A fresh perspective
Image by Peggy und Marco Lachmann-Anke from Pixabay
One of the items on my bucket list this Christmas was to play Nintendo Wii with my boys. However, when you do not own a TV, it becomes a proper challenge. I did have a quick and dirty solution in my sleeve, though. In my drum rehearsal room, I have an old 37” TV mounted on a speaker stand with a VESA mount, to use as a practice teleprompter. This was a simple “drag and drop” operation and the couch gaming was on. But when the holidays ended, we realized that it is quite nice to have a big screen in the living room. We haven’t seen this many movies in ages, so there is a lot of catching up to do. The primary reason we do not own a TV is that our living room floor plan cannot provide a proper setup or placement of the TV/Sofa combination if you aren’t prepared to accept some feng shui from Hell. But we finally figured it out, by thinking outside the box.
When trying to figure out the optimal TV placement, I first thought about a wall mounted or even ceiling mounted VESA arm. It would have got the job done, but it would have looked utterly terrible. That, and it would not have been possible to install a proper sound system either. As an acoustician, I intend to practice what I preach, and that obviously excludes any form of built in speakers. And on top of that, you need a wife approval as well. It starts to sound like an impossible task. Another option I considered was a ceiling mounted cinema screen and a video cannon. That would probably have been a slightly nicer way to integrate the system in the living room, but I was still stuck with the sound system problem. The dream was a 2.1 setup that vanishes completely when not in use. And there is no way around it that a projector is infinitely more complex than flicking a TV switch. Just imagine the cable management necessary…
It is funny how stuck one can be with a specific train of thought. We only considered the projector or wall mount, or even installing the sofa/screen combo in the guest house, but whatever angle we looked at the problem, it sucked. But when we had my old teleprompter TV in the living room, it finally snapped into place. What if we put wheels on a TV furniture and pushed it to the side when done? We live very compact, so unfortunately most if not all the available products were too wide. We needed something that was about 90 cm wide, and most TV stands are around 120 cm to accommodate larger screens. But then we remembered an old Trofast IKEA wooden frame with mesh boxes that we had in the kid’s room. We brought that one to the living room, placed a TV on it, and it was jackpot. Next step was to add four wheels with bearings, add a couple of steel L-shaped strengtheners and it turned out perfect. We had an old 40” inch screen that was a better choice for the job so we chose that one.
Next up was the sound system. I did the bargain of my life some year ago with a complete Genelec 8020+7050 system. The sound from this system and at the screen-sofa distance provides a truly spectacular experience. But what about wife approval? Well, the 7050 had just about the perfect dimensions to hide behind the sofa. And low frequency rumble is not too sensitive where it comes from anyway, this is not a production studio. It is about making the sofa jump a little when Mario does a ground pound. Total immersion. The 8020 speakers are also perfect with regards to wife approval, because they can be fitted with VESA mounts and weigh only 3 kg. That means that you can mount them on computer screen desk arms. And by a stroke of luck, I happened to have two identical ones from some dumpster diving. A couple of hours later, we finally had a moving TV bench, with 8020s on each side in perfect listening positions, with the illusion of floating in the air courtesy of the gas arms.
We have lived here since 2019 without a TV and I have really missed watching movies. It only required a new perspective to instantly solve the problem. Time to start reducing the backlog!