Chodley's Plasma Telly Adventures

First, witness the power of the old school setup

Sony 32" CRT, B&W 602 speakers. 468 cables including those nice white ones along the skirting there. Proper Bo'

Step forward to the carnage of the telly arrival

Luckily the father-in-law was around to help with the proper man's work. Almost embarassing the way everything that has lived with us for 6 years has been hauled away to make way for the new arrival.

I would bring your attention to the horror of the Sky engineer's "drill now, ask questions later" policy.

So the end result was ok, but too cluttered

The picture on the x360 was righteous though

So halfway through the rebuild, we've taken just about everything out although the rack lives on, you can see this shot of the back of the room has the surround speaker wire buried in the wall now.

And this pic shows nicely the following key features

  1. Nice new Clipsal custom 3 way faceplate for the sat & RF connections. Courtesy of letsautomate.com and G's big drill. Woof. Happens to be 3 inches higher than the old wires too to accommodate the new taller skirting
  2. Front speaker mounting, re-wired under the plaster, ready for the B&W M1s. Thanks G.
  3. Old school UHF connection to convince anyone who tries to buy the house in the future that they may have a chance of terrestrial reception
  4. 5 speaker cables from around the room, sans skirting board, peeking towards the approximate future home of the amp, craving the banana socket goodness
  5. The B&W centre M1 test-mounted to make sure it isn't about to fall off the wall, spirit-level-assured horizontality clearly on show. The cable for this one may just about be visible in this picture, to the keen of eye.
  6. Multi-meter to test the mountings as the metal of the wallmount itself carries the negative connection, so if a strand from the +ve touches the mount, you've buggered your signal and amp probably.
  7. Do you think 2 sockets is enough? Let's hope so
  8. Oh, and the wall's cream now, not terracotta. One for the ladies, that one.

    Finally got the screen back up today. Had to look after it mind.

    Trunking in rough position it needs to go to hide 4 cables (centre speaker, power, HDMI, RGB) - looks a lot darker in the photo flash than normal lighting where it blends into the wall much better ... luckily. Looks like a poster tube in this pic. And this took a lot of pain to get almost right. Oh, and as for the centre speaker cable being 9 inches too short... *&!$ it. Soldering is always fun anyway. Speakers are up too.

    PV1 Sub is still in the box

    Get the amp, Sky+ and scaler wired up for a test run... and as usual there's only crap on TV.

    The black borders are due the wife using RF2 which is set to 4:3L and that always seems to affect the main TV too. Don't think it's fixable. Pressing channel up/down on the main box seems to fix it until the remote in the bedroom gets used again... anyway, Hustle looked pretty good earlier. Oh, centre speaker didn't work first time, but it was the cable supplier's fault this time.

    And the finished article. Sub's back, everything working. Phew. One window sill left to paint, but that can wait a few months. And yes, luckily there is another sofa that actually faces the TV :)