Theater Guts
You are about to enter the A/V Equipment Room, which is a small room located directly behind the Theater Equipment Rack. This room is the real "guts" of the household and especially the theater systems. Let's see what we got.
Directly Ahead, As You Walk In
In the two racks dead ahead, we have top to bottom, left to right:
- Escient Power Play DVD Changer & Controller
- Crossover and Amps for the Clark Tactile Transducers
- 2 x Bryston 500W Monoblocks for the Bag End Subwoofers
- Extron Matrix Switch for Video (takes top half of righthand rack)
- Rack drawer with all the remotes
- Power Conditioner
- Intel 24 port 10/100 LAN Hub
What does it all do, you may wonder? Well, some things are obvious--you can guess what a DVD changer is, right? What about the Clark Transducers? These are for the Guy Flick mode on the theater. A crossover is needed to make sure nothing but the lowest bass goes through to them. Otherwise, it'll sound like tiny voices are emanating from the furniture. This could be useful if you've just eaten a lot of mushrooms, but otherwise its just annoying.
The Extron video switch is a little more interesting. We have a whole house audio/video distribution system. The audio portion is done in the digital domain. The video portion, in order to accomodate very high quality video, is managed as RGB. Essentially, it is like VGA-quality computer video. The matrix switch lets us individually choose a different video source from each of the video receiving locations in the house, so that they don't all have to see the same thing. As you can see from the amount of rack space required, this was a complex problem to solve.
On the left wall you can see the Panasonic PBX that runs the phone system in the house.
On the Right
Looking to the right, we see the back of the twin racks that are visible in the Home Theater. It is absolutely critical to be able to get to the back of every rack in the house. It's easy on this one. Most of the rest employ a slide-out rail system. Otherwise, you can never get them wired up and manage the wiring. Incidentally, you can see from this just how extensive said wiring can be. In the top left corner of the picture you can see the distribution system for the DSS dishes on the house. We don't have cable currently, so we use satellite for our TV. It takes a little doing to make it work for 5 different sets that all want to be able to tune in their own channels independently, and throw in a satellite internet connection while you're at it.
Looking Back Towards the Door
In this final view you can see the relays used by the Panja/AMX touch panel system to control various amplifiers and other such components in the Theater. The little white box interfaces the Lutron computer-controlled lighting to the Panja, and the large block boxes at the bottom are the subwoofer amplifiers for the in-wall surround channels.
Whew! That's a lot of gear. The temperature rises noticeably when you walk into this room!