Now HERE is an awesome idea, folks–Tom Hetzel, who lives in a townhouse in Cleveland, has neighbors surrounding him in pretty close quarters.

So how’d he beat that?  What he did was he built a room…in his basement.  The “room within a room” concept provides a little extra dead air insulation so that he can have his sweet home theater setup and not bother the neighbors.  He even showed the neighbors the construction process and how the various additions would be largely unnoticeable.

How sweet is this setup, you ask?  Sweet like candy, I’ll tell you that much.  He’s got Acoustic Research speakers, a ninety two inch Draper screen, a Pioneer receiver, a Samsung DVD player and a Sanyo projector.  The Acoustic Research 910s he’s got, for example have two twelve inch woofers, and one liquid cooled titanium tweeter.  They weigh a whopping one hundred forty seven pounds each.

Considering that the neighbors actually approve of this monster setup, you know it’s got to be pretty sweet to pump out that kind of force yet not wake the neighbors…or even the kids.

Jeremy Hummer’s love of movies began when he was a kid, much like most of ours did.  He actually began collecting films–and I mean ACTUAL FILMS, like sixteen millimeter film–but quickly branched out to video when he discovered that collecting actual film was a difficult and downright painful process.

But as he went on, and his love of movies carried on, soon he found himself the owner of a house with a five hundred square foot garage…or the perfect home theater to be.  And this set him down a path where, eventually, he would use that garage home theater as the centerpiece, and the showpiece, of his own home theater installation firm.

So what does he have in this incredible theater?  Oh man, you’ll hardly believe it.  He’s got Monitor Audio speakers, Velodyne subwoofers, a JVC projector, a VuTec one hundred ten inch screen, Oppo DVD player, Marantz Blu-ray player and plenty more to boot.

That’s one sweet home theater setup you’ve got there, Jeremy, and if that’s the kind of thing that your company, Electronic Home Designers, does, then even I’m interested.  And you know from experience I’m one cheap individual.

No, you didn’t misread that.  But man, I was as shocked as you are now when I read about how a guy put together a complete home theater in his backyard for two hundred and fifty bucks.  And how he did it, now that’ll amaze you.

One day, while Ed Sweeting was talking to his seven year old girl about drive in movies, she asked a rather fateful question: “What’s a drive in?”.  Now, it’s not so hard to believe that she didn’t know.  There aren’t very many of them around any more.  But Ed wasn’t letting this old institution go down without a fight–he put one together in his backyard and he did it on the cheap.  Just two hundred and fifty bucks assembled a drive in in the backyard.

What does two hundred and fifty bucks buy you these days?  Not much, actually.  But thanks to some timely donations, eBay, and a little fixer-upper attitude, he managed to bring together a set of Yamaha speakers, an Eiki projector, a one hundred ten inch Stewart Filmscreen and an RCA DVD / VCR player.

Next thing you know, he had his backyard drive in.  And hopefully, his little seven year old is learning just how sweet a home theater setup can be.

Okay, so on the surface, five thousand bucks sounds like a lot of cash.  But if you break it down over the course of a year, you’re actually only talking about a hundred bucks a week.  And if you’re willing to put aside that kind of cash for that whole year, then you too can have a home theater setup like Mark Wiener’s.

When I read about this one I was pretty well surprised.  He mostly paid for electronics and furnishings, doing most of the construction work between himself and his father in law, which was probably a good bonding experience for the duo.

But that five grand went a pretty long way, putting up a Toshiba DVD, VCR and HD DVD player (though that one probably doesn’t see much use any more), a Panasonic Blu-ray player and 720p projector, KLH speakers and a B-tech ninety inch screen, and plenty else.

With some careful planning, you too can put in a really awesome home theater setup and without breaking the bank to do it.  That makes it, especially these days, doubly sweet.

So this guy by the name of Jeff bought a 1921 Georgian colonial house nine years ago, and it wasn’t exactly in the best shape when he got it.  Well, if you were eighty years old you probably wouldn’t be in the best shape either, so don’t laugh.

Anyway, Jeff set out to gut the house and renovate it to suit his needs.  Now, I know that this is how a lot of horror movies started, but for him it worked out just fine.  He added a new master suite, an exercise room, a guest suite…and of course, what we came here for, a sweet home theater setup.

He’s got plenty of awesome equipment in there, including fully TWELVE Acoustic Innovations Deco recliners (those red and pink things you see in the foreground), a Denon Blu-ray player, a JVC VHS deck, an Oppo DVD player, a Panasonic Blu-ray player, Klipsch speakers, a Sony projector and a monster screen from–where else?–Stewart Filmscreen.

For gutting most of his home and adding on like no tomorrow, Jeff’s definitely managed to add on a truly sweet home theater setup.

There’s a whole lot of people out there who crave the “drive in movie experience” of yore.  But Kevin Van wanted it so badly that he built one.  In his backyard.

He bought his first projector for inside the house, and it got him to thinking, why can’t I use this projector outdoors?   But that wasn’t the end of his quest to remake the drive in, no…only the beginning.   Get this–the guy went so far to restore the “drive in movie experience” that he bought and restored nine vintage drive in speakers, paying a hundred and ten bucks for the lot on eBay.

He put a concession area on his screened-in porch to keep the bugs out, and included a commercial-grade popcorn popper, a hot dog steamer, a nacho chip and cheese warmer and even a chili warmer.  He even built his own screen.

But he’s also got a bit of the twenty-first century hooked in as well–a Sharp projector, a Sony Prologic receiver, Pioneer amps (the vintage speakers on eBay?  Pioneers all.) plus some Bose and MTX speakers too.  Speakers are a big part of outdoor theater.

The sheer devotion to the medium definitely earns the appellation of sweet home theater setup, and hopefully, the heartburn from the chili will be mistaken for the warming love of home theater.

David Adey of Newfoundland may well be the poster child for building a home theater in the modular style.  I love the modular style.  I personally espouse it.  And when you consider how he did it, a little bit at a time, he shows exactly why I endorse this style of design.

A little at a time, a new piece here and there, and soon (well, in seven months) he had a home theater system.  And though it sounds like he spent a small fortune on this sweet home theater setup, he actually spent ten thousand dollars.

Now, that SOUNDS like a lot of money.  And objectively, on the surface, yes it is.  But think about this–he didn’t spend ten thousand dollars…he spent three hundred and fifty bucks a week. Every week. For seven months.  And that doesn’t sound nearly as bad.

What did he get for that cash, you ask?  How about a Yamaha receiver, Paradigm speakers, a Sanyo projector and a hundred and four inch projector screen, among others?

It’s a pretty sweet setup, and the fact that he built it a little at a time makes it all the sweeter.

Matthew Katz wants everyone to know that he did NOT build this sweet home theater setup in his backyard instead of planning his wedding.

He merely did it on his downtime.

And frankly, whether he did or he didn’t is immaterial for our purposes because man, did he ever do it up RIGHT.  Oh, sure, he doesn’t have a lot of fancy hardware in there–his goal was for 5.1 sound and at least a 480p picture, but considering that “cheap or free” was the goal of the day (a must when you’re neck deep in a wedding plan) and they built the whole thing for an astonishingly low seven hundred and forty bucks, I’d say he pulled it off nicely!

He’s got an eight by twenty FOOT screen in there, homemade, from some lumber and Dazian Trapeze Plus screen material.  Plus, he’s got an Onkyo home theater in a box system, an Epson projector and a Sony DVD player.  You put all these together and what do you got?  A basic, outdoor, and totally sweet home theater setup.

Matthew Katz’s sweet home theater setup is a lesson to us all that you don’t need thousands of dollars and all the latest and greatest products to make a home theater special. All you really need is a will to do the job and a love of movies.  Oh, and a little help from your friends.

Steve Mize is a man who feels much the same way I do about the movies.  Growing up, we both regarded them the same way, as a special treat.  See, we didn’t have Netflix back when I was a kid.  We didn’t have hundreds of cable channels.  We had some, yeah, but not that many. Cartoon Network was still a gleam in Ted Turner’s eye.  One of my earliest movie memories is my father packing me in his old pickup truck and the two of us driving a town over to catch Robocop 2 at the local small movie house while my mother was at bingo.  Needless to say, I went to bed late that night, and it was fantastic.

Steve Mize brought this same kind of emotion into his home theater setup.  He built his theater around a ticket stand, concession area (I love theaters that remember the concession stand) and a “walk of fame” featuring stars of the past, like Hepburn and Bacall.

But it’s not all about the nostalgia, no sir.  There’s also some prime hardware in here too, like a JVC projector, Pioneer blu-ray player, Screen Research hundred and ten inch screen, and the ability to play almost every format ever released.  He’s got an HD DVD and a VCR in there, as well as a straight Denon DVD.

Steve Mize’s home theater setup brings the best of the past and present together, and must therefore always be called sweet.

Morris Saad’s home theater setup contains all manner of choice components, but it also does one thing really, really well, and that’s illustrate the value of modular function.

See, Morris has been working on his dream home theater setup for a lot of years.  Tech has come and tech has gone, and Morris kept up with the changes in gear, constantly swapping out old and busted for new hotness with virtually every opportunity.

He’s got a ticket booth, a concession stand (I LOVE it when home theater buffs add a concession stand. It really shows maximum dedication to the home theater concept when you go that far to replicate it at home), a bar and a game room, but that’s not all he’s got.  As for components, he’s got a Stewart filmscreen, speakers from Definitive Tech, an Epson home projector and a Pioneer receiver and DVD player.

So next time you get ready to set up a home theater, spare a thought for Morris Saad’s setup, and remember why his buddies always called him the “upgrade king”.

When I saw this my jaw dropped in a kind of joyful alarm.  I had never thought of something like this myself, and yet, in retrospect, it’s the most perfect idea EVER.  Ken Allwine managed to stun me into incoherence by creating a drive in home theater…in his driveway.

It quite literally is the PERFECT idea.  You’re already in the car.  There’s enough room in the driveway for a car and then some, so why not put up a projector screen and make your own drive in theater!

Most of his equipment is housed inside the garage so it’s protected from the elements, but outside is a speaker array and the eight by twelve foot screen.  It’s a pretty big setup, with room for thirty or forty people (not thirty or forty CARS, though), and shields the viewers from the lights and sound of the street outside.  Viewers actually say it works like a small amphitheater.

But by way of specifics, it’s got a Crown amplifier, a Sony DVD player, an InFocus projector, Fisher speakers and some extra custom gear.

When a theater can present the kind of thing that anyone probably should have thought of before, but didn’t, well…it’s got to be a sweet home theater setup.

Home theater buffs, you’d best brace yourselves RIGHT NOW because I’m about to lay a metric ton of amazing on you today.

Seems that the crew out at Office Max got nice and proactive about their upcoming Black Friday shopping deals.  Just for a bit of background, Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving, the biggest shopping day of the year, so named because that’s the day the stores go “in the black”, or show a profit.  The deals are positively MONSTROUS.  Check this out!

If you’ve got a home theater PC, then you can get a terabyte external hard drive for it for about eighty bucks.  A half-terabyte, five hundred gigs, will run you a relatively bad deal at sixty bucks.  Seriously, why spend sixty for a half-terabyte when you can double it for twenty bucks more?

If you’d rather watch your movies on DVD, you can get a Memorex seven inch widescreen portable DVD player for just under thirty bucks.

And if there’s something else you’re after, well, the deals don’t stop there.  I was just talking about the deals that mean something to US.  So don’t eat too much turkey Thanksgiving Day, because you’re going to want to be fresh and rested for Black Friday.

So the Los Angeles Times took a run at the somewhat flagging DVD market to make a few breathless suggestions that, somehow, this was the beginning of the end for the DVD format.

Okay, sure.  Let’s make one thing clear right off the top.  Chances are, DVD is something of a doomed media.  But this doom is fairly off in the far flung future.  Right now, there are three essential aspects to media delivery: digital distribution, that is, distribution with no disc; Blu-ray, distribution on Blu-ray disc; and DVD, distribution on straight DVD disc.

Digital distribution is a fantasy until the basic internet infrastructure of the United States is sufficiently upgraded to allow ordinary citizens access to the internet in their homes without usage limits or low speeds.  That’s a good chunk of the country mostly out of the game right now, and no studio in its right mind will focus on a distribution strategy that excises major portions of the market.

Blu-ray is gaining ground as a distribution medium, as it should, but is still in its earliest stages.  Remember, the forum wars between Blu-ray and HD DVD were barely ended back in 2008.  Players are still pricey, and with a hamstrung global economy there’s not a whole lot of room for new purchases.  But like I said, it’s gaining ground, but slower than normal.

DVD is still the top distribution strategy, because it encompasses the widest portion of the market and thus, the most potential business.

The Los Angeles Times can say what it wants, but to ignore DVD is done strictly at one’s own risk.

It’s possible you’ve already heard the name of Ruben Ortiz, the guy who build SmX Cinema Solutions, a company that deals primarily in home theater gear.  But what you may not know is that his company got his start as part of his very own sweet home theater setup.

He developed what’s called an “acoustically transparent screen surface”, which basically reduces the amount of sound distortion caused by the screen.  Naturally, one of his screens is in his own home theater (which may well be the strongest endorsement anyone can give a product) but it’s not just the choice screen that makes Ruben Ortiz’s home theater setup a sweet one.

You can tell from the picture that he’s got one of those awesome star fields in there, which alone makes most any home theater setup a sweet one, but he’s also got Crown amps, Klipsch speakers, an Xbox
360 and a PS3, which of course serve double-duty as DVD and Blu-ray players, and a SIM2 C3X Lumis 1080 projector.  Plus there’s his own SmX screen, which is a whopping one hundred and forty inches.

When you care enough to use your own custom-designed hardware, it can’t be any less than a sweet home theater setup.

Panasonic offers a potential Blu-Ray player and recorder that should interest the hardcore home entertainment people looking for fine video playback for their desired videos and movies. The Panasonic Blu-Ray DVB DMR-BW850 is a high-end digital TV HD recorder that was launched in New Zealand which can play and record via the Blu-ray format. It also comes with a SD card reader which allows you to view photo content from digital cameras straight to your TV set. If that storage access option is not enough, there is also a USB memory adapter you can use. The player has an internal 500GB HDD and even has provisions for LAN access as well as interfaces that include component video out, digital audio out and S-Video. It supports most audio, photo and video file formats, providing you an array of options as far as viewing preference.

The Panasonic Blu-Ray DVB DMR-BW850 player retails for about NZ$1,999.00.

(Source) GeekZone

It started out with a forty thousand dollar outbuilding and a dream.  But for one young family man, it eventually became the sweet home theater setup he’d always wanted it to be.

Rather than GOM fabric or acoustic dampening walls, Greg Powers’ home theater setup uses over seventy individually crafted fabric wall panels.  It’s one of the first home theaters to use this process, and you can see them hanging on the walls of his home theater, pictured at right.  This is actually an incredibly difficult process, as each frame must be precisely engineered so that they fit together in sequence, like massive tiles of fabric that hang on a wall.

But it’s not just this thoroughly unusual approach to home theater building that makes this a sweet home theater setup–there’s plenty of choice hardware in here too. There’s an LG Super Blue DVD player, Polk Audio speakers, NEC projector and one hundred ten inch Stewart filmscreen.

Between the innovation of its construction and the quality of the gear, this is definitely a sweet home theater setup in every particular.

Gather round, kiddies–it’s time for math fun with Toshiba!

I know, I said the word “Math” and half of you just got the cold sweats thinking you had a test today.  But it’s cool.  This is going to be math FUN!

Toshiba’s introducing a new product, you see–you’ve heard about it a little here already; a combination LCD TV and DVD player.  Comes with your choice of screen sizes: nineteen, twenty two or twenty six inch.  Plus, apparently, it can be run on direct current with an available free inverter, which is actually something new and different.

The twenty six inch model costs $ range from $279.99-499.99.

At this point, you’re probably thinking what I’m thinking: who’d pay a thousand bucks for a twenty six inch LCD and a DVD player?  That’s where the math fun comes in!

A twenty six inch Toshiba television, by itself, runs as low as $283. A Toshiba DVD player, retails for about $39.  This means you could put together your own array for about a third of what Toshiba’s charging for the all-in-one uint.  That doesn’t make much sense, somehow.

(Addendum: I was recently contacted by Toshiba staffers who pointed out, fairly, that my logic is quite correct, but it’s geographically flawed.  The prices I quote on the TV / DVD combination are limited to AUSTRALIA only.  The prices for the United States market, meanwhile, have been updated and are much more reasonable.)

Okay…this might be a little confusing, so bear with me.  I’m not actually repeating anything here, but we first mentioned the recall of Durabrand DVD players sold by Wal-Mart back in August.  Well, only recently, an expansion to that recall was announced.

The alert of the day is now to watch for COLORS of the Durabrand–where before, the recall was limited to silver colored DVD players, the recall has now been expanded to included the pink and purple DVD players as well.  Here’s the complete rundown with UPC symbols:

- Silver unit: Model number 1002, bearing a 1799901002 UPC
- Pink unit: Model number 1002 PINK, bearing a 1799934100 UPC
- Purple unit: Model number 1002 PUR, bearing a 1799932100 UPC

So if you have any of these at home, you’re going to want to pack them up hasta pronto and take them back to Wal-Mart for a full refund.  Don’t worry about having a receipt–just having the unit is plenty good enough since there’s a recall notice out.

And don’t brush this warning off, either.  Reports have already come in about the units overheating and catching fire, so if you’ve got one of these, get it back to the store.

This sweet home theater setup has a special sort of resonance for me, and for anyone else who’s lived through the sheer mammoth crippling unpleasantness that is a flooded basement.

When a couple found that their sump pumps had failed–sump pumps are those really valuable things that keep water that can seep up through concrete floors from pooling and flooding in your basement by ejecting it out into your yard or into your septic tank or whatever–they quickly replaced them, but they were left with a whole lot of ruined drywall and carpeting.

So they set out to have the room restored, but they discovered that the company they’d hired also did home theater installation, they decided to go whole hog and have a sweet home theater setup installed.

But it’s not the impressive origin story by itself that makes this sweet–it’s the Control4 control gear, the Denon receiver and DVD player, the Triad speaker gear, the Runco projector and the one hundred thirty inch Stewart filmscreen thrown in that makes this sweet.

Any time you can go from flooded cavern in the basement to home theater, you’ve got to call it sweet by default.

Renting DVDs from kiosks was initiated in April by Blockbuster but for sure many of you have not visibly seen them. Maybe you are looking in the wrong places or they haven’t disseminated these DVD rental kiosks properly. But now Blockbuster may change all that as it has announced that their express-branded DVD-rental kiosks reveals that they will be adding 27 more locations by this month. The Blockbuster Express is currently distributed among 89 Tedeschi Food Shop locations in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Connecticut.

For your reference, no membership is required to rent DVDs at a kiosk. You are just required to swipe your credit card to which you will be charged only $1 a night until you return the DVD you rented.

(Source) Press