Wife and I decided to join the modern society and get a thin wall mounted TV.
Our whole house is Queen Anne stuff I’ve made. Do ya have any suggestions for achieving a wall mounted TV ,without visible wires, that would look nice with a traditional home?
Thanks,
Don
Replies
Hi Don,
Wow, great minds think alike! :-) We are slowly redesigning our livingroom with Queene Anne furniture as the motif. I hope to make most if not all of it.
I am currently working on a Queen Anne cabinet to house the components, i.e. AV Receiver, satellite dish, CD/DVD player, etc. It's sort of a low sideboard, for lack of a better description. I posted some drawings of it a while back. The main goal of the piece is to look like furniture and not an all consuming entertainment center.
For the flat panel display I plan on making a picture frame mount in a Queen Anne style. I haven't found any plans yet that would work so I guess I'll have to design one. It too will be QA style.
Regards,
Bob @ Kidderville Acres
A Woodworkers mind should be the sharpest tool in the shop!
DonC
My idea (for when I get a FP TV) is to make a wooden frame with folding door covers that would be framed artwork, so that when you closed the "shutters" you would see only the artwork not a TV screen. Design the frame and select the artwork to match the style of the room. Wires would be fished through the wall.
This isn't exactly a wall-mounted suggestion, but it would get you a flat-panel TV in a Queen Anne style. There's a piece of furniture often called a secretary. It can be 6-7 feet tall. The lower part of the piece is deeper than the upper. It generally has a fold-up desk surface in the middle. Above the desk there are often doors. I've seen a TV system neatly installed in one of those. The flat screen goes in the upper portion behind the doors. The electronics (DVD player, cable box, video games controllers, and whatever) goes in the lower portion. The key thing is that the whole exterior looks completely Queene Anne when the doors are closed.
One other tip: look into infrared repeaters. They allow you to control electronics (DVD player etc) which is hidden from sight.
I ran a 2" pipe up the wall behind the drywall. It comes out on top behind the TV. On the botton, it comes out behind the cabinet that houses all the other electronic gear, like the cable box, so the wires are all hidden. Not a big deal for me, since I was re-doing the wall anyway.
I also put plywood behind the drywall to make mounting easier. You definately want to hit something solid to mount those suckers.
Mike Hennessy
Pittsburgh, PA
Don:
Why not use flat wires that you glue to the drywall and paint?
Here's the url for a manufacturer:
http://www.decorp.com/products.htm
I have it mind for my TV.
Hastings
A couple of years ago I saw an installation in AudioVideo Interiors magazine. The plasma TV was framed, and there was a painting canvas on electric rollers. Hit a button, and the canvas rolls up revealing the TV. Hit the button again and all you see is a nice painting.
Samsung has a line of plasmas that don't have cables... they use a wireless system to drive the display. They use a base station unit to communicate to the display via 802.11n, which gives it a range of 200 feet. But there is still a power cord hanging from the display unit, which means it's one less than what I have with my setup, which uses a single HDMI cable to a switch in the equipment cabinet.
I will say that the Samsung plasmas are gorgeous, with high contrast numbers and crisp images. I currently have a Panasonic that is, along with the Pioneer, considered one of the best displays on the market and the Samsung looked better.
As has already been said, there is an entire industry of A/V product manufacturers that have every imaginable product for mounting and controlling electronic equipment.
One last comment, don't cheap out on this part of your plasma or LCD purchase. It amazes me how many people will drop $3-4k for a nice plasma and then get cheap about cables and mounting hardware. First and foremost, crappy cables will ruin an otherwise beautiful display, and cheap mounting hardware is a disaster waiting to happen as these technologies both result in a lot of weight as a result of a lot of glass.
I gotta comment on the cables. What you say is true, for analog signals. For digital (HDMI for instance) the signal is either there or it isn't. That is the nature of digital. No reason to pay 3 or 4 times for improvement that will not be there.BTW, a former colleague of mine cheapened out on a wall mount a few years ago (when plasmas were quite heavy) and, you guessed it, it failed. Saved $100.00, but had to buy another $4K TV.Cheers,Peter
Better life through Zoodles and poutine...
HDMI cables are already a scam and a half, can you believe what companies are getting for those! What I was referring to are audio, composite, and interconnect cables.
I've done it recently- but in a bed room that was contemporary in style, not Queen Anne. Others have addressed the issue of framing and cabinetry- I'll be more mundane.
I fished a data/power tunnel behind the set by removing the baseboard and running power and cable/DVD lines to an outlet mounted behind the TV. I also left a pull-through wire in place in case I needed to run additional lines in the future. This means the set is mounted without any visible wires or cables.
I mounted the set with a steel mount that was anchored into the studs with lag bolts. Make certain that you identify the center of the studs to secure them properly. You can identify stud locations by where the nails of the baseboards are placed, a few test drills (at the baseboard level) will ensure that you are on center.
My own take is that the accessory market for TVs has gone nuts with overpriced cr@p that is no better than the standard fare- mounts for $300, Monster cable (apparently their elemental copper is better than regular copper...). The mount I bought was $100 from Crutchfield. It is heavy duty steel and welded- I suspect you could mount a 55 Chevy from it without failure. Put the money into the set, go to the hardware store for the cables.
Glaucon
If you don't think too good, then don't think too much...
Monster Cable is really no better than most, they just have so many people convinced that they'll part with their money for it. There are still more expensive brands, and they're just as convinced that all of the rest are worse than their products. If you placed the power and signal wires in the same duct, the chance of interference is increased. If the high and low voltage wires are in the same box, it's a code violation.
"I cut this piece four times and it's still too short."
Monster has to pay for their stadium deal here in SF... I prefer to go to bluejeanscables.com. Not only is their quality very high but prices are reasonable.
I don't even like the rise in wholesale cable prices but what are you going to do when China is buying up most of the scrap metal in the US? Marketing BS causes a lot of products to cost more than they should and when Munster first started getting big, someone I know did TEF analysis (Time-Energy-Frequency) on a big selection of speaker cabling. He found that for less than 80' runs, generic 16 gauge was just fine when signal quality was concerned. Longer runs increased resistance, which is well known but no appreciable loss of high frequency content was shown. I did a job last spring and the living room speaker cable was Monster. The place that installed it charged somewhere close to $8/ft over 5 years ago and when I removed the little "pants" to strip the end back, I found 16 AWG stranded with an 18 AGW solid conductor. One if for the high frequencies and the solid is for the lows. If it was going 25', that was the longest one and there may have been a difference of 10' between the two channels, so maybe a 10 μS delay would occur, which is completely inaudible.
"I cut this piece four times and it's still too short."
I look for quality connectors and assume that all cable pretty much comes for a handful of the same factories. Insofar as marketing costs, that business has become very competitive so I understand why the companies spend so much on marketing, but it of course does end up costing the consumer. The thing that really bothers me is that the industry has conditioned the market to pay exorbitant prices for HDMI and DVI, and they are all in it together. It's like $3 a gallon gas, even when oil prices decline the refiners have little incentive to lower the pump price because we've all accepted paying $3 a gallon.
I just helped a friend hang a 60" plasma and there was an HDMI cable hanging out of the wall. It's a cheap, bagged one that comes from one of our local distributors and he says that one works, but he has had issues with many of the expensive ones. I still don't use HDMI and for some reason, my customers all want to wait till the smoke has cleared before they buy a BluRay.
"I cut this piece four times and it's still too short."
I don't blame them, Blu-ray has and will continue to drop in price and up until last month is was still a toss-up between HD and blu-ray. At any rate, if I was going to buy a blu-ray right now I would go out and buy a PS3.I do like HDMI because it cuts down the number of cables. But I think what Samsung is doing is really where we should be going, wireless. 802.11n has plenty of bandwidth to carry 1080p and with the range being what it is you have a lot of flexibility about where to locate the equipment. There are a couple of companies working on wireless power as well, but currently limited to very low amp stuff like recharging your cell phone. But in time we will get rid of these cables too!
Copper is very expensive these days, which is surely having an impact on cable prices. Monster is probably well-protected though, since their prices were very high to begin with.
I read an article someplace, can't remember exactly where, but they double-blind tested 20 audiophiles and none of them could identify by listening whether the speaker cables were the $200 variety or just 12-ga lamp wire from Home Depot.
Well, of course the audiophiles would tell you it's because they only tested the $200 cables and not the $5000 cables....
-Steve
That's the point. Copper is copper. Gold contacts, color coding, expensive packaging and extensive marketing not withstanding, a cable is a cable. The same sort of nonsense was applied to SCSI cables back in the day, and while really poorly made multicomponent cables can fail or have shielding problems, there is no diff between the moderate priced well made and the overpriced, overhyped variety. Put the money into the set...Glaucon
If you don't think too good, then don't think too much...
I agree, with one caveat. A number of years ago a friend, who is an electrical engineer designing antennas for aerospace applications, told me that if you run a pair of wires straight you invite RF interference. The simple solution is to simply give them a continuous twist. It does not even have to be a tight twist for the frequencies used in home audio applications. He told me this because I was installing about a 60 foot run from the amps to the wall mounted speakers. I have no idea if this also applies to the frequencies used in digital video. But I have had no quality issues with the 30 foot HDMI cable from the DVD player to the overhead projector.Cheers,Peter
Better life through Zoodles and poutine...
Look at Cat5- it has four pairs of wires, each with their own twist rate.
"I cut this piece four times and it's still too short."
Yes and no. You get induced interference when the two wires don't "feel" the same electromagnetic field. Twisting the two wires together helps because it ensures that they stay as close together as possible, which ensures that they both feel the same (or nearly the same) field.
It is for this reason that data communication cables, such as the CAT-5 and CAT-6 cables used for computer networking, contain twisted pairs of wires. But it's not perfect. Since the two wires don't occupy exactly the same volume of space, they're not going to feel exactly the same field. If the interfering signal is strong enough, you can still have problems.
An alternative to twisted pairs is shielded cable. Here, you avoid interference by wrapping the signal-carrying wires inside something called a Faraday cage (i.e., the shield). By connecting the shield to a good ground, any interfering field is absorbed by the shield before it gets to the signal-carrying wires. This sort of shielding isn't perfect, either, but it's usually better than twisted pair. The RCA connectors and associated cables used to transmit audio and video use shielded wires.
Except in unusually noisy environments, speaker wire doesn't require either of these techniques. The signals traveling over speaker wire are low-impedance (low voltage/high current) and are thus much less susceptible to induced electromagnetic interference than the other kinds of signals traveling around AV equipment.
Radio-frequency signals (primarily video in AV equipment) have another set of problems: At RF, cables are more accurately treated as transmission lines, rather than just wires. Just as you get a reflection when light hits a window (even though the glass is transparent), you get a reflection inside a video cable whenever the cable is interrupted by a connector or other discontinuity. These transmission line effects increase as the cable length increases, and sending video over a long cable can cause multiple ghosting, for example. This is one situation where better-quality cables and connectors can make a big difference.
-Steve
Thank you.
Better life through Zoodles and poutine...
The reason the wires are twisted is so the interference riding on the signal will be canceled by the field on the return path wire. This is called 'common mode noise rejection' and works very well. Two wires running straight and parallel will not reject much, if any, noise.Re: RCA and other coaxial audio cables- the reason they aren't the best is that the shield is one of the signal's conductors. Balanced audio/video is much cleaner and there's a lot less noise. Plus, it tends to be low impedance (at least in the case of balanced audio) and that allows much longer runs with much less signal loss. Keeping the shield separate is the best way and shielded, twisted pair is the best for balanced, unbalanced, voice/data and even speaker cabling. Not all speaker wire is equal, but spending a buttload on "Sound Pipes" isn't for everyone, just the extremely obsessive. The better jacketed speaker cable tends to have a twist rate similar to the brown/white pair in Cat5e and for long runs, this does matter. As far as two conductors not "feeling" the magnetic field equally, they're not far apart enough for there to be much difference, unless the difference will cause one to be twice as far from the source as the other, in which case there will be a 6 dB difference."Just as you get a reflection when light hits a window (even though the glass is transparent), you get a reflection inside a video cable whenever the cable is interrupted by a connector or other discontinuity. These transmission line effects increase as the cable length increases, and sending video over a long cable can cause multiple ghosting, for example. This is one situation where better-quality cables and connectors can make a big difference."You mean, like when a splitter is used and there are open taps with no terminating caps? Oh no, I NEVER see those! And DEFINITELY not after some of the other A/V dealers have sent their "installers" out on a job.
"I cut this piece four times and it's still too short."
"The reason the wires are twisted is so the interference riding on the signal will be canceled by the field on the return path wire. This is called 'common mode noise rejection' and works very well. Two wires running straight and parallel will not reject much, if any, noise."
There are two parts to common-mode noise rejection, and the reason for twisting the wire is one part of it. Imagine taking a length of two-conductor wire and shorting the ends together. What you end up with is a long, skinny loop. If the insulation were infinitely thin, the wires would be adjacent and the area of the loop would be zero. But the insulation does have finite thickness, so the area of the loop is non-zero. The current induced into the loop is proportional to the area of that loop. By twisting the wire, we convert that one long, skinny loop into a large number of smaller loops. The twisting of the wire causes the loops to alternate in their orientation--every other loop is "turned over" with respect to the other. And that's the trick: The noise induced in one loop is cancelled by the opposite noise induced in the adjacent loop.
"As far as two conductors not 'feeling' the magnetic field equally, they're not far apart enough for there to be much difference, unless the difference will cause one to be twice as far from the source as the other, in which case there will be a 6 dB difference."
Ah, not an amplitude difference, but rather a phase difference. This isn't an issue at audio frequencies, where the wavelengths are enormous, but starts to become one at video frequencies, where the wavelengths begin to be comparable to the dimensions of the cables (which is also why transmission line effects become important at these frequencies).
-Steve
I'd like to hear more about the 3 new handplanes :P
"I'd like to hear more about the 3 new handplanes"
Sure. You want to compare and constrast the merits of A2 vs. O1 vs. D2 vs. M2 for plane blades? Or would you prefer to discuss the differences among ductile iron, ordinary gray cast iron and bronze for plane bodies?
-Steve
Uh oh, I'm outta my league. Although I did just get myself a LB LA block plane, so I'm learnin' :)
The previous remarks regarding shielding, common mode rejection, impedance mismatch, etc. are true as far as they go... but they are more applicable to analog signals sent at moderate level over long distances- for example speaker lines driving at >100 watts over extended distances.Most digital lines that are only a few meters in length will not be subject to limiting behavior- nor will ghosting result from RF effects on a digital line. Digital outputs are binary, DAC occurs in the television. A comparison of cable television performance- digital vs analog provides a rapid proof of this construct. The manufacture of decent, multicomponent, shielded digital cables is exacting, but routine. Paying more for “super” (monster) quality is a fool’s errand.
Glaucon
If you don't think too good, then don't think too much...
I agree- in most cases, digital signal is generally immune to the usual problems from RFI and EMI, but with all of the wireless transmission everyone wants, buys, installs, are exposing everything to, some issues can come up. Serial digital cable is very simple, works well and isn't terribly expensive, but in all truth, regular RG-59 works just as well and in many cases, "serial digital" is just RG-59 with RG-59 crossed off and Serial digital written in, in crayon. (Python fans will recognize this). I'd really like to see a review of digital audio cables- that should be interesting.I don't know that all digital runs are short but with the cost of repeaters coming down, it makes sense to send some signals digitally instead of analog, IMO.
"I cut this piece four times and it's still too short."
All,
I recently had all my antique handplanes pinced by the movers. Out of frustration I bought three LN planes. They are nice and work well right out of the box. I am not convinced that they work that much better then my highly fettled older Baileys and Stanleys.
Still very nice and quite pretty.
Frank
With the high price of copper and most other metals, the logical place to look for improvement is fiber. It doesn't need to be glass, just a pure, clear material that can stand flexing. 3M makes fiber optic terminations that don't need to be fused and are about $3.50 each, which will surely come down when they start making by the millions. Media convertors are getting cheaper and M-Audio has a piece that takes analog lineaudio or optical input and converts to USB or analog audio out, for $79.00, list. Pretty soon, fiber and S/PDIF digital will be the norm and analog will only be at the front and back ends of the signal chain. Also, baluns for sending analog and digital audio, composite/component/DVI/HDMI video are available that send the signal over Cat5e and you can go well over 200' with them. That alone cuts the cost of cabling because Cat5e is so much cheaper than other kinds of cable.
"I cut this piece four times and it's still too short."
OK, wireless is great for installation but at some point, there's going to be so much RF flying around us that we'll glow at night, not to mention the conflicts that will ultimately be created. There's too much RF around us now, more will just make things worse. Re: wireless power- the high voltage transmission system throws off a lot of signal (remember the cows being affected?) and adding high power RF to induce voltage is asking for more things around the source to not work. Look on any RF device for the FCC sticker and expect that to increase.
"I cut this piece four times and it's still too short."
I don't blame them, Blu-ray has and will continue to drop in price and up until last month is was still a toss-up between HD and blu-ray. At any rate, if I was going to buy a blu-ray right now I would go out and buy a PS3.
Blu-ray sucks. Even now that HD-DVD looks like it's finally dying, BD (Blu-ray Disc) still has compatibility problems, because it's not even compatible with itself! If you have a BD player, what kind is it? 1.0? 1.1? 2.0? If you have a BD 2.0 disc, it won't completely work in a 1.0 player, so if you were one of the early adopters who shelled out $800 on a new Blu-ray player when they first came out, you're screwed. How many more revisions to the spec will they make before it finally stabilizes?
What's more, Blu-ray has DRM (Digital Restrictions Management) to keep you from making back-up copies of your discs, or from copying them onto your media center computer so you can assemble a video library without having to fumble with discs. Many people have done this with their DVDs: ripped them to DivX/Xvid format and stored them all (hundreds) on one media center computer with 500GB - 1TB capacity, so they can just pick a movie to watch with their remote control instead of messing with discs. With Blu-ray, this isn't allowed.
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