that happened, rather than catch my full weight on a vertical drop.  The rig I arranged managed to do exactly that, and gave me an extra bit of leverage to move around on the roof with.

A challenge was that I had 15 feet of wall I am painting, and I had to move up or down the length of the wall as I worked on it.  I managed that with the dual, paired lines.  When needed I could move uphill a bit, unclip one of the lines, tie a temporary knot with a loop in it, and clip back in on that loop as well as the end loop.  That let me keep the rope short so that if I fell I would only slide a foot or two before stopping.  And, of course, I could work the other way, starting at the top with two shorter, temporary attachment points, work, then lengthen the ropes one at a time, always being clipped in to one or the other while doing so, then moving down the roof and working some more.

The biggest risk - I think - is that I was using non-locking carabiners, and that when I unclipped from one line to reset the length I was left on a single carabiner.  At all other times I think everything was at least doubled up.  Well, I suppose the harness itself counts as a single point of failure, but it's built to take some strain.

Anyway, the work on the sloped roof is done now except for putting a ladder up to sweep the debris down with a broom.  No more walking on fragile shingles.  I already had to glue a bunch back together as a result of this excursion and numerous others that have been done by painters, roofers, Internet connection installers, and exterminators over the years.

Thanks to Chief Alex for his training when I was part of the VFD - even if I only remember a fraction of it now - so that I could setup a system that let me get this job done with confidence and some measure of safety.  He would have done it very differently, I know, but given what I had to work with I think I did OK.

Lots more projects remain to be done before the rains get here, but I don't think anything will require this sort of rig again.  

Thoughts on Stress

Many things can mess with your head, of course, and we're all different in terms of what affects us, but for me stress is a killer.

The house remodel isn't done yet.  In fact, though it is nearing completion, it may be another month before we can do the final sign off with the county.  I hope it is faster than that, but it may take that long or longer for reasons that are entirely out of my control.

Oddly, despite the fact that the vast majority of the time remaining is spent waiting for things to get done, not with people actively working at the house, it is still very stressful for me.  Very stressful.  And that stress just cripples me in other ways.

I'd like to do some serious fiction writing, but just finding the energy is hard.  I'd like to carve more stone, but the same issues apply, along with cold weather making things tougher to do.  I'd like to go back to the gym twice a week, but the vagaries of scheduling the times when the contractors are here makes me hesitate to do even that.

In all, there are a lot of things that keep me from moving forward with life, and I find it all very frustrating.

One of these days it will be done, and I will move on.  I just hope that day comes sooner rather than later.  I need this project to end.

Without a Shred of Remorse...

For very different reasons, I am following in the footsteps, to some degree, of my friend Merikay.  She is cleaning out a lot of the stuff in her life over time because she is hoping to RV for a while.  I, on the other hand, just feel weighed down by the stuff of life and am gradually trying to reduce it.

Now, however, I find myself confronted with a larger issue.  we're going to get some repair work done on the drywall in our den and guest bedroom.  Some of you may remember the issues we encountered this winter.

Well, we're going to get that fixed, along with another little water/drywall issue that cropped up when the typhoon remnant came through last year.

But doing that means getting the den and guest bedroom emptied out so contractors can work in there.  That isn't as simple as it sounds.

The result is a mutli-hour effort involving relocating, condensing, and (in some large measure) getting rid of things we no longer need or want or use.  There is also a whole subplot about wireless routers and repeating bridges that hasn't resolved itself just yet, thanks to problems on the part of Netgear.  But I digress.

I have finally pitched a bunch of cassettes that no one will ever listen to again, equipment for cleaning and demagnetizing cassette playback and record heads, an inline dimmer switch of unknown provenance, a bunch of toys I haven't looked at in years, and so on.  The net result was some six linear feet of cabinet and drawer space opened up so I could hide the stuff we need to keep and keep it safe from people wielding plaster and drywall.  Fun.  Not.

In any case, eventually the house was made ready for the great contractor invasion, which should happen tomorrow at 9am, and I have now collapsed in a heap.

I'll write up the bit about wireless networking when I have a resolution.  As of now I don't know how that plays out.

Merikay, at least you know you're not the only one getting rid of things.

Things you don't expect

How about a water leak when it isn't raining?  And no, a pipe didn't burst.

Apparently some time back - no one is sure how long ago, but probably back in mid-December before we left on vacation - one of us left a hose valve just slightly open.  The water dripped out once every couple of seconds.  Normally this would not be a problem, but we live in a house with a flat roof.  An 18 year old flat roof with a deck over it.

Well, apparently the part of that roof right against the house where the hose was dripping slopes the wrong way.  Water had pooled up against the house there over the years and rusted through the steel roofing.  That rust may have been exacerbated by nails driven through the wall just above the roof line, into something vaguely like but not really flashing.

Anyway, the water runs into the house there, drips down through the ceiling and into the guest bedroom.  But it's not really that simple.  The entire house is shear-sheeted with plywood - on the inside even - so that soaks up and holds a TON of water before it drips down onto the drywall.

We discover the mess in the guest bedroom a week after getting home.  I got some advice from friends and tore out a lot of water soaked sheet rock.  Now we run fans in that room all the time trying to dry it out (which is working) and I've opened up the deck and put a bunch of goo into the area of the leak which I hope will prevent additional water intrusion.

What a mess.  I have a garage full of busted up drywall and muck to haul to the dump and need to give everything a long time to dry out before we close it back up.  Fortunately we have little or no mold in there, which is good.

Oh, and I did note dry water stains on the back of some of the drywall as I pulled it out.  That means there was previous leakage that we never saw.  This could have gone on for years.

I guess this summer we get a new roof/deck.  What fun.