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Jungle Home Theater Really Roars
Bamboo pots, monkey sconces, and a tropical ceiling mural may sound primitive, but this jungle-themed home theater is all about comfort and quality.
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The Lutron Grafik Eye lighting system offers separate scenes for TV viewing, for when the room is partially lit and for movies when it is virtually dark.
February 14, 2008 | by EH Staff

And to think it almost never came to be. This jungle-themed home theater outside of Indianapolis was the brainchild of interior designer Robert Orr. Orr convinced his father, who custom built the home, that a lower-level room should be upgraded to a full-fledged theater.

One trip to the showroom at TriPhase Technologies in Carmel, IN, was enough to persuade Orr’s parents that a home theater wasn’t a bad idea at all, as long as it didn’t approach the $250,000 price tag of the showroom’s trophy theater. The family contracted with systems designer Tom Wilburn to come up with an impressive but downscaled media room that included simplified remote control and coordinated lighting.

Wilburn selected the Sony VPL-VW60 SXRD (Silicon X-tal [Crystal] Reflective Display) projector for the job. The 1080p projector provided Wilburn’s clients “the best value for a future-proof technology,” he says. On the speaker side, the Orrs didn’t quite get the Triad In-Wall Platinum speakers they had heard during the TriPhase audition, but came close with Triad’s offering, the Gold series. “The owners feel they got the same Triad sound,” Wilburn says.

The theater gave Orr Jr. a destination for prized monkey sconces in the rear of the room. He then built a jungle theme around the sconces, including a ceiling cove painted with a jungle theme and oversized bamboo stalks “planted” in urns on either side of the 100-inch screen.

The owners’ request for simple operation was met by RTI’s T2C remote control, which TriPhase programmed to mimic the look of the Elan touchscreens used throughout the house. In addition to his-and-her satellite DVRs, the owners enjoy content from their Escient FireBall DVDM-100, which stores and serves music and movies.

“They love that when they buy a new DVD, they load it into the FireBall, and it never has to come out,” Wilburn says.

Editor’s Note: Unfortunately EH was unable to obtain more photos of this home theater.


Equipment List

Video
Sony 1080p VPL-VW60
Stewart Filmscreen 100-inch FireHawk screen
Escient FireBall DVDM-100 CD/DVD management system

Speakers and Electronics
Triad InWall LCR Gold/4 Omni
Triad InRoom Bronze powered subwoofer
Marantz SR6001 A/V receiver

Other Equipment
RTI T2C remote control
Lutron Grafik Eye lighting control system
Panamax M5100 surge protection
Pullman seating (Carmel Series)

Systems and Room Design
TriPhase Technologies
Carmel, IN
www.triphase-tech.com



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Comments (29) Most recent displayed first.
Posted by Steve Preslar  on  02/15/08  at  01:07 PM

You just don’t get it do you. Our point was made a long time ago and really wasn’t all that important to begin with. The article’s good, and sure, I would have like to see some more pics. I mean, who wouldn’t? But, you getting all hot under the collar has made our day! :) I hope you had as much fun with this as we did.


PS Wookies do live on Endor

Posted by Jeff Kalman  on  02/15/08  at  12:38 PM

“This monkey smokes cigarettes, rides a dirt bike, does algebra, teaches kung fu at the Y and sings back up vocals for bruce springsteen. check it out its true

check out this URL http://www.lovesanimals.com/images/animals/monkey/funny_monkey.jpg

That’s no monkey!  That IS Bruce Springsteen!!!

Posted by Steve Harbor  on  02/15/08  at  12:38 PM

we as consumers want the pictures.

Yes, I understand that *you* want pictures; you’ve made that pretty clear.
I’m just as much of a consumer as you are, and given the choice of no
article, or an article without pictures, I prefer to have the article (yes,
ideally I’d like to have both so people like you could be happy too, but
apparently that wasn’t possible here). Why is your “vote” more valuable
than mine?

And again the title says “Jungle Home Theater Really Roars”. I still fail
to see anything misleading there. If you’re talking about the sub-title,
yes it refers to bamboo pots (shown), an overhead mural (shown, though the
quality certainly isn’t great) and monkey sconces, not shown.

So you’re saying, you came to this page, read the headline, read the
sub-title, then invested time in reading the text and didn’t see photos
and you feel somehow that you’ve been mis-treated..that your time is too
valuable for you to have come to this page and not been able to see photos.

And yet spending 2 days arguing about the lack of photos is a valuable use
of your time?

Whatever…for myself, I’d rather have more content, and I’d hate to see
ElectronicHouse not post an article just because they don’t have a couple
of pictures… and my page views are just as valuable as yours.

Preslar:
What do you have to do with this anyway?

I read the site, I want them to post more content, not less. I don’t want
them thinking all their readers need “visual aids” in order to be happy.

Don’t give a great title and then not let me see it as WELL as read
about it.

So again, even though you stated the article was informative, you’d rather
they hadn’t posted the article because they had no photos. Is that correct?

Posted by Steve Preslar  on  02/15/08  at  12:20 PM

“Maybe whoever owns the theater doesn’t want to let them take photos? Who knows?”

And maybe a wookie lives on Endore? Who knows?


My point is this, when I sell a theater the home owner has to see it, invision it, as if it were already in there home. This helps them to own the theater before the pen hits the paper. I’m sorry for thinking you wrote this, but now that I know you did go down a notch in my book. What do you have to do with this anyway? 

“HEY EVERYONE! Come check out my Lord of the Rings inspired home theater! It has life size trees in each corner branching up to a forest canopy over head, a laser optic starry night sky, and little hobbits all around. Now instead of listening to rich mind enveloping speakers on my own true HD, better than life, iMAX screen lets sit IN my theater and read about it. If everyone will get out there books and turn to chapter 4 (this one sounds REALLY good)”

Hey we get excited about this stuff. We are visual people. Don’t give a great title and then not let me see it as WELL as read about it.

Posted by Joshua Pokorney  on  02/15/08  at  12:09 PM

Steve H.

I beleive the point we are trying to make is that we as consumers want the pictures. No one wants to read a title eluding to all sorts of cool stuff and then click to an article that contains no pics of it. The “Secret Door” Article was another perfect example…....the title said “Home theater has cool secret to to access equipment” Again not one picture of any secret anything!

I really thought for sure the whole “monkey” analogy would sum this up for you. Guess not, heres another one.  I could preach all day about unicorns and how cool they are but you would never believe me unless you saw one. (That does not include your my little pony collection)


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