THe house is passing final inspection tomorrow. Shop is coming this summer, HT after that. Stay tuned.

I'm getting pretty stoked, this concrete construction made it a very quiet structure inside.

Excellent! I'm looking forward to seeing what you come up with for your new system.

I'm thinking a 990 (or the upgrade if it's out by then) as the centerpiece, and a slim RP as the display. Maybe one of the RCA DLP units, 62" or so. Around that the speakers and wall treatments will be custom built units, but not in-wall. In-wall precludes easy tweakage. Probably 22 channels of amplification and all active crossovers, each set of drivers connected directly to its amp section.

No clever clocks are planned.

charlie,
check out the new Samsung DLP around 54". It has LED lighting. Say goodbye to color wheel. I have seen one. Very sweet. I was watching a collage football game in HD. Greens where smokin', yellows-blues and the other colors very-very nice.

Have fun w/ the house - looks cool.

This one?

Looks nifty, but I'm hoping for at least 60", 65" would be ideal. We'll see. Thanks for the tip.

According to this from the HE show, HP's also getting in on the LED light source thing, although like Samsung they're starting out around 52".

This LED thing is such a very cool idea - I hope it works out. If so I'd expect LED powered DLP systems to go bigger and smaller. Very cool.

Thanks guys.

You should definitely check out the Sony SXRD displays. The new ones were just officially announced and should be out in early fall.

You can get the current 60" SXRD for less than $4000, but you will probably be able to get the new one for about the same as well.

Differences between current SXRDs and upcoming:

1080P accepted on both HDMI inputs instead of just 1080i (though not a big deal at all yet)

They got rid of the "elephant ear" speakers on either side of the screen and moved them below the screen - this has been a big complaint of the current models

up to 30% shallower depth. The 50" comes in at around 19" deep now and apparently the new 55" will be about 13" deep, so pretty shallow.

Other than that, it's pretty much same as current models...

One thing about DLP. Most DLP sets (pretty much any of the RPTVs based on the TI chips) are not true 1080 displays. True 1080 displays have at least a native resolution of 1920x1080. Most (if not all) current and upcoming DLP RPTVs are 960x1080 and use a process called wobulation (you can read up on it on Wikipedia.com if you want more info) to approximate 1920x1080.

You can totally tell the difference between a true 1080 display like a sony SXRD or JVC D-ILA vs any DLP when viewed side by side. The native 1920x1080 displays are obviously sharper.

I expect DLP to start to fade away based on increased competition from LCD and LCoS based RPTVs as well as LCD, Plasma and upcoming SED based direct view TVs.

Seems like good 3 chip true 1080 DLP designs are not forthcoming for RPTVs any time soon and even in front projectors they are quite spendy (I think the Runco 3 chip projector is like $20k).

So if you want the best bang for your RPTV buck, look at something other than DLP.

And make sure if you do buy an HDTV right now that it is true 1080. Why companies are still coming out with new 720 designs is beyond me.

13" is OK, but I'm after the 7" deep RP systems, like the slim RCA units.

Finally I'm getting the shop built, so sometime this winter CHT 2.0 will start moving forward. The family room is upgraded to a 3.1 system and a Viewsonic 40" LCD, so I'm not suffering too badly anymore.

Currently I'm starting to plan for my audio test gear needs, I'm looking at Sample Champion for the software and maybe a Lexicon USB sound interface for testing hardware. Also gonna use a decent audio amp and I have a lab microphone.

Any comments or suggestions?