Designing/Building the Perfect Computer Desk

[Xope_Poquar]

Thanks! I also now have a camera at my disposal so I won't have to use my cell phone. Hopefully the next round of pictures will actually be better. You'll be able to see all the flaws though.

It's been raining a lot lately so I'm waiting for a sunny day to put on the clear coat.

[Xope_Poquar]

Alright so we had a warm weekend and I was able to put the first coat of polyurethane on on Saturday.













I sanded it lightly on Sunday with some 320 grit making sure to go in the direction of the grain. Got a second coat on and it's starting to look really good.

Hopefully tomorrow if it's warm I'll be able to put one last coat on the heavy use surfaces like the keyboard tray and desktop. After that I'll just be mounting the keyboard tray and I'll be able to bring it in my house!

[individual]

I'm sorry to get to this thread so late, wish i saw it earlier to say that putting your sub box, inside that space, will make it sound crap. Subs in corners sound crap in general, you need your sub to be somewhere open, thats why people often presume that subs sound "muddy" when they have it sitting in one of the corners of their room, or in your case, that space in your desk. I've got the same speakers as you, so i recommend putting something else in that space and placing your sub at least a meter away from any corner, and have the port of the speaker box facing away from you. Sorry i don't like to criticize, but subs are the hardest part of your system to get right, of any system really. Awesome desk by the way

With the rear speakers, the formulas you have there are for surrounds and not rears. Surrounds are used in 7.1, which include rear speakers, where as what we have is 5.1. I also recommend placing the rear speakers at least twice the distance away from you, as your center speaker, then simple adjust the level on the rears by 3 steps on the dial. This will give it a more "ambient" and realistic audio quality, which is what the rears are designed for, especially in gaming/movies.

I'm not sure what I_Found_Nemo was going on about. All i can say is, do not mess with the speaker box in anyway. You would be UN-pleasantly surprised at how complicated the labyrinth port systems are of this particular sub, and how much engineering it requires to get minimal resonance. Basically, you need at least a diploma in audio engineering to begin to calculate the port dimensions.

Out of curiosity, what shape is your room? are all your walls parallel?

[Xope_Poquar]

I really appreciate the reply. I definitely can still set the sub somewhere else in my room. Also I haven't built the speaker stands yet so I can still make changes to them.

Do you know where the rears are designed to be placed? Should I use the rear placement shown here?:



Or does it depend on how EAX or OpenAL routes sounds from games? Wouldn't movies route the sound using ProLogic II and therefor follow my original design?

The walls in my room are all parallel but have bamboo covering them muffling the reflection. The floor is carpeted but the ceiling reflects sound.

[individual]

5.1 setup uses the same virtual sound placement regardless of encoding/decoding algorithm. To put it simply, all legit bought movies, in DVD format, or in proper 5.1 rip if they are bought and downloaded online, will have 5.1 channels designed for the diagram you have above, with the LB and RB speakers, not the LS and RS ones. Few movies have support for 7.1, some blu-ray would I believe, most modern games are designed for 5.1 and 7.1 - However:
Movies that utilize 5.1 are done in studios, and all studios have different properties, and not all of them have the same speaker placement, so each movie will be a little different sound placement wise.

With the speakers we have, PLII is generally used to turn 2 channel music into 5.1. Ill explain how this works

Stereo separation, is the difference between the left and right channel of 2 track audio, at any given time. so if you have a guitar in the track and the sound sits evenly across both tracks, the PLII system will see this as "center" and place this sound on the center speaker. Where as if you have a snare of a drum set, only on the left channel, and nothing on the right channel, traditionally it stays on the left channel. If you listen carefully to an audio track with headphones, you can tell what instruments of the track lie where in the music (center/left/right), and if you take out the headphones and put it in PLII music mode, you will hear that it attempts to mimic this, basically, and it does a good job. If your input is direct which it most likely will be if using a computer as your media system, leave it on 6 channel direct, as this is true 5.1, and any movies encoded in 5.1 will play, true

The real difference between the 2 PLII settings (movie and music) is a bit of tuning and re-verb.

[Xope_Poquar]

Right. I remember when I found out that PL and PLII used nothing more than a 2 channel source and extrapolated across 6 or 8 speakers, I was really disappointed. And since receivers cannot decode a digital signal that is encoded with say EAX or OpenAL the best you can hope for is 3 or 4 stereo analog inputs (direct). Your sound card has to decode the sound for you into the analog signals. We had this problem when we found out it's impossible to send 5.1 channel audio from an HTPC to a receiver across optical or HDMI as they can't decode the signal. We couldn't afford any receivers that had the 3 direct analog inputs.

The only thing I'm confused about is you saying 5.1 uses that left and right back speakers. All the diagrams I see seem to suggest they use the left and right surround speakers. Only when you use 7.1 do you utilize the left and right back.

Dolby
Crutchfield
THX


Edit:


Seems for computers it's less stringent for the angles but you were right with the distances.

[individual]

On different websites they call the rear/side speakers differently, but i can tell you for sure that 5.1 has speakers at the rear, not on the sides.

The latest diagram is the most correct one I have seen so far.

And i can say don't be too fussy with it. unless your producing scores in a purpose built studio, the speakers don't have to be down to a millimeter or degree accurate, you can be off by like 30cm and 10 degrees anywhere, especially if you are in a "box" room, the sound will always be "messy" and have a certain amount of unpleasantness due to the room itself. In studios they spend hundreds of thousands, millions in the bigger ones, soundproofing and sound-modding the room, So unless you have a good 150k to throw around (we all wish) i wouldn't look into this all that much.

last rule in audio: There are no rules.

If it sounds good, do it. I learnt that from Doug Rogers himself. Mess around with the speaker placements to get the sound "you" want.

What we used to do before we ordered speaker stands, is grab a couple of adjustable PA stands and place the speakers on them, then move them around the room, raising or lowering them 'till we got the perfect sweet spot, because last but not least no 2 speakers are alike, all have different attributes.

I could go on for ages but ill stop rambling lol.

[Badfastbusa]

Wow man, great job!!!

[cling]

I would spring for more mousing surface as well as a non sliding keyboard