Renovation with Green, Efficiency and budget in mind
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Media center

I had a great meeting today with Jesse Korsban from Stafford Home Services’ low voltage and audio/video department. We discussed the location of TV screens (can we even call them that anymore? I guess I should have said, Flat Panels), the speakers and the consolidation of the hardware. Stafford will be consolidating all of my equipment (receiver, Cable box, Sony PS3, Nintendo Wii, OPPO DVD player, DVD recorder, iPod station, and Mac Mini) to a single location under the basement stair. There will be a screen in the casual living area and in the media room in the basement, with surface mounted Athena speakers and recessed speakers from the casual living area, through the kitchen and into the formal living area, with surface mounted Boston Acoustics speakers on the South wall (above the windows.) This will create three distinct zones for music and two for video.

How to control all of this you ask? Well, my dear, with my iPhone of course! Yes, I said my iPhone. Or maybe a iPod touch if I want to let visitors have fun too. The Buletooth controllers on the PS3 and the Wii only five bout 30′ of distance so they will ne installing a Bluetooth repeater in the kitchen (the basement media room is abutted to the stair, so that is not an issue. The Wii controllers also use a control bar which emits light, so another remote bar will be installed in the 1st floor. Sick, isn’t it? One can walk from the basement to the 1st floor, Guitar Hero “guitar” in hand, jamming all the time. Now that’s class my friends. Or some kind of digital excess yet to be named.

One great advantage to this madness (or brilliance, depending on your Luddite or Jobs tendencies) is that fan noise is greatly reduced or eliminated. The PS3 is still screaming out billions of cycles and driving it’s fans like rented mules, but it is safely ensconced in a separate room, in a tidy rack. Ahhh, peace and quiet. Now, when I am watching a classic film, with plenty of moody silence, like The Third Man I won’t be distracted by the steady roar of the PS3’s insane fans.

Another advantage is the savings of not having to have duplicate hardware;  in space, cash, and energy (I guess that’s kind of a Geen Renovation thing as well. Nice!)

Stay tuned for updates and photos.

1 comment

1 Jesse Korsbon { 11.10.09 at 10:18 am }

It is great to be involved in a project that requires out of the box thinking when it comes to helping a client manage the vast darkness of media technology and the challenges it creates with regards to space, budget and media content. Meshach brought the vision to Stafford Home Service that he wanted the ability to have access to all the media content he currently uses with the flexibility to have an all out Wii or PS3 tournement in the media room while still being able to entertain guest upstairs and outside with great music and have his personal collection of digital photgraphs and digital art displayed on the flat panel in the casual living area. We wanted to keep the clean lines and minimalist look that was the vision of this project and still meet the clients needs. We also needed to keep this within his budget and that is what we will deliver.