Basement

Project

Basement History

We purchased our house three years after it had been built. The basement was "finished" but not really. The previous owner had installed drywall, nice pine barn-board wainscoting (unfinished pine) and a drop acoustic ceiling. But the floor was raw concrete and it definitely begged to be really finished. I sealed the concrete (foolishly using a petroleum-based sealer and nearly passing out from the fumes) and we had wall-to-wall carpeting put down. I stained all the bare pine and sealed it and painted the drywall. Then we got a pool table and I put in some light fixtures over it.

But after our children got through their teenage years, the basement was barely used, except for my occasional attempts at camping out in a makeshift home office. It was never really comfortable down there.

Then when grandchildren came along, it served as a sort of rumpus room, getting messed up with scattered toys and Legos. It was usually a disaster. So I decided to do it justice and embarked on a home improvement project.

The Project

The first step was to get more light in the room. In the largest area, there were only two old-school can lights which were totally inadequate. In another area, there was a 4-foot florescent fixture that had failed, so it had to go too.

I bought a bunch of these LED fixtures. I was not sure how many were needed, so in one 24' x 12' area, I used 8, spaced 3' out from the side walls 6' apart the long way, and 8' apart across the narrow dimension. This worked out pretty well so I used the same spacing in the other large basement area.

These particular LED lights have selectable color temperature, which is a nice feature. I prefer warmer tones as opposed to bright white.

I got a 6 1/4" hole saw for making neat holes in the acoustic tiles. This was probably overkill but sped up the task of cutting 16 holes. As it was, I ruined several tiles because they are fragile and the hole saw is very aggressive, even at low speed (these are really designed to cut wood and drywall).

Cutting acoustic tiles is messy and creates a lot of dust!

Wiring proved to be a bit of a challenge because our breakers were not well labeled and required some head scratching to figure out which circuits to safely tie into. My next task will be to create an accurate breaker chart.

I used these Kasa smart dimmers for each section. They don't cost any more than regular dimmers and have the added bonus of being controllable via an app or Alexa. You can create 'scenes" for various moods. Since one of my goals was to create a home theater, this proved to work well.

I used Kasa smart plugs in the past and was happy with them since their technology seemed solid.

The new lights made a vast improvement from the dinginess of the old space. This was a fairly easy upgrade - I spent maybe a total of 4-5 hours wiring the lights. The lights are very bright at full-on, but only use a total of 100 Watts in this space. They are actually bright enough for normal activities at 50% dimming. I created Alexa commands for "Theater Off", "Theater On", and "Theater Dim". The Dim command takes the level as low as it can go with these lights.

AIr Quality

Another issue I had was that our basement dehumidifier had just failed. The average lifespan of dehumidifiers these days seems to be about two years if you are lucky. They all appear to be junk. I'll refrain from commenting on the lack of quality control and materials used in the country where they are all made, but it is basically a rip-off. Fortunately, my Frigidaire unit had a 5-year warranty on the compressor, so when I researched the error code it was displaying, it seemed likely they would replace the unit. I supplied the necessary documentation and a couple of weeks later, they shipped me a brand new unit. It took a while to get the humidity down from 70% to 50% but the basement is now dry and comfortable again.

The dehumidifier drains into a Little Giant pump, which then sends the water outside the house via some plastic tubing.

I also purchased an inexpensive ($50) HEPA air filter which runs continuously.

Home Theater

Next up was converting part of the large section into a home theater, something I had always considered. I did not want to invest a lot of money into the project, so I researched some affordable projectors and screens. How things have changed over the years!

After reading many reviews (at least those I was reasonably certain were not fake) on Amazon, I settled on this projector from Redeer (a typically strange Chinese brand name). What convinced me to try this one was a guy who said he tried a dozen different brands and kept this model. It was only $190. A few years ago you would need to spend about $1,000 to get something comparable. It has autofocus and good keystone adjustments. Brightness is very reasonable, although looks best in a dark room. It is full HD (not 4K) but can handle 4K HDMI inputs, which it downscales to full HD quality. I got a new Amazon Firestick 4K for it which works well.

Since I did not want to bother running wires from the audio outputs, I tried the Bluetooth audio connectivity and noticed an appreciable lag in the sound when paired with a cheap little Bluetooth receiver. So then I tried the Firestick Bluetooth and it worked perfectly. So that is one negative on the Redeer.

However, Bluetooth has limitations for home theater (see below) so I used another solution for the sound.

I got a 100" 16:9 pull-down screen which I mounted at the end of the room. Initially, I tried using mounting brackets, but the supplied wall anchors did not hold well in the drywall. I resorted to a much simpler scheme using hooks screwed into the floor above and short chains with a 50 Lb. load rating. The screen is as shown in the banner above.

This screen has a gradual retract feature and will lock in various positions when pulled down. I considered an electrically operated screen but could not quite justify the added expense, although that would have been nifty.

You can easily get carried away with this sort of stuff - for example, I could have added proscenium curtains, wall sconces with lighting, and theater chairs. I have to restrain myself. Haha.

My initial tests with the projector made it clear that I needed a ceiling mount. I tried placing it on one of the side walls, and the keystone adjustments allowed this, but the focus was not consistent across the screen, which is not surprising. So I purchased this inexpensive mount from Amazon. I attached it to a floor joist above the drop ceiling and installed an outlet for the projector and Firestick. The projector is mounted upside down and is just below the ceiling tiles. The projector is about 12' back from the screen. The farther from the screen, the bigger the image. The projector can reduce zoom from 100%, but not increase it, so minimum placement is somewhat critical. At this distance, I have the zoom reduced to about 90% in order to just fill the screen.

Here is the projector ceiling mounted with an AC outlet. The ceiling tile was somewhat inexpertly cut to accommodate the mount but I can probably touch up the opening and cuts to make it look a little more professional.

I then decided to make the theater my audio-listening space as well. So I purchased this inexpensive rack to sit below the screen in order to hold all my gear. Then I moved my Martin Logan speakers to the basement from the living room and my McCormack DNA .5 amp. Eventually, I will add my DIY amplifiers but for now, I am using just my DIY preamp and streamer for stereo.

The rack is reasonably sturdy, although the wire mesh shelves can sag a bit and might require some reinforcement. Assembly was easy, and I was assisted by a grandson.

As a temporary sound solution, I repurposed an old Yamaha desktop/subwoofer speaker setup (originally sold for computer audio) connected to a little Bluetooth receiver I used for my guitar. The sub gives a cinematic feel to the audio and the little desktop speakers sound good. My initial trial "movie night" runs proved to be a big hit with the grandkids, so I guess I'm on the right track!

I wasn't sure where to go with sound and I did not want to invest a lot more money, so I found the bargain used items below and figured, what the heck?

I bought a used (but working) 5.1 channel surround sound receiver for $20 - a Sony STR-K502, rated at 100 WPC. This is a pre-HDMI (released ca. 2000) unit but it does Dolby Digital and DTS and has optical and coax inputs. It came with no remote but my Firestick remote can power it on/off and adjust volume.

I also bought a used Pioneer SP-C21 center channel speaker - also for $20 - this is an Andrew Jones-designed speaker and is pretty heavy-duty. Back in the day, some people complained about the tweeter - but this one works and sounds good. Both of these were found on Amazon Marketplace - something I rarely look at but just happened to see these locally and called the same day to pick them up.

This is what the setup looks like at this point. Currently, I am using L/R speakers borrowed from my test bench for the A/V system, since there appears to be no way to feed the audio system from just the left-right channels of the surround receiver (while it is decoding surround, at least according to the manual). That's OK since I am keeping the two systems separate for now and the small 3-way speakers sound pretty good with movie material. The center channel is just below the screen.

The old Sony receiver has a dizzying array of options and adjustments - so many that it is a time-sink trying to understand them all. I expect it will be a case of set it and forget it. This must have been an early example of the Sony engineers having too much time on their hands. Haha. They even incorporated modes that model the Sony sound stages in Hollywood, I guess to promote their movies. Just joking - the video/home theater craze that started ~25 years ago spurred Japanese companies to invest huge amounts of money in developing sophisticated technology for the consumer market. Looking at the service manual for this thing, it is impressive; lots of custom ICs and complex circuitry. And now essentially obsolete.

I had not had much experience with home theater and surround sound (or Bluetooth sound for that matter), so I was surprised to learn that Bluetooth cannot transmit more than 2 channels of sound, due to limited bandwidth. I just never paid much attention to either. This makes sense and I would never consider using it for high-quality audiophile sound, but looking into the specs for even the latest version (5.3) it still won't support surround sound.

Qualcomm has been pushing "aptX" chips and many devices are using their technology, but this is just a compression/decompression scheme to squeeze more information into limited Bluetooth bandwidth. Also, we are seeing devices with simulated 3D sound. Meh.

This caused me to re-think my initial idea of not having to run an HDMI cable to the projector. Since the old receiver does not handle HDMI at all, I needed to test out an HDMI audio extractor and run an HDMI cable from it to the projector. Then connect the coaxial SPDIF output from the extractor to the coax input on the receiver. This is a Rube Goldberg arrangement but beats laying out $300-$400 (at least) for a more modern receiver.

So to further my explorations into surround sound, I ordered this little HDMI audio splitter box from Amazon ($20). I liked that it had coax output - several of these types of audio splitters only have optical outs and I did not want to mess around with fiber cables. Also, I am guessing that most low-end receivers sound slightly better with coax than optical due to jitter issues. The Sony in fact does 96 KHz sampling with coax but only 48 KHz with optical inputs. The box has 3 switches which allow 9 different options for HDMI passthrough and audio split-out. Also, the box takes its power from the HDMI cable so does not need a separate USB wall wart (although it does have a power input if your HDMI connection does not supply juice - in my case the Firestick seems to do the job).

At first, I could not get any sound from the receiver using the coax input. I tried a factory reset on the receiver and a bunch of settings on the splitter. Finally, I looked at the Firestick audio settings (which are sort of hard to find in the menus) and noticed that the HDMI audio was set to Dolby Digital Plus. Changing this to plain Dolby Digital fixed the issue and the sound started working. The Plus version came out after this receiver was made, so it did not know what to do with the signal. Apparently, media recorded in Plus is backward compatible with regular Dolby Digital.

As brilliant as the Firestick 4K is, it took some head-scratching to cover my use case.

I did notice a slight audio synch issue playing surround material. Fortunately, the Firestick has an adjustment for this (again, hard to find in the menus).

The old Sony also supports DTS. I learned that this is a completely different and competing standard to Dolby (I had simply assumed it had something to do with Dolby), so I need to see if the Firestick/splitter combo supports DTS. (N.B. the original Jurassic Park movie was the first to have DTS sound). Also, various streaming services have different media encoding types, so I will need to check out some different material to see if everything plays OK.

And of course, there is a plethora of newer standards like Atmos, HEOS, 7.1, 7.2, 9.2, 13.2, etc. which would only work with the latest receiver technology. And you can spend thousands of dollars on a receiver. Best Buy lists several over $5,000! Since many videophiles want the latest and greatest, there are a lot of older tech receivers on the used market for little money, great for cheapskates like me. Constant obsolescence at its finest!

So based on this I ran an in-wall HDMI cable for the projector, along with speaker wires for the rear channel. This is not such a bad idea, since it will allow for other sources in the future (e.g. my old BluRay player should I dust it off). There was an old wall plate for a hard-wired telephone jack which I re-purposed for a keystone plate with speaker binding posts and an HDMI feedthrough connector.

To finish up the project, I ordered a pair of inexpensive rear/side channel 6.5" speakers to mount in the ceiling. These are made by Pyle and were only $50 for the pair. Amazon applied a mysterious "courtesy credit" to my order (I guess they like me) bringing the cost down to $33 for the pair. I am not really concerned about the audio sound quality since rear speakers are mainly for special surround effects. I mounted them about 1' from the side walls and about 2' behind the listening position. I have been playing with various sound field settings in the receiver but noticed that the amount of rear channel effects is highly variable depending on the video source material. Some movies hardly have any but some, such as sci-fi and action movies are very pronounced.

There is much more to do - furniture rearranging/replacement, carpet cleaning (I have a Hoover carpet shampooer) setting up the fitness area etc.

Future plans include converting a large closet into a wine cellar and possibly a powder room in the adjacent utility room space. This gets complicated and expensive since I will need a "pump-up" toilet and a plumber to do hookups.

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