Not everything to do with the house this week has been devoid of an element of fun; quite the opposite, in fact.
Pakjesavond for me came a day early this year, when the long-awaited installation of the gear for our new TV room finally took place.
The new TV room has been my project since we got back from our summer holiday. It started with an order for a new couch, a couple of side tables and a lamp, and ended with the largest single order of audio-visual equipment I’ve ever done.
The room is now wired for sound with two KEF iQ70 speakers at the front, an iQ60c centre speaker and two wirelessly driven iQ50 speakers at the back, on either side of the couch.
The subwoofer is a T3 from REL. I have a couple of their [Quake](http://www.rel.net/t3.htm] subwoofers on the ground floor and have been very happy with them.
To handle the music, a new model ZP90 controller provides our seventh Sonos listening zone.
The centrepiece of the room is an absolutely stunning Sharp LC-65XS1E television, mounted on the wall. Its picture quality, particularly the purity of the black in films, is breathtaking.
A Sony BDP-S550 provides the ability to watch BDs (Blu-ray Discs) and DVDs. The DVD function has been made region free, as we own a lot of foreign (mostly region 1) discs.
Normal TV viewing is courtesy of a UPC HDTV cable box, but only a few channels are currently offered in HD over here, including one from National Geographic and another from Discovery. Even then, not all of the programming is in HD, but when it is, it looks simply amazing.
Rounding out the experience is a Sony Playstation 3, which I’ve barely had time to mess with yet.
All of the above is currently hooked up to a Rotel RSX-1057 receiver, which drives the 5.1 speaker system described above. The receiver itself is actually on loan, because I’m still awaiting the arrival of a brand new RSX-1550 unit, which has support for the new Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD lossless audio codecs (needed for Blu-ray), as well as HDMI 1.3a, which enables Deep Color support.
In anticipation of the arrival of all this gear, I patched the room’s network ports through to my main switch, so the Sonos, the Blu-ray player and the Playstation all have wired Internet access. All the ports on my main switch are now in use, though, so any further expansion will require the purchase of a new switch.
All of this new equipment added another five remote-controls to our already extensive collection, so I purchased a second Logitech Harmony One universal remote-control to manage the new stuff. I really like the relatively new Harmony One model and find it to be a big improvement on previous models, such as the 885 that we used to use.
To celebrate the arrival and installation of this grand new cinema set-up, we watched our very first film on Blu-ray, the director’s cut of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which had been beautifully remastered and looked as if it hadn’t aged a moment. The difference in picture quality between Blu-ray and DVD is impressive, but DVDs are still good enough that you really don’t know what you’re missing until you’ve witnessed a Blu-ray.
Anyway, I’m like a child in a toy shop with this new set-up. It’s like my birthday, Sinterklaas and Christmas all rolled up into one.