Over the weekend we got the front frame wrapped in GOM, the speakers installed, the AV Rack installed with equipment in and wired up.

There are few things left to be done, wrap the side columns in GOM, touch up some painting with a fine brush, figuring out the rope lighting and some reworking the wiring on the AV rack. Future additions will be doors for the AV Rack, shelves for the DVD storage area, dimmers for the rope lighting and probably IR controlled dimmers so I can control them from the iPronto.

One last little nasty is a ground loop issue. I have a really loud hum in my subwoofers when using either of the two new outlets I ran. I’ve found an outlet outside the AV Rack space that goes to the 2nd breaker box that reduces the hum to tolerable levels but I still need to do some things to try and remove the hum all together. Looks like the issue is that only the Receiver and Subwoofer Amp are grounded to earth, so I’m picking up DVD and Cable Box trying to get to earth via the Sub Amp and humming at 60hz….far as I can understand it all…I’ll probably end up with some sort of isolator/transformer thing to remove the last bits of it.

We watched a few parts of movies on Saturday and after a birthday dinner with friends last night at Bravo we watched Finding Nemo all the way through. It looks fantastic upscaled to 720p, much better than the 480i signal coming through a composite video cable. Finding Nemo has an impressive amount of low bass in it. The submarine scene is quite impressive and when Darla knocks on the fish tank….well…we all just laughed. I’m happy to say that the SVS Subs are even more impressive in the home theater room than they were upstairs. No transducers are needed under the seats to FEEL the bass. The room shakes quite nicely.

I hooked up my HDTV cable box Saturday night as well, and had to call Time Warner at 10:30 at night to get the box working. Some activation signal needed sending a few times. I was impressed that they were still in at 10:30 and doing service stuff. The High Definition stuff looks incredible. After watching Discovery HD for a bit regular cable looks horrible.

Pictures are, of course, updated.