These are some small projects that I have undertaken to improve some facet or another of my home theater's performance. Some worked great, some didn't really do a darn thing...
All credit for this idea goes to KennyG on AVS Forum, who did the research for this, see this thread.
In brief, the phosphors in the Barco CRT (MEC/Panasonic) tubes produces a red color that is skewed towards orange from the CIE red color point. By putting a red Roscolux #19 filter on the CRT face the red saturation is increased. Reds look more, well, red.
This tweak gets a 5/5 for being easy, inexpensive and effective.
The idea with a star ground system is to tie all the equipment to a single ground reference point, this helps eliminate ground loops, helps with RFI immunity and improves shielding effectiveness. Reference this site.
Per the National Electrical Code, all grounds, supplemental or otherwise, must be tied back to the service entrance ground point.
I installed a ground bus on the media distribution backboard. This bus bar ties to another bus bar located in the home theater, it is also tied to the security system and media distribution system components.
Bus bars are Square D models, with the interconnections via #4 AWG bare ground conductor and #12 AWG stranded green wire, NEC type MTW/THHN.
Each component in the system has its chassis grounded back to the ground bar, ensuring that they are at the same ground potential, whether or not they use a grounded three prong power plug or not.
Didn't really have a problem here, more of a preventative measure. I'd give it a 3/5, cheap, not to hard, no real immediate pay off though.
I put my main speakers "up on blocks". The blocks are MDF painted flat black.
The idea was to provide a little additional isolation from the floor and try to cut down on any mechanical coupling that may be occuring.
Not a huge difference here, really fits the definition of a tweak. I think the bass response may be a bit tighter, but it could be wishful thinking. The blocks get a 2.0/5 for being way cheap, way easy and at least doing no harm.
Speaker Isolation
My center channel speaker has a dull black finish. It is mounted quite close to the bottom of the screen, where it receives a good amount of reflected light. This had the effect of illuminating the speaker enclosure and making it very visible.
My solution was to cover the top of the speaker with some black velveteen fabric. A real light sponge. Now the center channel is pretty much invisible with the black curtains and carpet.
