Bob reviews the comfortable, light-filled third-floor family room, complete with a Palladian window, large-screen TV, microwave, and fridge.
Clip Summary
Bob reviews the living room furniture in the third-floor family room as well as the large TV screen. Thanks to the new dormers, the attic has lots of light. The focal point is the Palladian window. And, since teenagers will primarily be using the space, there's even a microwave and fridge for easy access.
Okay. Well, now we're up on the third floor. And this will be our last visit here. If you recall, if you've been following the progress, we have two teenager's bedrooms and a bath behind me.
And then this great room. This living room, family room, whatever you want to call it. Where we've brought in this terrific furniture from the Baker company. This stuff is built, like, in the nineteenth century. It's so nice and heavy -- sturdy. It should be here for at least a generation or two.
And the main thing that I'm very pleased about is this 52-inch rear projection Phillips TV set, that is just ... Well, right now we're just playing with our camera and it. But the quality of the picture here is unbelievable.
Let's say hi to Joe Domato from Bose.
Hey, Joe.
Hi, Bob. How are you?
Good, how are you?
Good.
Now, the real important part of this whole set-up up here, as far as having a media center, is the surround sound. Tell us about that.
We have a new system from Bose corporation. It's a speaker system actually. It has some of what we call our cube arrays, they're right there on the wall right next to the television.
Cube arrays.
That's correct.
So that means you've got a collection of these cubes around the room.
That's right.
So, what's this thing you're fussing with over here?
This is a, we call this the acoustimast module and we've actually tucked it neatly into this bookcase. Kind of built it in sort of, but I'll pull it out a little bit to show you.
This is where all the base energy for the speaker system comes from. All the explosions that would happen in a movie or all the music that you would actually listen to that perhaps was reproduced by a bass guitar.
The deep sounds. Yeah.
Absolutely.
OK. And this can also be mounted in new construction. For example, in between the floor joints so that you get the just the circular part aimed up into the room and then you put a grill over it.
That's correct. This is the part of the system that's meant to be hidden. So, no matter where you sit or stand in the room or enjoy your music and movies you can hear the sound from here.
Now how many of the little cubes do you have in the array?
Well, we have three in the front, for specific reasons for surround sound, for audio effects in the front and also the center channel dialogue. You have a television screen.
So the central one is for dialogue.
Correct.
And the other two will pick, pick up what kinds of sounds?
Will reproduce all these sound effects. Like if a plane was going to come from the right side of the screen the sound would actually pass through electronically and that would give you the effect that there was movement with sound.
That that plane was actually flying through your living room.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
That's excellent.
We also two more up here. We have a rear channel speaker, which is up here. This is a pair. They also are able the reproduce the ambient sound, the rear channel as we call it in the industry, and that's the effect that you get when something moves from front to back or vice versa.
Right. Well Joe I'll let you get back to your work over there. Thanks very much.
Thank you Bob.
Well if you recall we had some difficulties building our dormers up here these Two dormers were added on so that we could create an attic that had lots of ventilation and light
We did get our variance and now they are completed, and of course we've, We're down to the window seats, and can practically sleep a kid up here and the controls are all, here for, you know, sound, music, etc. and then over at this end, what I consider to be the real focal point of the room is this terrific palladium window from Marvin.
This is the south side of the house, so that during the day this is flooded with light and of course you can't really have happy teenagers in a family room without a microwave, little Marvel refrigerator that fits neatly under the counter where we can keep sodas and stuff and generally speaking, a very very comfortable 3rd Floor.
Got to break for messages don't go away.
That's going to wrap things, but don't miss next week's show.
I'll be giving you a personal tour of my finished House.
'Til then I'm Bob Vila. It's good to have you home again.
