I thought i'd finally start to document some of what I've done in home cinema as it's a bit of a crazy install, with lots of, mainly second hand, esoteric kit and done on a reasonable budget and with some odd constraints. It is however quite a show and very impressive!

Kit

Front Speakers - 2 x Mirage OM6

Centre Speaker- 1 x Mirage OM-C2

Rears Speakers- 2 x Mirage OM-R2

Side Speakers - 2 x Mirage OM-R2

Subwoofers - 2 x Paradigm Servo 15a

Front Effects Speakers- 2 x Mirage OM-R2

Ceiling Speakers- 4 x Mirage Nanosat

Processor & Ceiling Atmos - Marantz SR6011

Power Amp - Yamahaha DSP-Z9

Room Correction - Minidsp DDRC-88a

Sub intergration - Minidsp 2x4HD

Tactile Effects - Behringer Ultrabass pro EX1200 (Modified) Fed by Rolls MB15b promatch

Tactile power - Behringer Inuke 3000DSP

Tactile - 2 x Buttkicker LFE + 1 x Buttkicker Origional

Tactile - BOSS 2x JBL GT5-12 car sub speakers built into the front riser is free air - docs

Tactile2 Alesis RA300 power amp

Tactile2 power- 2 x Clarke TST-239

UHD 4K Bluray Player with LLDV - Sony UDP-X800m2

UHD 4K Bluray Player / 3D Bluray - Panasonic DP-UB420EB

Bluray Player- Panasonic DMP-BDT700EBD

LLDV / 24P Media Player - Apple TV 4k (2017)

HDR10 Media Player (Netflix, Disney+, Prime) - Amazon Fire TV 4k Stick

Projector - Epson TW9400 enhanced 4K 3x LCD high contrast and brightness projector. I've also a FAQ on this PJ

Screen - Spitfire Acoustically Transparent fixed frame screen (121" diag viewable)

Image processing - eecolor 3D Lut box

Dolby Vision LLDV EDID hack - HDFury Vertex (original)

Power distribution - Furman Power Conditioner (8 x IEC)

Rack - **U metal professional server rack

History

Early experiences

I started off in London in a shared house in the late 90s. My first real pay packet was march time and as such was pretty much tax free as I hadn't earnt enough to hit tax levels. I worked near a Richer Sounds and drooled over many a thing there over lunch times. I bought my first Yamaha DPL receiver there and some floor standers. A What Hifi voucher snagged me cables and some bookshelf surrounds. I only had a portable TV and a stereo VHS but it was amazing.

I moved into a shared flat with an ex and set it up in the living room. Getting a bigger TV, A second hand Yamaha DSP-A3090 and my first Paradigm Servo 15 over the years, until I saw advert for an old Barco Data 800 CRT projector. The room got swung round, a stand fashioned from wooden shelving system from homebase and made a screen from three pieces of taped hardboard in a tongue and grooved cheap flooring wooden frame. I used a PC with a Creative Encore Dxr2 DVD player which acted as scaler. It was massive. It was glorious. It wasn't much of a living room though and due to fear of theft the curtain stayed closed!

My second cinema

We eventually moved out the city and the then wife, wanted her living room back, so we looked for a place with space to put "my toys" in!!! We found a house with a spare, very large room (previous owner built it as a kids playroom over the small back garden because of special needs children). It was going to be a man cave. Talked about painting it black and so forth, but the wife got creative. I had a CAD/CAM router at work. She being an architect was a dab hand at Autocad. She drew, I made, and so a ridiculously over the top Lord Of The Rings Cinema was born. I spent a *LOT* of time creating that place.

It was an large L shaped room. We needed to put a wall up making it rectangular. We needed to redo the ceiling. Audio calcs meant if I dropped the ceiling half an inch, set the rear wall in a reasonable position, it would be a great LWH ratio so we did that! I put in a new power supply to the room breaking from the power board and a new separate consumer unit with the best audio power components i could find. The ornate boxing and paneling hiding cables and fitting lights. The kit rack in outside the room and all sorts of sound deadening. A hoist for the upgraded barco, so people were sat under it. It was crazy. It was awesome and it never quite got finished as we got notice they were going to run a road through the house. This held all sorts of house development projects on hold for quite a few years in the will they won't they. Divorce happened for various reasons and then they finally did run a road through the house! Drive through cinema???

Third and current set-up

I had to move and i looked for a place with somewhere to hold my kit. I ended up in an oddly large town house. It's semi-detached and four floors. The top one being a massive room with an idea of a cinema. However life stuff meant it took me ages to get started on it.

The problem is that in my previous house, the room was odd and kinda useless. A cinema added value. In this one it's typically a second lounge or even the master bedroom and doing a SERIOUS conversion of it knocks the value down. Installing the HUGE barco would be silly. However tech's come a long way on smaller and way lighter digital projectors! The panels are sat in my garage safe but the massive install build would take forever and again damage the room.

I started thinking round the problem and though i'd try cutting the supports on the screen that i built in half (it was a wood frame) and plating it after to get it up to the top floor. This worked surprisingly well. I set my speakers up and the amp and got a cheap Mitsubishi HC4000. The ceiling bracket was small so a few holes in the ceiling isn't a biggy. With regards to the screen, I wondered if rather than making a wooden H type frame mounting frame that bolted to the ceiling and floor as before, if I could suspend it on some steel tensioned wire with some D shackles into the wall as it wasn't heavy. It worked and I had a quick set-up for that Christmas

The Amp now being a little old I looked at ways to improve things and got a Nakamichi AV1 processor which gave access to the new bluray audio formats and HDMI capabilities. Easy to use the 7.1 inputs and while not actually a power amp, I've always loved the Yamhaha sound and wide front speaker expansion. I slowly started adding things, an upgrade to the Projector with the HC5. It's big but nothing like my old Barco's and the image I got was fantastic. I got some big black rugs which I put in front of the screen which was mainly for sound absorption but noticed an image improvement more. I added some mesh fabric curtains with some black velvet tape. They're on Ikea clip hooks and another thinner steel wire line but they hide the kit, reduce light spill and get rid of the magnolia background. This made another big difference and got me thinking some more. I didn't really want to paint the walls black and still wanted things demount able and quickly repairable. Ebay and some cheap rolls of fabric (~£100 each roll ends) and a staple gun worked impressively well. Walls and ceiling are now half covered in velvet fabrics with an aim to finish off but the front row vision is pretty much sorted. MASSIVE improvement visually.

I've got an Atmos set-up in my living room with a load of Kef 3005se's and it impressed me so much I wanted it in the cinema. A set of five cheap ebay (~£80) nanosats I thought would meld with the rest of the Mirage speakers reasonably well. One had a mounting bracket on it which is basically bent metal but I wasn't happy with the design. Ended up getting some MK Ceiling rose light fittings. A bolt and a few washers fitted the speaker to the white rose part and the back plate is screwed to the ceiling. The rose mates up and screws on giving a secure rotatable speaker mounted on the ceiling, again with minimal room damage. I also swapped the NAK to a Marantz SR6011 which is used with the Yamaha 7.1 input. The Marantz handling processing and amplification for the Nanosats in atmos mode!

In the old set-up i'd built a riser to hold the 3 Cinema chairs as the back row and for the Buttkickers as it was also a suspended platform. Alas this got left and destroyed but I had drawings and i've just finished making a replacement. Had to cut and join the boards as 8' boards wouldn't go up the stairs and now it's glued and screwed it would need to be destroyed to remove it, but I can live with that. It's mounted on 9 rubber isolaters that were got from a local company who does fan ducting and they're for huge fan isolation and they often scrap the old ones! This has two rows of seating. The first is a double lazyboy leather recliner, the second row on the higher riser is three cinema style flip up seats.

I recently replaced the HC5 projector with an Epson TW9400. it's 4k enabled and does pixel shifting to create a 4K image. This had better contrast and encouraged me to add more fabric to the walls. I've also had to mute the lights on my kit rack as the darker things get the more you notice the extra light!

Cinema Pictures

Projector set-up

Screen 120"

Seating 12' (3.65) from the screen

Projector ceiling mounted 14' (4.25m) from the screen

The Dynamic HDR setting is built off SimplyHome's settings and uses the custom gamma from there - This setting has VERY strong black level and contrast and whilst the colours are as accurate as possible to my Pgen/Vertex bit accurate patterns, It occasionally comes across a little cold/muted. In testing i tried adjusting the Colour Saturation setting up a few points (50 -> 58) but also found myself dropping back to 50 as I adjusted to the cooler colours. This often happens with calibration and it takes a while to personally adjust and then you end up seeing more detail and going wow.
This setting particularly with the Vertex using a custom 600 bt2020 EDID for LLDV gives some amazing detail and some how appears to improve the perceived resolution, noticed in things like forest and cityscape pans. The detail and depth can be breathtaking.

Custom Gamma, 1:9 - 0, -3, -3, -4, -5, -6, -8, -16, 0

SDR Rec.709

based on my learning process of how to get the best from this projector.

I first set the Brightness and contrast using normal patterns. I then used the RGB Offset/Gain to get a reasonable tracking of the gray scale. I then used a 8 point grey scale setting in HCFR and the 8 point individual adjustment of the Epson to bring the grey scale much closer than either can do on their own. I've since learnt that using the near black scale can be used to better tame the black output which can be used with Grayscale 1 - The 0 light reads black and doesn't give targets to aim for, hence i'll need to revisit this area.

After grayscale, I've then used the RGBCMY with Primaries & Secondaries to pull in the colours being displayed. Whilst working mainly with 100% I also use the other values (25%, 50%, 75%) to try and get as low a Delta e for all the percentages rather than just 100%. I do struggle a little with this as HCFR isn't the easiest to work with and I often feel like I am blindly adjusting the HSB levels just to get the lowest value. I believe Calman shows the HSL errors but alas I don't have that software.

I then go back and tweak the 8 point Grayscale and reset the Brightness, Contrast and then measure 100% white to set the iris for a max of 16ftl and then enable the auto iris.

Gamma is currently set at -2 which is the closest to 2.4 - I did attempt a custom gamma curve but it looked whacky in terms of the settings, (dramatically high, low, high, low which I felt was wrong )

HDR Accurate

I've still to visit Grayscale 1 as described above. The RGBCMY are struggling a little as this is an aim at Rec.2020 (80%) rather than DCI P3 (111%) . The setting uses the Colour Filter which drops light output significantly which is why the high power mode and the low HDR slider. It certainly gives a good picture and I often find myself impressed by small details, things like fabric looking exceedingly life like or paint finishes on cars. I think this is what HDR adds.

I initially started out with the slider on 1 but found things like the outdoor chase scenes in the last star trek movie almost painful to watch. It helps with dark shadow details but reminds me of tweaking the brightness settings playing Doom2 so the monsters didn't scare the pants off you rather than being an accurate representation of what is happening!

Hardware & Software

I'm using a Spectracal C6 Colorimeter, it is an X-Rite i1 display pro clone with special Spectracal firmware. I bought it second hand via ebay. It is supposed to be more accurate when used with Calman, but I use HCFR, Display Cal and occasionally Lightspace Free with a hacked .dll to get around the firmware lock!

I also have a X-rite i1 pro which is a more accurate spectrophotometer which has a much slower read time and is less capable at low light. However it can be used as a reference to improve the accuracy of a Colorimeter and keep it in check with it's calibration tile, which is how i've used it, building a cross calibration.

Using the two together gets the higher accuracy of the i1 pro combined with the faster read times and better low light performance of the S6 (i1 display pro)

Beyond built in calibration

Further to the SDR Rec 709 settings above I also use an older Panasonic bluray player which has a direct feed to the projector on HDMI2 via my eecolor 3D LUT box, with just the Audio going to the Marantz amp.

It's an old and odd box and slightly re purposed from its original design. It is only HDMI 1.3 so despite the 3D moniker, it isn't 3D capable in terms of 3D viewing. It is however great for 3D Look Up Table calibration. The principle of this is that you show a myriad of colour images to the projector and read via a meter what the projector outputs. The value of the image sent is known and you then map how the system performs with ideally every different colour. Here's more details

The reality is that after a few hundred you have a very predictable idea of how the projector will perform with any given colour. The more colours patches you run the greater the accuracy of the map or LUT you create but the longer it takes to create the map so there is a trade off.

I use Displaycal which is free and based off the argyll drivers. I used to use a Colormunki but it's restricted firmware adds a couple of seconds a read. Fine for HCFR but long patch runs can take a while. The Spectracal is pretty quick with the readings which meant a small ~700 patch profile run took about half an hour to do. Uploading the profile to the eecolor, is a bit of a faff, but not too difficult and then just switch to the desired slot. The eecolor box has 6 profiles and remembers the last used, so once the set-up is done it is watch and forget.

Overview

Because I know my arrangement of things is a bit different and it can be tricky to imagine how it all goes together and works I drew a quick diagram in Draw.io to illustrate how things go together - It's not perfect and I apologise for my abuse of flow chart diagram symbols, but...