About 3 years ago we upgraded our family room entertainment system to HD. We've really enjoyed it, but it's only been in the one room, with the rest of the house still stuck in the 60's with standard def. Randy has wanted to upgrade the rest of the house, but there wasn't a good solution for distributing HD around the house without running multiple video cables to each room.

This summer a company named Audio Authority came out with a switching/distribution system which only requires two cat-6 cables to be run to each room. On those two cables they squeeze component HD video, digital audio, stereo analog audio and a return IR feed for remote control of all of the gear in the family room. The switcher has 6 HD inputs and can route any source to any output. Perfect!

  • Routing Diagram
  • Family Room
  • Media Central

The first step was figuring out what we'd need. After investigating for a bit, Randy drew up a schematic of the whole system to get a final tally of all of the components and cables that would be needed. We decided to go with LCDs for all of the TVs so that we could get 1080p everywhere and not have to worry about burn in when using the computer. We'd also be able to change the gray pillar-box bars (required to keep plasmas from burning) to black, which would be very nice. Sony makes some highly rated displays that look really nice. Going with the same brand for most of the panels assured us that they would have the same audio delay, so we wouldn't have echo issues when watching things in two rooms. It also meant that we'd only have to come up with one set of programming for all 4 of the Harmony-550 remotes, which would be a big time saver while making changes and fine tuning them.

In the family room we went with a Sharp Aquos 65" LCD. It's a big bright unit with lots of contrast (15000:1). Since it uses a separate receiver for audio, we added a Felston digital audio delay to match up it's audio to the other TVs and ensure lip-sync. Some new thinner Polk Audio speakers finished off the family room, they sound great and are really sleek looking.

  • Master Bedroom
  • Excersise Room
  • Computer Room
  • Guest Bedroom

After a bit of a shopping frenzy on Amazon, it was time to call Arden at AVPros. They did our satellite dish install in Los Altos 3 years ago, as well as all of our A/V wiring in San Francisco 2 years ago. It turned out to be a 3 day install, with all of the panels placed exactly where we wanted them for a nice built-in look. They even mounted one of the panels on an exterior wall by running the wires up from under the house. Nice!

We added a second HD DVR, the DirecTV HR-20. It's required for receiving the whole HD lineup from DirecTV, which will be about 100 channels by the end of the year. It gets the new signals from a whole new satellite which uses a new compression method (MPEG-4).  We did need a new, 5LNB dish, but Arden had that up and running the first morning of the install, using the existing wires down from the roof.

When the HR-20 was introduced about a year ago we had heard some horror stories about how bad the software was; crashing all the time with lots of bugs. Over the last year they've made great strides and had many updates. Arden said he had one at home and it was working well for him. We decided to give it a try and have been pleasantly surprised. It works well and has a pretty slick interface. It's not TiVo, but it some ways (especially visually with it's menus), it's ahead of TiVo.  

After getting all of the remotes programmed, calibrating all of the TVs and working through some IR reception issues, everything is working great. The LCDs look awesome, and we can now watch HD anywhere in the house. Just in time for our big Thanksgiving extravaganza, Yay!