The Attic & Our Future Entertainment Center

Over the past few weeks I have spent considerable time contemplating the future or our entertainment center – and how to best take advantage of our insanely large HDTV while at the same time avoiding paying any money to the cable and satellite monopolies that plague our country.

This led to me finally actually deciding to do something about our surround sound and move our speakers to the actual positions they should be in. I have avoided this for years due to the work of moving cords around and possibly having to go up into “the attic” – or crawlspace.

But after buying some new speaker wire and just having the wires go across the carpet we watched a couple of movies this weekend and were amazed at the increase of enjoyability of the movies. So last night I decided to take the plunge since it is not 100 degrees in the attic anymore. I had been up there once or twice briefly to stick old baby stuff up there, but never really crawled/walked around.

Together with Tevia’s help, we made some holes in the ceiling to thread the wires up. I went up into the spooky attic and realized there are like millions of wires up there. They were everywhere. Cable wires, telephone wires, and other who-knows-for-what wires. The first hurdle is to try and be able to find the holes and the wire Tevia was feeding up. The first one was fairly easy since I could see the flume for the fireplace and knew approximately where it would be coming up. And Tevia did a great job of getting the wire to emerge from the insulation that I ended up getting all over my clothes and lungs.

Next I had to have Tevia drill a hole for the wire to go back down into the living room and find that hole. This proved a little more difficult. Even banging on the ceiling wasn’t all that helpful, but we eventually got it. The third hole was the hardest as it was pretty much in the middle of nowhere. We spent quite a bit of time yelling/banging to try and find the hole. But in the end we were able to set up our whole surround sound. We celebrated by watching the Two Towers. My next step is to get an audio cable (either coax or optical) to connect the TV to the receiver. We have one for the DVD player, but never bought one for the TV.

Then the next steps will take place over the next month. The first will be cutting off cable. The plan is to get rid of cable and avoid giving them so much money each month. We will then buy a fairly inexpensive PC with enough memory, etc. and an HDMI (or DVI) connection to hook it up to our HDTV so that we can watch (via stream or download) videos from the computer. For example, we’ll be able to stream our netflix right to our computer. We can also use hulu or nick.com or scifi.com to watch shows. For our local TV we will get an antenna to get the HD quality for free – and actually in better quality than from cable. The last step will be to either get a blu-ray or just an upscaling dvd player to improve our DVD picture (which isn’t all that terrible anyway). With this we can save $50 per month or so, which is about what we pay for expanded cable.

And now I have conquered the attic, so setting up an antenna may not be all that bad if we have to stick it up there.