Building My Home Theater Part 3: JBL SCS260.5 Speaker System

Last month, I wrote about the Harman-Kardon audio-video receiver (AVR) that I bought for my future home theater. I picked Package Two which came with the JBL SCS260.5 Speaker System. Although it cost a little bit more than the Package One because of these speaker set, I figure I might as well spend that extra PHP10,000 since I've spent a fortune (or will be spending a fortune) on the rest of the home theather anyway.

Its a typical 5 set speaker + subwoofer setup -- 2 x front L-R, 2 x rear L-R, and one center front speaker. The sales people at SM Applicance Center have been helpful in explaining what makes these speaker set different from the more common consumer brands like Sony, Pioneer or Yamaha (or maybe I've just be sales-talked and I'm now trying to post-justify my actions). But to their credit, JBL speakers are very popular for audiophiles as compared to the likes of Sony. Most movie theaters (even the SM Imax theater), use JBL speakers. JBL belong to the Harman group of company, which also owns the Harman-Kardon AVR's.

My whole shopping experience had a bit of a kink though. The Package Two had an SRP of around PHP49k. But since I was willing to pay cash, I haggled for a discount with the JBL/SM Appliance Center people. After some deliberation, they offered me an extra 7% discount. I came back a couple of days later and left a check. Then after it cleared, I had the unit picked up.

When I opened the box at home, I noticed that the "freebie" iPod Bridge to the AVR was missing. I thought it was an honest mistake and went to SM Appliance Center to ask for it. Then the salesman gave me this stupid look and asked if nobody told me that the reason why I got the discount was because they took out the freebie! Hello?!?!! He was the only JBL salesman I was talking to there, so who else could have possibly told me. And ALL appliance stores routinely give cash discounts with no bearing whatsoever to withholding any freebies.

What a rip-off from those dishonest people! If only there were other JBL outlets, I would willingly return this unit for a full refund. But only a few SM Appliance Centers seem to carry JBL. None of the other appliance chain stores (Western, Anson, etc.) carry JBL.

So I guess I have to live with the discounted unit minus The Bridge. For now, its no big deal since I don't even own an iPod. But I just felt cheated from the deal. So to anyone out there reading this blog -- be very careful when dealing with SM Appliance Center (or JBL sales people for that matter). I would still strongly recommend Western Appliance stores.

Some Very Interesting Statistical Trivia

I received a mailer from the International Herald Tribune soliciting for subscription to their newspaper. The mailer was different from the usual annoying junk mail. It contained several interesting stats (from 1% to 99%). Below are some of the ones I found more interesting:

• 1% of the world's vehicles are in India
• 4% of the world's population does not live in its country of birth
• 7% of the world's male population is affected by red-green colorblindness
• 9% of the world's population is left handed
• 10% of the world has shopped online
• 11% of the world's music is downloaded
• 16% of the world's energy is produced by nuclear power plants
• 17% of the world's population is illiterate
• 21% of the world's atmosphere is oxygen (78% is nitrogen)
• 22% of the world's population is Chinese
• 24% of the world's undiscovered oil and gas lies in the Arctic
• 26% of the world's construction cranes are in Dubai
• 27% of the world's land surface is high mountain
• 30% of the world's vehicles are owned by Americans
• 34% of the world's cigarettes are smoked in China
• 40% of the world's concrete is used in China
• 42% of the world's spam email comes from the US
• 50% of the world's languages have been lost in the last six years
• 53% of the world's laptops are made in Taiwan
• 54% of the world's popcorn is grown in Honduras
• 56% of the world's suicides occur in China
• 61% of the world's birth take place in Asia
• 67% of the world's manual work is done by women
• 69% of the world's Internet searches are done using Google
• 70% of the world's population has never heard a dial tone
• 72% of the world's fresh water is frozen in Antarctica
• 73% of the world's population lives in cities
• 74% of the world's convicted serial killers live in the US
• 88% of the world's 12 year olds are familiar with Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator
• 89% of the world's computers run on Microsoft Windows
• 94% of the world's population recognizes the Coca-Cola trademark
• 96% of the world's languages are spoken by only 4% of the world's population
• 98% of the world's motherboards are produced by Taiwanese companies

Globe 3G Pricing

I reported a couple of months ago that I was happy to find out that Globe finally offered time-based 3G Internet surfing on the phone. There have been recent postings in the ph-cyberview yahoogroups about exactly how Globe does their charging and how it differs from Smart.

To recap, Smart offers 30 minute surfing for PHP10. The time starts ticking when you first go online, and you can disconnect/reconnect as many as you want within that 30 minute time frame. That entire 30-min duration is considered as a single session, and thus, you will be charged PHP10.

Globe offers their Internet surfing at a smaller denomination of PHP5 for 15 minutes, but here's the caveat apparently that they never mentioned in any of their ads -- they measure your 15 mins from the time you connect until the time you disconnect (whether intentionally or due to loss of signal). So if within a 15 min timespan, you got disconnected twice and you reconnected, you are billed 3 x PHP5 instead of a single PHP5 because it will be treated as 3 very short sessions!

This explains why my last saw Globe bill had multiple billings for the same day. I must have gotten disconnected/reconnected and was billed for multiple sessions. That sucks!

Dinner with Old College Friends

A former Ateneo college classmate, Malou Espino-Leonardo, is in town (from the US). Michelle Dy gathered a few of us for dinner at Terry Selection in Podium. It was a long day for me as I have been conducting training on our new hires both in Manila and from the branches. Then from the training, I had a board meeting that went up to around 7pm. So I had to rush through EDSA traffic to get to Podium. Its been a while since I had to wade through EDSA traffic on a weekday. :P

I got to Podium slightly past 7:30pm. Had to look for Terry Selection first since I've never been to the basement area of Podium. I didn't know there were shops there already (I think they partially converted the basement 1 parking into a shopping area). Terry is a Spanish deli that caters more to the higher end crowd (as compared to the likes of Casa Armas, I guess). Mitch said its more authentic. Well, I'm not a big fan of Spanish food so I can't really tell the difference.

When I got there, Malou, Mitch, Rene Lacson and Red Atendido were already there (I was the last to arrive). Shortly after some exchange of basic pleasantries, we went for the appetizer, and the main meal. Malou's now working at Costco in Washington; Mitch is still with Intranetsys; Rene's now with ABS-CBN Interactive; and Red is in the customs brokerage business. It was fun reminiscing through old times over dinner.

The basement area closed a bit early so we had to move up to the main lobby area for desserts. We stopped by Cheesecake, Etc. to unwind. I had to leave close to around 11pm. And I guess the rest of the guys left shortly after that. Mitch volunteered to start off a mailing list for our Ateneo BS Computer Science batch 1991. So for those interested in joining, just send a blank email to admu-cs1991-subscribe@yahoogroups.com.

Building My Home Theater Part 2: Audio-Video Receiver

I finally bought the audio/video receiver (AVR) intended for my future home theater. I settled on the Cinema Two bundle being offered by JBL at Power Plant's SM Appliance Center. Its a 5.1 JBL speaker system with a Harman Kardon AVR 145. (JBL and Harman Kardon belong to the same mother company -- Harman International.)

The original bundle price was around P49k, but SM Appliance Center gave me an extra discount for paying cash/check instead of credit card installment. So the final amount came out to about P45.5k. I paid by check so I have to wait for it to clear before I can pick up the goods.

It was a toss-up between the Cinema One or Cinema Two package, with the former being about P10k cheaper. They are actually both bundled with the Harman Kardon AVR 145. They only differ with the bundled JBL speakers. Since a big part of the home theater experience is dependent on having really good sounds, I decided not to scrimp and went for the higher package.

Before deciding on the AVR 145, I did the usual Google research. The AVR 145 received good reviews from several Amazon customers. The audio quality is supposed to be top-notch. The only negative comment was from a guy who was complaining that the controls were too complicated and that one needed an advanced degree in electrical engineering. Well, I've never been intimidated by consumer electronics controls, so its no big deal.

The only downside of the AVR145 is it does not have HDMI ports. Again, I'm not sure how important that is since my projector (more on that in future postings) does not have HDMI input as well anyway. So I will most likely just be sticking to component video for the video signal and digital coaxial cable from the player to the receiver. Most video player equipment today only support HDMI 1.0 anyway -- which only sends video signals over HDMI, but the audio is still sent separately through other cables. Only HDMI 1.1 or higher supports DVD audio on the same cable.

I have to admit that before this, I've never heard of Harman Kardon. I'm not really an audiophile so my knowledge of audio equipment pretty much ends with the usual consumer brands of Sony, Yamaha and Pioneer. Harman Kardon would be in the same league as Onkyo or Denon, which I would normally consider as being way too expensive. But I felt this bundle was not that out of reach from my budget so I went for it.

I guess I won't really get to enjoy this anyway until the end of the year when my home theater would be fully set up. Its still in the construction stage. Will update this blog next time with the details of my movie projector.

To read Part 1 of this adventure, click here.

Crystal Reports Merge Module for VS 2005

I was doing the finishing touches for the POS project I'm working on. I tried to make an installer project (.msi) in Visual Studio 2005 (yes, I've just moved up from VS 2003) but couldn't figure out how to do the merge module for Crystal Reports. My previous installer projects were all for VS2003 and including the merge module was straightforward. I haven't done much with Crystal Reports for VS 2005 other than test it on the web a couple of weeks ago.

According to MSDN, I just have to merge the file CrystalReportsRedist2005_X86.msm. But the file does not exist on my PC. Apparently, its not automatically installed along with VS 2005. Microsoft provides some links pointing to BusinessObjects, the maker of Crystal Reports, to download the merge module from them.

Doing a Google search, the links being returned all do not seem to work anymore. As it turned out, BusinessObjects has been acquired by the German company, SAP. And all the URL's don't seem to work anymore. They are being redirected to SAP and the site that it gets redirected to does not have the info on where I can get the merge module.

The developer download site of BusinessObjects/SAP is just as bad (if not worse). The search page does not work properly with Internet Explorer. It only shows the first page of the result. Clicking on the button to show the next page, or to increase the search results to show, leads to a reset of the search. I tried it on Mozilla Firefox and it worked properly there. But I still did not see the merge modules for VS 2005 -- only for the latest VS 2008. Also just as strange, the drop down list of products available for download only shows 3 products with Firefox, but more than double that when used with IE!

Anyway, Sonny (head of our tech support) finally found some forum discussion which lists where you can find the redistributable runtime for Crystal Reports 2005. Turns out that its part of the Visual Studio installation. Specifically, its in the folder:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\SDK\v2.0\BootStrapper\Packages\CrystalReports\CRRedist2005_x86.msi

I checked my PC and indeed it was there! So forget the merge module, we'll just manually install the redistributable runtime for Crystal Reports of 2005.

Yet Another Search Engine Tries to Unseat Google

There's a new search engine in town. Yes, its yet another search engine who is going to try its luck and wrest the search crown from Google which continues to lord the industry at more than 70% market share from the last stats I've seen.

The new search engine is called Cuil (pronounced "cool"), from an old Irish word meaning "knowledge". While many brave souls have tried to unseat Google and all have miserably failed, what makes these guys think they are THE ONE? For one, the team behind the project has some serious credentials backing them up:

• Anna Patterson: worked on Google's search index
• Russell Power: worked on Google's search index
• Louis Monier: founder of the AltaVista search engine (ahhh.. the former search king who turned down the opportunity of owning the Google engine when it was offered to them by Page and Brin when they were still nobodies)
• Tom Costello: worked on IBM's WebFountain project

Cuil claims to have the biggest index (bigger than Google). Somehow, I doubt this claim. They certainly don't have the number of computers Google has, nor the financial resources to put up such a large network (being a startup). For the heck of it, I tried searching for "full-spread photo books". It returned a page with only 2 entries -- happily, one of them is for ThePictureShop. Doing the same search with Google returns lots of entries. Strangely also, the result page says it found "3 results", but it only shows 2. I don't know why.

I don't know if Cuil also puts weight on the geoip of the user. When I searched for "Online Payment System", it returned PayEasy at the first page list along with big boys -- the likes of PayPal, Authorize.net. Surely, we haven't reached that stature, but I just wonder if it gave more weight to Philippine-based sites since it detected my geoip is Philippines.

Cuil also uses a new report format. Unlike the traditional list that goes top-down, Cuil returns in results in 3 columns. Its easier to read, I think. It also shows an image on the side. I have no idea where that image came from. In my search for "full spread photo books" where ThePictureShop.com appeared, the image beside it is that of a photo book, but it did not come from my site. No idea where that came from.

Perhaps most significantly, Cuil claims they are using a different way for determining relevance of a page. They departed from the PageRank algorithm that is used by Google. Only time will tell, I guess, if their algorithm proves it is that much better. For now, even Google seem to have noticed them, but people are also questioning the claim of them having a bigger index.