Man Cave Profile #5
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Today’s man cave is inhabited by Jess in Greeley, CO. You may recall seeing some of these photos from the CNET feature I linked to last week. Well, Jess came to his senses and submitted the uncut version to me. A wise choice. Maybe if we praise him enough in the comments we can get him to send in some of the “before” photos as well. On to the man cave...
Unfortunately, and maybe it doesn’t seem like it, but I’m not a real big “tech” guy. The DVD player, CD player and receiver are nothing spectacular although the receiver does have a separate zone or “Zone 2” where I can be listening and watching the TV on the TV wall and be playing music/CD on the 4 ceiling speakers I have throughout the basement at the same time. Great for entertaining.
I had used Onkyo equipment for years for other set-ups and had been very pleased with the quality and service. Prior to designing this set-up, I did some further internet research and investigating and found the quality and service to still be top tier, so went with Onkyo on the equipment here. I’m not a highly technical guy when it comes to TV/Audio equipment, but based my decisions on people’s comments who are much smarter than I and my previous experience.
TV’s – Did some exhaustive research on picture quality, 1080 quality, customer reviews, and follow up customer service reviews. After reviewing all the information, I felt Samsung was the way to go. Definitely not the cheapest route, but what I had heard about follow up service, dealing with warranty should there be an issue, picture quality... it all pointed to Samsung for me.
What I like – I’ve programmed one LCD remote to handle the entire system in the basement. There are buttons that take care of activities you want to do with one push of the button. “Watch Big TV”, “Watch DVD”, “Watch All TV’s”, “Listen to CD”, etc. It changes the receiver to what you want, and changes the TV inputs to where they need to be to watch cable or DVD. You can turn each piece of equipment on/off, change inputs, etc individually if you want, but it’s easy to just push one button for what you want and it turns everything on that you need, and sets things to where they need to be. Then... you press “off” and it turns everything in the basement off.
What I like – 3 games with buddies going at once on the TV wall. Buddies over playing poker with the plasma on watching a game or watching Rounders in the poker area. And ability to be listening to a TV on the TV wall and a CD on the other side of the basement all at once. Don’t miss a single second of action if you need to go take a leak. The sound system is spectacular.
The Polaroid TV over the urinal was selected mostly due to its dimensions. I didn’t have a lot of depth in the wall there, so had to find something shallow and also didn’t want something too big there. Wanted something so that if you’re standing at the urinal, you can see all the game action without it being too big or too small. So... that TV was basically selected due to its dimensions... and I searched quite awhile to find something that was the size I wanted and would work in the wall space I had.
What I wish I had – I’m unable to push a button and scroll the games clockwise through the TV’s. If there’s a commercial on the big TV game, I’d like to be able to just push a button and it rotates all the games around. Can’t make that happen with the HD receivers I have (plus you have to designate what cable receiver you want to access at a time on the remote control).
Dislike – I actually wanted the main TV portion on the TV wall to be bigger, but checked out some projection TV options for +/- 100” screen, and for what I want to use the wall for (mostly sports during the daytime with buddies). I didn’t like the picture with lights on in the room. Didn’t want to be sitting in there with the black out shades drawn over the windows in complete darkness with a bunch of guys watching a game. If my goal was for movies, then I would have gone projection, but it’s more for sports and the lights will be on most of the time... so I tried to find the biggest, good quality HDTV, to place there.
So... I guess you could say that I’ve created something in my basement without being a super technical guy on this sort of thing. I did have the help of a company in Greeley, CO called Sound Investments. I relied on his experience concerning choosing equipment and setting everything up as well.
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The only slightly funny story is that to get all the TV’s and urinal, I had to have a big craft room/studio put in down there for the wife... nothing in life is free!!!! The entire basement project took 3 1/2 months, but the actual TV portion only took about 2 weeks of wiring everything and then working with DirectTV to get everything up and running.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Jess, your wife drives a hard bargain. I’m going to go ahead and post the craft room photos if for no other reason than to show other men how much you sacrificed yet still came out on top. It’s all just a big chess game, fellas, and Jess won out big time on this one. Check…mate.
