VIZIO SS2521-C6 sound bar packs big sound into a short slab

December 9, 2016 by M.B. Grant Leave a Comment

It’s sleek, it’s boomy, it… fits under my 55″ VIZIO TV!

Today, I’m reviewing the VIZIO SS2521-C6 sound stand, as seen here under my TV:

vizio_sound_bar_under_vizio_55_inch_tv

If you own a VIZIO TV and let it sit on its own feet, you might have noticed there isn’t much space under the screen.

For my particular VIZIO TV (the VIZIO M55-C2) there’s 2.75″ between table and the TV’s bottom frame,and just a teeny bit over 3″ from table to screen.

Most sound bars are between 2.75″ and 3″ tall, so most of them would block some of the screen edge, if not the screen itself (especially to any viewers who might be laying down on the sofa).

Shopping for a sound bar that would fit under my TV

Unfortunately, nearly every sound bar with a decent rating and reasonable price seems to be at least 3″ tall.

And, because I’m picky and wanted to make this difficult, I also had the following criteria:

no additional speakers (no room on either side of my TV)
no separate subwoofer (nowhere to put it)
narrow enough to fit between my TV’s feet or small enough to fit in one of the cubbies under my TV

That ruled out some obvious choices, including the Bose Solo 5 (my initial choice, but it’s too tall) and the best-selling VIZIO SB3821-C6 38-Inch 2.1 Channel Sound Bar with Wireless Subwoofer (also too tall, plus I’m not thrilled about wireless equipment in general even though wireless subwoofers are generally fine).

We also considered the Samsung HW-K450 2.1 but it seemed like it might also be too tall to fit under the TV and I wanted to see if we could get away with no subwoofer, since there’s no good place to put one in the apartment. Finally, there was also this AmazonBasics 2.0 Channel Bluetooth Sound Bar which was a close fit at 2.6″ tall, but I ultimately decided it was too cheap, and I’ve had enough “Amazon Basics” stuff die on me to be leery of the brand now. No wonder I used my Bose SoundLink Mini as a sound bar for my TV for so long!

I only discovered this sound bar in the first place because I needed something that would fit under or in front of my TV without blocking the screen, but I’m glad I did: there’s a lot to love here beyond its physical size and shape.

Note: If you have space for the skinny / wide “traditional” sound bar design with or without a separate subwoofer, there’s no real reason to limit your search to “sound stands”. This product is designed to solve a specific space constraint problem – there’s no inherent advantage to sound stands unless you benefit from its size/shape.

“Create a problem, sell the solution”

Fortunately, VIZIO is aware of the problem they’ve created. Behold, the VIZIO SS2521-C6.

It’s a reasonably priced “sound stand” that just so happens to be short enough to fit under their wide-footed flatscreen TVs. It’s more like a sound slab, really – 11 pounds of speaker that fits in the space under your low-clearance TV. You can also set a TV directly on it (hence the “stand”, I suppose), up to a whopping 60 lbs if your TV has a pedestal-style foot.

Short enough to fit under VIZIO TVs, the VIZIO SS2521-C6 sound stand is a beefy sound machine for its price.

But how does it sound?

Sound quality is a subjective thing, but I like to think we (my partner and I) are pickier than average.

He’s a hobbyist musician and audiophile and I’m that person who gets into your car and starts fiddling with the treble and bass until it doesn’t sound like a tin can anymore. My concern with the VIZIO was that since VIZIO is selling to a captive audience, they wouldn’t have as much of an incentive to make it awesome.

Fortunately, my fears were unfounded: VIZIO made a fantastic sound bar and I’m super happy with it.

Speaker specs

For those of you who speak speaker, it contains two 2.75″ full range drivers and 4.5″ subwoofer speaker response (tech specs here on Vizio’s site).

It’s just one slab of speaker, but it sounds like more

It actually tricked me into thinking something (or someone :o) was behind me in the apartment and made me turn around. It’s not a surround sound system with the little speakers on stands behind your sofa, but it does bounce the audio off stuff behind you to make it sound more dimensional.

The bass is rich and boomy

I hate weak bass, and if you hate it too, you won’t be sad with this speaker. It’s so good you might actually want to set it a little less than the default, and I can’t believe I’m saying that because I’m usually a 100%-isn’t-enough person when it comes to bass. We have ours set to 1 dot less than the default (middle dot) in the settings.

It can go LOUD

We use this sound bar in my city apartment, though, so we could only responsibly test it up to a certain volume (near-deafening), but I believe the volume should be sufficient for the vast majority of TV watching setups. Our 1 bedroom apartment is a living room/computer room/kitchen open concept room, and it can out-loud all of those things at once.

VIZIO states that the stand “…packs a powerful punch combining a room-shaking volume of up to 101 dB at less than 1% harmonic distortion*”. 101 dB puts it right between a lawn mower and a rock concert, and 85 dB is generally considered the volume at which sounds become harmful to your hearing. Suffice to say, it’s plenty loud.

Virtual surround sound that can be toggled on / off

Depending on the size/layout of your room, you might like the virtual surround sound setting on or off. Basically, the speaker will try to bounce sounds off the walls of your room to fake surround sound. This effect is particularly noticeable you have a wall right behind your sofa. We don’t have a wall right behind our sofa, but we keep this on as we think it sounds “fuller” with it on.

» See the VIZIO SS2521-C6 on Amazon.com «

Feature rundown

For relatively basic TV setups, the VIZIO SS2521-C6 should have everything you need. It’s basically your TV’s missing sound system. (When TVs got thin, there wasn’t any room for decent speakers inside them anymore, hence the rise of sound bars and separate speaker systems, even for people who aren’t home audio enthusiasts).

This diagram of the remote (from the sound stand’s manual) is a good summary of the features:

What’s great about the VIZIO SS2521-C6

Fits under my TV
Can sit a TV on it
Remote included
Cables included
Great audio quality
TVOL (TruVolume) for volume leveling
Pleasing LEDs
Easy setup

Fits under your TV!

You can either set a TV directly on the stand, provided its base is sufficiently small, or over it, provided the feet are sufficiently far apart.

If your TV has a pedestal foot and weighs less than 60 lbs, it can sit on top of this VIZIO sound stand.

My VIZIO TV has two feet that are about 38″ apart at their narrowest point, so mine straddles the sound stand. This works out well for me – that space was just going to waste anyway, and I didn’t have to find room on a shelf under the TV (which I don’t have, anyway – the table my TV sits on is made up of square cubbies).

Cables are included

I hate it when I buy something, get it home, set it up, and realize the manufacturer assumed I already had the cables I would need.

In our case, we set up using optical, but there are a variety of connection types available:

Analog Audio – Stereo RCA
Analog Audio – 3.5mm stereo mini jack
Digital Audio – RCA (Coaxial)
Digital Audio – Optical (Toslink)
USB Input – USB

For more on the differences between audio cables, check out Apartment Therapy’s guide.

Setup is butt simple: connect the cable of your choice to the sound stand and the TV, plug in the power, and turn it on – done.

Notably, there are no HDMI ports on this sound stand. It cannot take in HDMI and send it on to the TV. In other words, it doesn’t act like a receiver or “hub” for your media devices. Depending on the complexity of your setup, you might not even miss it. We just have a TV and a PlayStation 4 in this setup. (If you also have, say, a BluRay player, Roku, multiple gaming systems, set top box, DVR, etc – or are simply accustomed to having a receiver – this won’t add more ports for all your devices or handle audio separately the way a receiver will.)

TruVolume (TVOL on the remote) makes volume level consistent

This is a setting you toggle on/off. It makes quiet things louder and louder things quieter.

In practice, enabling this feature lets you hear whispers without sudden loud stuff blowing you off the sofa.

LED lights are pleasing

When it’s on, there’s just one white LED on in the lower left corner. A row of LEDs indicates volume or settings, but only when you’re actively adjusting those settings.

Best of all: when the sound bar is off, there are no bright LEDs shining in the darkness. (If you ever sleep in the same room as your TV, you’ll appreciate this.) I find crawling text and glowing settings bars distracting, so I’m glad to not see those things on this sound bar.

The whole thing is just ‘plug and play’

There’s not a lot to set up. Just put it in place, hook it up to your TV, and start watching. Adjust the bass and treble to your liking and you’re golden.

Affordably priced

For this TV in our downtown apartment, we didn’t need an expensive surround sound speaker setup or a receiver. Our budget would’ve gone up to around $400 for the right sound bar, but we were plenty pleased with this one (which can be found for $200 or less, depending where you shop and if you can find it on sale).

VIZIO SS2521-C6 drawbacks

Doesn’t support streaming audio over WiFi
You cannot add a separate subwoofer or more speakers later
Some people say it vibrates
Doesn’t wake up with the TV

Alas, no WiFi streaming to this speaker

I’m getting greedy with this one, but I like my speakers to do multiple jobs, and I love streaming from Spotify over WiFi. It’s Bluetooth enabled, so you can play music to it from your phone/computer over Bluetooth, but playing music over Bluetooth is so inconvenient and inferior now that WiFi streaming is a thing.

(I’ll keep using my Bose Mini SoundLink + Echo Dot for streaming over WiFi.)

You can’t add more speakers later

I don’t feel like I want to add more speakers, but definitely don’t think of this as something you can “build on” over time. It’s not expandable. You can’t add a subwoofer or satellite speakers to this sound bar.

Some people say it vibrates

I haven’t personally noticed any vibration, but that could be because we don’t listen to it on max volume or because it’s sitting on a solid wood surface. People who say it vibrates also say you can fix the vibration with little rubbery foot pads.

Doesn’t wake up with the TV

Remember the good old days, when you could turn on your TV and the sound was on, too? I’m probably just lazy, but I wish this thing would somehow just turn on when the TV is turned on. (This problem probably exists with all sound bars, and you can solve it with a universal remote.)

What’s in the box?

You get the sound stand, a remote, setup guide, and cables for RCA to 3.5mm, digital optical, coax, and a power cable. In our case, we didn’t need to buy anything else to complete the setup.

Unboxing the SS2521-C6: all the cables you could ever need

The bottom line

We love it. It solved our problem of needing sound bar that fit under our TV, and it sounds great. We love the built-in subwoofer (we don’t have anywhere to put a standalone one) and even though we’re both pretty picky about bass, we think the bass is great.

Keep your expectations reasonable: without a separate subwoofer, there’s a limit to what this sound stand can accomplish bass-wise. It’s not a receiver, and you can’t expand it with more speakers later.

If you read this far and realized you don’t actually need the sound stand form factor (or you think you’ll miss a separate woofer), check out the Vizio SB3821-C6 38-Inch 2.1 Channel Sound Bar with Wireless Subwoofer. It’s cheaper and the reviews are stellar.

However, if you’re like us and need to stuff a sound bar under your TV, the VIZIO SS2521-C6 is absolutely the way to go!

» Check out the SS2521-C6 sound stand on Amazon.com «

Sony VPLHW40-ES 1080p SXRD projector for super-size gaming, TV, and movies review

June 30, 2016 by M.B. Grant Leave a Comment

We like our TV and gaming BIG and LOUD, and after dozens of hours of research, we decided the Sony VPLHW40-ES was a bad enough dude for the job.

Our Sony VPLHW40-ES Home Theater Projector rating:

Fantastic picture at a home theater friendly price! 5/5 stars!

If you’re in the market for a spectacular home theater projector and your budget is somewhere around $1600-2000, check out the Sony VPLHW40-ES. We’ve had this projector for 4 months and we just love it!

In this review, I’ll show you why we chose the 40-ES over competitor models, how we set it up, and what’s best about it.

» Check Amazon.com for current price and more buyer reviews «

Sony VPLHW40-ES features at a glance

SXRD (Silicon X-tal Reflective Display) – Sony’s “spin” on the 3LCD technology common to modern projectors is by many measures an improvement
No perceptible gaming lag
2 HDMI inputs – most competitor projectors in this price range just have 1 HDMI input
HDMI-CEC – Enables other devices, like a receiver or Playstation 4, to turn the projector on on their own
You can realign the panels – calibration grid, not available on all projectors. 3LCD projectors tend to drift out of alignment and you notice a black or white line and color seepage. With the Sony 40-ES, you can manually realign the panels instead of sending it in for service/repair
Lens shift for a greater range of possible projector positions – in this price range all projectors have some degree of lens shift, but the ES-40 has 25% horizontal and 70% vertical lens shift (so you can mount way higher than your screen, or off-center of your screen).
3D – requires glasses, like these or these
“Low” lamp setting – extends lamp life about 3x and gives you better black levels with little to no sacrifice to picture quality
1080p and can project up to about a 300″ screen (ours is 120″) – the smaller your screen, the sharper and brighter your image
Runs quiet
Backlit remote!

Sony VPLHW40-ES image examples – games, movies, cartoons

These photos were taken with my Samsung NX300 in a dark living room (windows covered by light-blocking curtains).

Video game

Below is Blizzard’s Overwatch at 120″ on our ES-40. The colors are rich and vibrant, and, even more importantly, the relatively small on-screen text and UI elements are clear and readable from the sofa 11 feet away.

Live action movie: dark scenes

These two scenes from Pacific Rim demonstrate how the ES-40 is still really good at showing detail in dark scenes, both on complex objects and on human actors. It’s even more impressive when you take into account the tricky nature of photography in a scene with low lighting – these scenes looked even better in person.

Live action movie: bright scenes

This scene from Mad Max shows the projector’s awesome capabilities at highly detailed well-lit scenes. This movie is pure eye candy to begin with and on this projector, it was like seeing it in theaters again.

Cartoon

This scene from Rick and Morty shows that even cartoons look awesome when blown up by the ES-40 for a 120″ size screen.

2016-04-10 18.35.17

Things to know about projector image quality

The quality of image you perceive any projector to have depends on a number of factors, including

the projector itself – in general, the more you pay for a projector, the better an image you’ll get
the surface you are projecting onto – a screen’s gain level affects how bright the projected image appears (we project onto a Silver Ticket 120″ screen)
how much you’re using lens shift and stretching to fill your screen
the distance between your projector and screen
how far you sit from the screen

With our particular setup, everyone who has seen our ES-40 in action agrees the picture is stunning. In a dark room, it’s plenty bright on the “low” setting, and in a partially lit room, the “high” setting is more than enough to compensate. (We don’t really run the projector in broad daylight.)

When you’re buying a projector, you’re looking for that sweet spot where you get the best picture without spending more than your budget, whatever that may be. Every major projector brand has its own pluses and minuses when it comes to image quality, and we determined that the Sony ES-40 had the best balance of these factors. Now that it’s on the wall, we’re confident we made the right decision.

For us, the most important aspects of image quality were:

Be aware of the “color wheel rainbow” effect

Lower-end projectors use “color wheels” to produce their images. Color wheels “overlay” the image on themselves really quickly to produce all colors, but if you look left/right while it’s projecting you might see a rainbow flicker. A lot of projector owners are looking for ways to reduce this effect in projectors they already own, so we thought it’d be better to try to avoid it in the first place.

We wanted a projector that used 3-chip LCD technology instead. The ES-40 uses Sony’s own proprietary LCD technology that does not produce the rainbow effect.

And the “screen door” effect

Lower-end and mid-range projectors often have a visible “grid” in their projected image, known as the “screen door” effect. The ES-40 has a mild screen door effect, but it’s far less noticeable than less expensive projectors. At my workplace, for example, the conference room projectors have very obvious grids if you look closely.

On projectors where it’s noticeable, the screen door effect looks like this (not from the ES-40):

Pay attention to black levels

Nobody likes seeing dim grey where they should see black. Generally speaking, more expensive projectors are better at isolating dark regions of an image than cheaper projectors. We’re very happy with the black levels on our Sony ES-40 and haven’t noticed any loss of detail, even in dark scenes.

Make sure it’ll look good on your size screen

When choosing a projector, figure out how big your target screen size is and work backwards from there. The bigger the screen, the more light your projector will need to put out. The ES-40 stood out in its price bracket for putting out a lot of light- enough to fill our 120″ screen.

There are other tradeoffs to consider, too: if you zoom in on the projector, you’ll get a sharper image but you’ll also lose some light, so you want some light to “spare” if you’re planning on zooming at all. Had we put the projector at 13′ back from the screen, we’d be full zoomed out (so really bright) but sacrificing sharpness. With the projector moved back to 16′, we use some zoom (about 50%) to fill the screen entirely, which seemed to be the sweet spot for sharpness and brightness.

These photos were taken with an iPhone 6 in a large room lit by the projector and natural light seeping in from around our window coverings.

This photo was taken 1 foot away from the screen. The large black rectangle is my phone’s shadow. The faint grid is the ES-40’s screen door effect, which is faint compared to other projectors we considered.

And get an actual screen (don’t use a wall)

The 1.1 gain screen made by Silver Ticket was absolutely worth the investment: we only had to project the image partially on/partially off the screen (and onto the eggshell-white wall behind the screen) during setup once to get an instant appreciation for our screen.

The black velvet border soaks up any spill-over light, so your picture looks perfectly rectangular, even if you didn’t (or couldn’t) line it up quite perfectly with the borders of the screen.

In the image below, the Silver Ticket screen is on the left and the painted wall on the right. Notice the fine bumps in the picture and blurriness on straight edges.

Why this projector? Sony 40-ES vs. competitors

In doing all our projector research, we found that home theater (as opposed to travel-size or professional grade) projectors tend to fall into one of three categories. These are very general categories, summarized here for people who aren’t huge AV nerds. (They’re also our categories, based on commonalities between models we researched, not some industry standard.)

In this section, I’ll tell you what other projectors we considered on our path to selecting the Sony ES-40. These runners-up are all good choices for their respective tiers, so if your budget isn’t quite enough for the ES-40, take a look at these projectors instead.

Entry level home theater projectors

These projectors cost around $500, and while they put out a decent amount of light they tend to fall short on image quality at large screen sizes and black levels.

They also tend to use “color wheels” to produce their images. Color wheels “overlay” the image on themselves really quickly to produce all colors, but if you look left/right while it’s projecting you might see a rainbow flicker. Some people are more sensitive than others.

Some manufacturers have ways to reduce this effect, but at a cost – and that additional cost can buy your way into the next tier. We were looking for something more cinema-quality and we wanted to fill a 120″ screen, so we skipped this category entirely from our consideration.

(If you’re actually looking for a travel or very small projector, we use and highly recommend the Sony Portable HD projector MPCL1)

Middle tier home theater projectors

In the next bracket up you’ll find projectors using “3 chip LCD”, often abbreviated as 3LCD. These cost around around $900-$1500 and boast a better picture quality than the entry level tier.

They don’t have the color wheel problem, but many of them do seem to have a visible LCD grid. If you have a sharp eye, you’ll notice this in many office-grade projectors (something to look for in the next boring meeting you sit through at work).

Some projectors we considered in this bracket:

ViewSonic PJD7820HD 1080p

Despite its good reviews and significantly lower price, we didn’t go with this ViewSonic because it’s still a color wheel projector and we thought we might be susceptible to the rainbow effect. It also lacks the horizontal shift we needed to have our screen centered on our wall while mounting the projector to an off-center ceiling joist.

Upper tier home theater projectors

At this price range, you’ll skip the color wheels and LCD grids and spend about $2000+ for the privilege. Most projectors in this range are 3LCD but they have proprietary features to come out ahead in other ways and remain competitive. SXRD Sony proprietary technology. This tier is where we focused most of our research and comparison efforts.

Epson Home Cinema 5030UB 1080p 3D 3LCD

The Epson Home Cinema 5030UB promises better black levels than the Sony 40-ES we ultimately went with we weren’t sold on that being the best feature. With a properly dimmed room and a high gain screen, there are ways to combat not having the very best black levels. Went with Sony because SXRD so we didn’t have the grid.

Sony VPLHW55-ES

The Sony VPLHW55-ES is the next model up from the Sony 40-ES we ultimately chose, and it costs almost 50% more than we paid for ours. The big thing the 55-ES has that the 40-ES doesn’t is a dynamic iris. The dynamic iris gives you better black levels and the projector itself is a bit brighter with a longer lamp life. For $1000 we weren’t convinced it was worth the jump in price, so we stayed with our budget and the 40-ES.

Projector plugs and ports

The Sony 40-ES has the following ports:

2 HDMI ports
Component (Y Pb/Cb Pr/Cr)
VGA (RGB/ Y Pb/Cb Pr/Cr)
IR in (for 3D glasses)

Note: It might be tempting to plug something like a Chromecast or an Amazon Fire TV Stick directly into one of the HDMI ports, but it requires more setup to get audio if you do. You’ll need to plug into a receiver instead to send the sound to your speakers and the picture to the projector (via the receiver). With a receiver (which typically have 5+ HDMI ports), you won’t find yourself feeling limited by “just” two HDMI ports on the projector.

Calibration tools

The ES-40 comes with plenty of tools for getting your picture level and centered and the colors just so. You can adjust hue, contrast, sharpness, but there are also presets such as “Reference” and “Film”. With these, try them and see what you like. You can also adjust colors independently.

There’s several different grids for aligning the picture and you can spend as much (or as little) time as you want matching it up to your screen. We found this process straightforward and rather satisfying once we got it lined up.

Tradeoffs, shortcomings, and other things to know before you buy

It’s hard to find something negative to say about this projector. Most of its shortcomings (if you can call them that) are technical limitations that exist for all projectors that any would-be projector owner should be aware of.

It’s not a 4k projector

4K is the new hotness in TVs (and damn, is it ever gorgeous – I adore my 4K 55″ Vizio) but 4k projectors are still up in the pricing stratosphere. The most affordable 4k projectors start around $10k – yowch. That’s outside our budget.

At 1080p you can see a little bit of pixel stretching on a 120″ screen, but it depends how far away you are. We sit 12′ away from our screen and it’s not noticeable at all. In general, I think any stretching is subtle and hard to notice, even on things like captions and gaming UIs. You wouldn’t see it on a smaller screen, and you probably won’t notice it unless you’re looking for it.

At 27 lbs, it’s pretty heavy – and you’re almost certainly going to ceiling mount it

Due to its size, weight, and heat output, you’re best off mounting this projector to your ceiling (rather than, say, stuffing it in a bookshelf cubby or putting it on top of some shelving). How much of a challenge that is for you depends a lot on your ceiling and DIY skills, but we found the actual mounting process quite doable with a good household-grade drill.

In our case, our ceiling joists ran perpendicular to the screen, and none of them were exactly center in relation to the screen. The joist we chose was the lesser of two evils, and it’s off center by about 4″, which we made up for using lens shift.

Our DIY skills are just above novice, but we were able to mount it to a ceiling stud ourselves. This came with some trepidation and hand-wringing, but it’s been up there for 2 months now without incident. (We left a pillow under it the first night it was up, just in case – lol).

Lamp life is a thing

If you’re a heavy TV user (I’m talking 4+ hours a day of use), I would hesitate to recommend you a projector over a television. That’s because the bulb has a finite lifespan, and replacement bulbs for the 40-ES cost around $100.

On high setting, the lamp has a life of about 2000 hours. In some households I know that leave the TV on 8 hours a day, the lamp wouldn’t last a full year. There’s a reason so many reviews call this projector a “light canon” – you can get it BRIGHT (1700 lumens, according to Sony), but that brightness comes at a cost.

(Personally, we find the high setting to be too bright and prefer watching on the lower setting.)

On its lower setting, the lamp has an expected life of about 5000 hours. 5000 hours is more reasonable, but our hypothetical 8-hours-a-day household wouldn’t make it to 2 years on a single bulb.

The low setting looks totally fine in a darkened or partially lit room (and many viewers prefer it). Unless you’re watching in a daylit room, you’ll probably be happy with the low setting, too. Low also gives you better black levels.

There’s some math to do

You’ll need to mount your screen and your projector in such a way that they complement each other, and getting the distances right will take a little bit of measurement and arithmetic on your part.

Fortunately, there are online calculators to help. We also found drawing diagrams of the room to be a useful exercise.

More reviews

Here’s what we read when we did our research:

Mounting bracket of choice: Peerless PRGS-UNV

We went with the Peerless PRGS-UNV Precision Gear Universal Projector Mount, which is a bit pricier than competitor mounts but worth it for two reasons:

Spider adapter made it easy to center the mounting hole (it comes with 4 arms but we removed one because the 40-ES only needed 3)
Precision gears made it easy to tilt and position the projector, then lock it into place

Our installation was probably fairly typical: drywall ceiling, wood joists (they run perpendicular to our screen, though, so it took some mathing to figure out which one was closer to center), no extension. We used the vertical lens shift to center the image on the screen (if you don’t use vertical lens shift, you’d have to align your projector with the very center of your screen). We used this calculator to help us with our projector position.

First, we attached the spider adapter to the projector. The bracket comes with 4 “arms”, but the 40-ES only needs three. The extra was easy to remove. It took some trial and error to find the best arrangement of the arms, and this is what we settled on. The goal was to center the circular hole as close to the middle of the projector body as possible.

There are two pieces to the mounting hardware – the one in my hand (below) gets attached to the ceiling, and the projector and its bracket slide into it. Here I am testing that the orientation is the way I want it by sliding the two halves of the bracket together.

The dry run was a success. It’s good to get familiar with the slide-in process and the adjustment knobs on this bracket while you can still see them – once it’s on the ceiling (assuming you don’t have any kind of extension on it) you’ll probably have to do some of this by feel.

These pencils mark where our screws will attach the bracket to the ceiling joist.

2016-04-16 12.14.37

Make sure you are on a stud, preferably near the center of the stud.

We needed to use a longer drill bit to get both screws in place. Here’s a link to my DeWalt drill and the 3.5″ power bit I used for this project – I highly recommend them both for driving screws into studs (if you’ve never drilled into a stud before, this Q&A helped us troubleshoot when we got stuck while mounting our screen to studs).

The ceiling-mounted bracket is now on the ceiling. The projector itself will slide into position on this bracket, a process you hopefully practiced at least a couple times on the ground.

We spent far more time on measuring and double-checking the placement than we did on actually screwing the bracket to the ceiling and then sliding the projector onto it. This was a fairly painless installation, despite having to work with a heavy object over our heads.

Here it is in place:

About our screen

It’s a 120″ Silver Ticket screen, and it’s amazing. Much better than projecting onto a white wall. It’s smoother, the blacks are darker, and the light areas don’t get bright hot spots like they do on a painted wall. Click here to see how the screen assembles and how to mount it on the wall.

The bottom line

The Sony 40-ES is awesome and we love watching movies and playing games on it. With a baby on the way in a few months, we’re going to appreciate that cinema experience in our own home more than ever. 😀

Who it’s for: Home theater enthusiasts, people who want to project onto a big screen (120″), anyone susceptible to the “rainbow” effect, higher quality projector that doesn’t have a lot of the pitfalls a lot of the competitors at or below the same price have.

» Check Amazon.com for current price and inventory on Sony ES-40 «

How to use a Bose SoundLink Mini as a sound bar for your TV

April 15, 2016 by M.B. Grant 29 Comments

If you’ve bought a new TV recently (after years and years with an old TV) you might have been horrified to find that modern TVs come with terrible built-in audio. I’m guessing there’s some kind of industry-wide assumption that you’ve got killer audio equipment to hook that fancy new TV up to, but if you don’t, you might be looking for a way to re-purpose a Bluetooth (or similar) speaker you already own as a speaker for your television. Hey, at least you’ll use something you already own instead of running out and buying a full-fledged sound bar (possibly with separate subwoofer to find space for in your possibly tiny living room).

Anyway, I had a Bose SoundLink Mini not quite laying around but not doing much of anything while I was watching TV, so I gave it a second job with the addition of an RCA Y-cable. The cable has a 3.5mm audio plug on one end and two (white and red) bigger plugs on the other end.

I use a ridiculously cheap Y-cable, but if you’re feeling fancy they actually do make a gold-plated version that still costs less than a sandwich in most cities. (Just make sure your cable is long enough.)

Full list of things you’d need to get a setup like mine:

Bose SoundLink Mini speaker (but any speaker with AUX in should work)
6′ stereo 3.5mm to RCA cable like this
a TV with available RCA audio out ports (this is my exact 55″ Vizio 4k TV, it is spectacular and I love it)

Simple guide to using your Bluetooth speaker as a sound bar for your TV

Step 1: Find a good place for your speaker and its charge cradle

I put my Bose Mini right in front of my Vizio television. My TV is elevated on little feet, so there’s a bit of space below the screen for my SoundLink to sit. If your TV isn’t elevated, you might have to get creative. Try to keep it centered in relation to the TV, though, for best results.

Get it set up with electricity, either on a cradle or directly plugged into the speaker. (I don’t run mine off battery when I’m using it as a TV sound bar.)

Step 2: Connect it to your TV using the RCA Y-cable

My 2015-vintage Vizio TV has a couple of RCA ports on the back. Plug the red/white RCA ends into those ports.

Plug the 3.5mm into the side of the SoundLink Mini.

Step 3: Turn the SoundLink Mini on and set it to AUX mode.

Pretty easy.

Step 4: Turn your TV’s own audio to zero so you don’t get sound out of the TV speakers

Your TV will probably output sound out of both its own speakers and the external speaker you just hooked up. Just turn your TV’s own volume down to 0. Your TV might be fancy enough to know that it’s outputting to an external speaker and not produce the overlap, but in any case, this fix has worked for the two televisions I’ve used this Mini with now.

Step 5: Enjoy!

There’s only one major drawback to this setup, and that’s that you probably don’t have a remote for your speaker. This hasn’t bothered me too much, since my apartment is small and the speaker isn’t that far away and I tend to adjust volume pretty rarely, but it’s a thing to keep in mind.

I’ve done this exact setup with two TVs now (a 2013-era Sharp and a 2015-era Vizio) and it’s pretty awesome not having had to waste money on a dedicated sound bar when my other speakers are just sitting around doing nothing while I’m watching TV.

Silver Ticket STR-169120 Projector Screen Assembly and Installation Steps

April 12, 2016 by M.B. Grant 1 Comment

Last weekend’s project: mounting our new Silver Ticket projector screen!

The booklet and videos make it look easier than it is and some steps are left out. Here’s what I learned in the hours it took me to set up my home’s new Silver Ticket 120″ projector screen.

The screen itself is amazing, by the way – I highly recommend it, and it’s definitely worth the setup time especially if you were previously using a white wall as your screen like I was – it’s a huge upgrade!

You should have:

Two people
Good drill (I love and recommend my DEWALT drill) with a variety of drill bits
Stud finder (here’s my Zircon MultiScanner that I love)
Bubble level
Measuring tape
Rubber mallet (or if you’re brave, a normal hammer)
Several large towels or blankets to go between your floor and the screen as you unfurl it and affix it to the frame (unless you have super pristine carpet, I guess)
About 3-4 hours

You should also watch this video before proceeding, it’s only 4 minutes long (shorter if you watch it on 1.5x!) and gives a good overview of the installation, start to finish.

Unboxing the Silver Ticket screen parts

You’ll find several cardboard boxes containing the frame pieces, an instruction booklet, a bundle of thin white plastic sticks (tension rods), a box of misc. hardware, and a box with the screen rolled up inside it.

Inside those cardboard boxes are the black velvet frame pieces that’ll make up the border of your Silver Ticket projector screen. Put the rolled up screen somewhere safe and away from children, dogs, cats, etc – you won’t need it until you’re almost done putting this thing together.

Included hardware

Here’s the hardware they give you. Note that there are two kinds of short screws: 16 of them have rounded heads and 8 of them have flat heads. This will be important later and the printed instructions do not tell you which is which!

Here’s all the parts along with the nicknames my partner and I gave them as we assembled the screen, which I will refer back to in the instructions to follow.

Unfortunately, the instruction booklet does not name these pieces.

Fortunately, I was able to assemble and install my screen without adding any hardware that wasn’t originally included.

Silver Ticket screen assembly

Step 1: Connect the straight-edge pieces

Here’s a diagram of how the velvet border pieces fit together. (The seams are not at all noticeable in real life, they’re just exaggerated here for this diagram.)

There are six velvet pieces total: two short pieces with straight edges and two pieces with pointy edges. The two straight metal brackets with holes are used to hold the straight pieces together, and the L-shaped metal brackets with holes are for holding the corners together.

The first step is to connect the long straight pieces that make up the top and bottom edges of the frame. Slide in the straight metal connector piece into the flat-edged end of one half of the top/bottom of the frame, and then slide on the opposite half of the frame.

Here’s mine halfway done (with the wrong screw in place):

Use the flat-head screws for the middle joints (the rounded screws are for the corner joints). The included instruction booklet doesn’t really make it clear which screws to use here. You should use the flat-head screws for the straight pieces.

I foolishly used the round-headed screws for the straight joining pieces. That is bad! Don’t do as I did.

silver_ticket_short_pieces_together_wrong

Don’t use the “round” headed screws for this step!

Here’s the diagram that should’ve been in the manual, showing which screws go where:

What if the holes don’t line up?

On mine, the holes on the frame pieces didn’t line up with the holes in the brackets (and apparently neither did some others, judging by the occasional negative Amazon reviews on this screen).

Misaligned holes look like this, and it’s not a matter of mixing and matching pieces differently (or at least it wasn’t for me) nor does it mean you have to push the pieces together harder (we tried).

I ended up using my drill to widen the holes by chiseling them along the edges. Probably not the best use of my nice drill bits but it got the job done.

Hold that sucker down and drill, baby, drill…

(Not shown: use a vacuum to get all the little metal bits vacuumed up before you move on)

My corner pieces in particular were pretty poorly aligned. Here’s an “after” showing off our handiwork:

The misaligned holes were the only frustrating part of the screen assembly process and it added an hour or so to the setup time. While this screen is well-reviewed on Amazon, it seems most of the (relatively few) negative reviews come from this misaligned hole problem.

Silver Ticket should definitely look into why this is affecting people, as not everyone’s going to have the ability (or desire) to just bore bigger holes into their frame pieces and the screen is awesome otherwise.

Anyway, just screw the long straight top/bottom pieces of the frame together. Don’t do the corners until you’ve added the plastic pegs (screen hooks).

This is what you should leave this step with: the top and bottom edges of the frame held together with the “flat” head screws.

Step 2: Slide in the plastic pegs

Each metal frame piece has a sticker telling you how many little plastic screen hooks to slide onto each frame. Don’t worry about aligning them, just get the right number on. The round nub points up.

Your peg baggie will probably have a ton left over when you’re done.

Once the plastic pegs are in, you can screw the corner pieces together using the L-shaped corner brackets.

Step 3: Slide in the “snowman” brackets

You’ve got four of these metal “snowman” brackets that are designed to slide into the tracks on the back sides of each of the velvet frame pieces. The “head” of the snowman should point towards the ceiling – this is where the screw on the wall will rest when the frame is hanging.

Step 4: Connect the corners

Remember to use the 16 “round” headed screws for the four corners.

Once it’s all together, you should have a fully contiguous frame with the correct quantity of plastic pegs in each track.

Step 5: Screw the mounting screws into your wall

You’ll need:

two studs (use the stud finder to get the center of each of them)
that are 48-60″ apart
and reasonably in the center of your screen
don’t drill into metal or electrical wires (turn off your breaker if you’re concerned)

Remember, the “snowman” brackets can slide left/right in their tracks, so you can still center your screen even if your studs aren’t equidistant from your screen’s intended center.

The instructions provided aren’t terrible for helping with placement, but they won’t help you with screwing into studs. Screwing into studs generally requires more pressure and care than screwing into plain old drywall, but for this screen you definitely want to screw into studs for the extra stability (or maybe use some toggle bolts if it has to be drywall).

For my installation, I first drilled a pilot hole into the drywall and stud. The drill bit I chose for making the pilot holes was as wide as the “valleys” on the provided screws.

For more help with drilling into studs, this question and answer thread helped us a lot when we were having trouble.

We just did the top two screws and then we moved on to testing it out.

Step 6: Hang it up and see if it’s level!

Hang your frame on your top two screws and see how you did. This is why you shouldn’t do all four before testing it: if you’ve messed up and it’s not level, you only have to re-do one screw, not three.

We were quite lucky and the frame came out level on the first try. Glad we measured repeatedly before drilling.

Step 7: Do the bottom two mounting screws

You can now use the placement of the bottom two “snowman” brackets to determine where to put the last two screws. Go ahead and take the frame down and put those last two screws into the wall.

Step 8: Unroll the screen

This part’s easy, just roll it out white-side down. Try to align it as close to its final location as possible during this step.

Here’s a video of what NOT to do when stretching out the screen.

Step 9: Feed in the tension rods

You have six of these thin plastic tension rods. Two of them have rubber caps on both ends; four of them have rubber caps on just one end.

silver_ticket_two_rod_types

The “dual cap” rods belong on the left/right sides of your frame (the shorter sides). You can feed these in rubber-cap-first.

The other four have one plastic end and one capped end. The capped ends belong on the corners of the frame, meaning they go in plastic-end first and are harder to feed through.

We found it helpful to have one person feed the rod and one use a small tool to widen the vinyl tunnel the rod was going through.

When it’s done, you’ll have two capped tips in every corner of the frame.

Step 10: Pull the screen edges over each peg

I started in the center of each side of the frame, doing opposite sides in pairs.

In this pic, you can see I pinned the center of each edge first. I then worked my way out from the centers, doing one side then its opposite side. The corners were the last parts to get hooked onto their pegs. This process was easy and didn’t require as much force as some of the tutorial videos seemed to suggest.

With the screen stretched and held in place by the pegs, there is just one major step left…

Step 11: Install the center support bar

This part was easier than I expected. Have your helper hold one end of the support bar in place at the center of the screen. On your end, pop the screen off two pegs (or just never hook them in the first place) and lock the support bar into the frame track.

Don’t worry, the screen sitting on top of the pegs looks worse than it really is…

The bar will now be at an angle and tough to slide into place without a rubber mallet or hammer of some type. Carefully pound it (from the side) along the track until it is centered and straight. (This is why you used the flat screws here, so the support bar can pass over them.)

Take your time – don’t hit the screen!

Ta-dah! Your support bar is done once it’s square with the rest of the frame. Put the screen back on the pegs.

Step 12: Put that bad boy on the wall

Marvel at your accomplishment – looks great!

That’s it! Silver Ticket projector screens are definitely awesome and worth the setup effort, even if you have to manually widen some holes on the frame.