Since there seems not to be a forum for personal introductions, I'll make this thread do double-duty here. I am Mark Weiss, but most people in the audiophile world know me as Bass Pig, as I am 'curator' of the Bass Pig's Lair (oh, really, yes indeed...).
I've been building speakers longer than most of the US population has been alive. It's what I do for fun and my pursuit of perfection in sound.
When I settled in my present home in 1966, I was a fairly ordinary fellow.. but something happened which drew me into the search for great bass over the next eight years. By the mid-1970s, I was a changed man, suddenly less obsessed with radio, Tesla coils and using my body to light fluorescent tubes, and slowly becoming obsessed with bass. Several events, actually, lead me on that wild journey... one was a trip to Radio City Music hall, where I heard an honest-to-goodness Wurlitzer organ. Another was a wealthy audiophile friend, who showed me a JBL Paragon and some Cerwin-Vega speakers. Other events were trips to audio showrooms.
But I was a very sick man.. I wanted more, more, more than what they could give me. So by the mid70s, I started to study acoustics, principals of transducers, and found that audio behaves pretty much like RF--just the wavelengths are much longer. But nearly all of the standard rules apply--standing waves, peaks, nulls when two or more sources converge, etc. So I got busy in earnest, on my quest to build speakers. I'd built a few in the 1960s, but got serious a few years later, on the quest for that almighty bass.
I went through my horn-loaded phase, building a variety of horn-loaded LF systems. Eventually after another decade and ten new tried, tested and sold off designs/systems, I ended up with the present system. All through the 80s, 90s and halfway into the first decade of the 20th century, I was audio-only, for practical purposes, although in 1987, I made a small gesture to video and got me two Newvicon tube cameras and a NEC 19" CRT monitor. Until 2001, that would suffice. Then I got bit by the DV revolution and bought me a string of DV cameras, eventually ending up with a Sony TRV900 and two VX2000s for the next five years. The 19" monitor got replaced with a 32" TV..
2007 came and HDV was coming of age, and I bought me a Sony HVR-V1U. I was running a pretty much full-time business as a videographer by this time. Now it was time to go HDTV, so I bought a Vizio 47" LCD. It looked good--great compared to my SD TV and it was here until this past month.. that's when something happened that bit me with the projector bug.
Three weeks ago, I helped a friend calibrate his new projector. I'd last seen one in Best Buy, a Sony shooting an 80" Stuart screen and it was washed-out looking and unimpressive except for size. It was too dim. I dismissed it mentally and moved on looking at bigger, better LCDs. But I had a problem: I could not fit a larger TV between the speakers. I knew I wanted projection technology to vastly improve so I could go that route.
Back to my friend's projector... he'd gotten a sweet deal on a Mitsu HC6500 and had gotten a DaLite 16:9 110" screen. His problem was that he'd spent hours tweaking it but the blacks were only greys and colors were washed out. I spent about fifteen minutes with his setup and studied the menus, looking for the adjustments I needed to make and within that time, had achieved deep, dark blacks and punchy, saturated colors. He was ecstatic, and I was, to quote Johnny Cash in "A Boy Named Sue," "comin' away with a different point of view," on projector technology, that is.
So I researched projectors. The one weakness that bothered me with the Mitsu on my reference Blu-ray demo reel that I carried with me, was the audience in the darkened concert hall in my concert video was almost crushed to black and the projector was noted for having difficulty with shadow detail in night scenes in most of the reviews I found on it. So I went looking to find something even better. For a while, I was hitting the $20K mark just to make a modest improvement, but then I ran across a review on an InFocus IN82 and there were screen shots of a dark night scene with a train in a forest. I could clearly see the rich detail in the shadows and the reviews were encouraging. Only thing was it cost a lot more than the Mitsu.
Next day, I looked on eBay, and lo and behold, there was an IN82 with 76 hours on it There was only one bid, so I watched it, contacted the seller, found we had a philosophy in common and stayed on top of the auction. And then I sniped it at the end with two seconds to go--for $1425.
To make a long story short, that project just blew me away--just aiming it at a piece of sheet I'd bought for a temporary screen.
I stared on construction of a false wall in front of my 22' wide wall of speakers, a wall which would support a screen frame. But what was I going to use for an AT screen? I read, studied and researched, but the very expensive brands were given poor marks by audiophiles due to comb filtering and loss of treble detail. All these screens were perf screens with evenly spaced holes, just like the one in my local cineplex. Being an audio purist, I did not want that. So I studied more. Then I found two companies selling nearly identical materials and claiming true audio transparency, so I contacted the first, got no reply, so was lead to the second and got a sample. Read many happy reviews and invested $350 and bought a precut sheet of it.
We installed that screen on Friday night. Suddenly, the InFocus projector became a brilliant, creamy-smooth picture-maker. The linen sheet texture was visible across the room, but the weave on the new screen disappears from view beyond 5' and I was thrilled with the way it looks AND sounds. I listened to my reference recordings and, unlike the linen sheet, the treble was not audibly attenuated. So the 'guts' of my theater conversion are up and running.
Next comes the finishing touches--the Royalty 3 velvet curtains that my wife and inlaws are sewing for me, and the center channel speaker that I am constructing this weekend.
Serendipity was written all over this theater build. A JBL 2403 tweeter, to match the other pair in my mains, appeared on eBay for the first time under $1100. I made what seemed a ridiculous offer, but the seller accepted it. I found the tweeter needed refurbishing, and I did that work myself and now it's good as new. The last time I saw a 2403 on eBay was a year ago, and a pair of them for $1100. I needed just one. And here it was! Just one. So my center channel is coming along great. All I have to do is run the wiring and move a spare Hafler 500, bridged mono, to the amp rack and plug it into my DCX2496 Loudspeaker Manager/crossover.
Lots of little odds & ends to finish, but already we are watching movies on it and it's an awesome experience. I am noticing details that went unnoticed on my small 47" TV. The 30-bit projector also solved my banding problem and the exaggeration of noise in images by providing more levels of contrast.
I built a 154" screen in a 2.35:1 aspect. I ended up removing a loli column to make possible the projection, after doing exhaustive structure analysis of my self-design, self-built home. That column was another factor that kept me away from projection for many years, too.
The real, driving force for building the projection system was to see the footage I shoot with my CineAlta HD video cameras. Seeing it on the 154" screen gave me a new-found respect for the capabilities of the tools I use for my business.
I had a friend over this evening and he's starting up a stock footage business. He's been trying to convince me to put lots of my video library up for clip sales. So I fired up my demo reel that I'd authored on Blu-ray disc. There are several categories on there.. military air show, a vintage WWII aircraft association display, an equestrian show, various scenic clips, a laser light show that I'd created and recorded in HD, a classical concert I'd shot for a violinist/pianist from China, a Memorial Day parade with amazing audio with my Rode NT4 stereo X-Y mic on the CineAlta camera, and a southern rock concert I'd recorded for a band at a theater. We watched a variety of these segments and it was as if the screen were a big hole in the wall, bringing in a view of outdoor reality. There was no veil of 'celluloid', no grain, no fuzziness to the edges--it was like having 20/20 vision and looking directly into a 3D world.
What I'd hoped for was to at least equal my LCD for quality, only much bigger. What I got was a huge upgrade in quality, shadow detail, and brightness. Everyone says that the IN82 is bright, but to see it in person is quite the convincer.
So after 25 years in the present space, the Bass Pig's Lair gets a screen and picture worthy of the sound.
