TV Picture: What Does "Calibration" Mean???

[Tim R]

On Thursday, October 29, 2015 at 8:50:17 AM UTC-4, thekma...@gmail.com wrote:

Tim R:

OK. Next I need you to select
picture mode "Standard" or
"Custom". I need to know the
scale and present setting of each
of the following:

Backlight
Contrast
Brightness
Color
Tint/Hue
Sharpness.

I.E. "Contrast: 0..........50.......100, presently 90.

etc.

Before you do that, check color temperature
setting. Move it to Neutral, or Warm1, if available.

Here are my settings. It gives me a number and a point on a scale, I'm estimating percentages.

Backlight, about 48%
contrast, about 75%
brightness, 50%
color, 42%
tint 0
sharpness 0
color warm (dunno why two colors)
Noise reduction On
light sensor On
Black Stretch Off
Dynamic contrast Off

 

Tim R wrote: "Backlight, about 48%
contrast, about 75%
brightness, 50%
color, 42%
tint 0
sharpness 0
color warm (dunno why two colors)
Noise reduction On
light sensor On
Black Stretch Off
Dynamic contrast Off "

Seem reasonable. I'd still turn off
noise reduction and the light sensor.


Run up one of the controls all the way to
the right: That will determine your scale.
On my Samsung LED, the scale is 0-100,
with 50 as midpoint. On my "bedroom"
tube Toshiba, scale is 0-64, with 32 as
midpoint.


Anywho, the cause of your "washed out"
image is (1) Being so used to the
exaggerated settings of Vivid or dynamic.
and (2) - nudge that Contrast up a little
higher - 85% or so. I keep mine at
90/100.

How many color temp. options does
your set have - just TWO? Warm and
.....? There should be at least three
on any reputable/recognizable brand
name TV.

My backlight(scale 0-20) by the way
is set by me at 7. I had to bump
up brightness to 55 so as to not lose
detail in darker parts of the image, IE:
the texture of a dark suit jacket, etc.

 

"Anywho, the cause of your "washed out"
image is (1) Being so used to the
exaggerated settings of Vivid or dynamic.
and (2) - nudge that Contrast up a little
higher - 85% or so. I keep mine at
90/100. "

And you are probably white clipping.

 

[pfjw@aol.com]

Please note the interpolations

On Thursday, October 29, 2015 at 1:06:19 AM UTC-4, jurb...@gmail.com wrote:

"Well - this is a horse of an entirely different color. "

You an AKer ?

I am not from Alaska, but I do own several Atwater Kent radios made nearby. Otherwise, I do not get the reference?

Anyway, in response, speakers run 5, 6, 7 dB off, microphones about the same. Amps, tuners, whatever, consider them good within 3 dB. And people are afraid to use tone controls ? Where is that in the Bible ? Where is that in the Constitution ?

Some do, some are better than that. Most of mine are in the "better" category. Most (not all) speakers that are in the better category are also power pigs. All of mine are in that category - which leads to having to have relatively high-wattage amps based on speaker type, expected volume and room size. My least powerful amp is a 12-watt EL84 based homebrew, my most is 225 watt solid-state beast.

What's more, when turned all the way up that bass control is doing what it is supposed to do. Or all the way down. It was endowed by its creator with that ability. It is your free will to use it or abuse it. Like a gun, well at least as far as some woofers are concerned but they are just paranoid....

Have you ever looked at a 'full/min.' curve on a typical amp tone control? One runs out of words past "ugly". Not even the first cousin of the input signal.

> Bose had no shame in using a permanent EQ. Neither did I. Years ago I had speakers used to have a small woofer and like an 8 or 10 inch passive radiator which I replaced with a four ohm woofer.

On Bose - there is a very accurate descriptive phrase: No highs? No lows? Must be Bose. Of all the "popular" and/or mass-market "Name Brand" speakers out there, Bose were and are perhaps the worst of the lot. Their singular virtue was that they sounded just as wretched anywhere in the room due to that equalization. Which Bose managed to turn into a selling point. But, if that is your 'reference' speaker, much of what you have to write is justified, and heroic use of equalization is probably necessary. Generally not so much with decent speakers and sufficient power to drive them.

ASIDE: one day, I will fasten upon a set of Klipschorns - and retest my theories using fixed-location highly efficient speakers. Until then, I am quite happy with what I have, have no fears, constitutional, biblical or otherwise using equalization, bass, midrange or treble controls but just not having much of a need.

It was not good, but using the full range off a Soundcraftsmen ten band EQ I got them to sound good. And when I played a few other things on them I started liking them better and better. Damn that bass was smooth.

The settings were 31 Hz at +max, 62 at 0, 125 Hz at -max (min) and the rest gradually up to the center from there to about the sixth band. It sounded fantastic, but was inefficient as hell. First of all it was 2.3 ohms, poison to at least half of the amps known in existence, or not actually...

Good sound, especially Bass is a matter of moving air. It takes a certain amount of surface area to move sufficient air to get clean, smooth bass. In my direct experience concentrating mostly on vintage equipment (my most recent amp other than the homebrew is c. 1980) is that every one of them is perfectly happy down to 2 ohms, and my two front-line devices are stable to 1 ohm if short-term, and will shut themselves off if long term. I drive nominal 4-ohm AR3a speakers and nominal 6-ohm Maggies as the two extremes - no worries. The rest of the lot are much more conventional nominal 8-ohm devices.

> The lights dimmed when I cranked these babies up. Eventually they became the rear channels in my quad system. Fed them with a supposedly low power Sansui 771. I scoped it once and don;t remember the reading but it was well over a hundred a channel into that 2.3 ohms. The front was the Marantz 4270 running into speakers I put together. A 12 inch three way system, decent dome tweeters, noting fancy ad did not sound perfect, but I had an EQ for them as well. Separate EQs for front and back. Yup.

If you *needed* equalization with decent drivers in a homebrew speaker, I suspect that your crossovers may have needed work as well, and you were overcoming their limitations - no shame in that, but it also makes your fascination with equalization more reasonable. And a good thing that using such means did get you where you wanted to be in the end.

Once set, I believe the sound was damn hard to beat. Nobody did back then, at least in the current crowd. And I had it with the Advent five foot silver screen job with the mirror out front, AND MINE WAS CALIBRATED. Someone has just changed all three CRTs but it had another problem nobody could fix.. Nobody else that is.

You understand that Henry Kloss began to go deaf with increasing rapidity right around the time he moved away from speakers and audio to TV. His projection TV was a tour-de-force, with its biggest problem after the expense was in keeping it running, much less setting it up in the first place. Like the little girl with the pretty curl. When it was good, it was very, very good. When it was bad, it was just awful.

Peter Wieck
Melrose Park, PA

 

jurb...@gmail.com wrote: ">"Anywho, the cause of your "washed out"

image is (1) Being so used to the
exaggerated settings of Vivid or dynamic.
and (2) - nudge that Contrast up a little
higher - 85% or so. I keep mine at
90/100. "

"And you are probably white clipping. "

-got anything positive to add, jurb?

 

[Chuck]

On Wed, 28 Oct 2015 22:06:07 -0700 (PDT), jurb6006@gmail.com wrote:

"Well - this is a horse of an entirely different color. "

You an AKer ?

Anyway, in response, speakers run 5, 6, 7 dB off, microphones about the same. Amps, tuners, whatever, consider them good within 3 dB. And people are afraid to use tone controls ? Where is that in the Bible ? Where is that in the Constitution ?

What's more, when turned all the way up that bass control is doing what it is supposed to do. Or all the way down. It was endowed by its creator with that ability. It is your free will to use it or abuse it. Like a gun, well at least as far as some woofers are concerned but they are just paranoid...

Bose had no shame in using a permanent EQ. Neither did I. Years ago I had speakers used to have a small woofer and like an 8 or 10 inch passive radiator which I replaced with a four ohm woofer.

It was not good, but using the full range off a Soundcraftsmen ten band EQ I got them to sound good. And when I played a few other things on them I started liking them better and better. Damn that bass was smooth.

The settings were 31 Hz at +max, 62 at 0, 125 Hz at -max (min) and the rest gradually up to the center from there to about the sixth band. It sounded fantastic, but was inefficient as hell. First of all it was 2.3 ohms, poison to at least half of the amps known in existence, or not actually...

The lights dimmed when I cranked these babies up. Eventually they became the rear channels in my quad system. Fed them with a supposedly low power Sansui 771. I scoped it once and don;t remember the reading but it was well over a hundred a channel into that 2.3 ohms. The front was the Marantz 4270 running into speakers I put together. A 12 inch three way system, decent dome tweeters, noting fancy ad did not sound perfect, but I had an EQ for them as well. Separate EQs for front and back. Yup.

Once set, I believe the sound was damn hard to beat. Nobody did back then, at least in the current crowd. And I had it with the Advent five foot silver screen job with the mirror out front, AND MINE WAS CALIBRATED. Someone has just changed all three CRTs but it had another problem nobody could fix. Nobody else that is.

You look at these things and the picture is trapezoidal, the convergence is shit, you can't read the letters sometimes because it is so bad. Not mine. Mine was perfect. Convergence within a raster line width everywhere on the screen. I figured out a little design defect that was keeping the others from having that. It was radiation from one wire to another, polluting one of the waveforms going to the convergence waveform board. It caused an error at the right side and most people just made it overscan, not me. On a five foot diagonal screen my overscan was less than an inch on each side. Now remember how long ago this was. Your TV picture got smaller when your fridge started not long before that.

I wouldn't mind having one of those old sets now. Not that I have anywhere to put it, but if I did...

We had one of the Advents in our living room. One day the video died.
We didn't have a scope at the house and all the parts in the video
circuit checked okay. What we eventually found was that there was a
transistor with over 30v on the collector. It worked perfectly up to
29v, then when this threshold was surpassed, it ceased to amplify.
Hours of pure enertainment.

---
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>"If you *needed* equalization with decent drivers in a homebrew >speaker, I suspect that your crossovers may have needed work as >well, a..."

It was the fact that the cabinet was way too small. The passive radiator was much bigger than the original woofer. Kind of a slim cabinet also, not much volume. Actually they were a bit smaller than Boston Acousics A-70. Those had a relatively small cabinet, and shallow, which I like. The Bostons also have a dowel in the middle to stiffen the front and rear baffles. They handled the small volume by using a seriously low impedance woofer and a decent 12 dB crossover. I read the DC resistance of a woofer out of an A-150 and it was 3.2 ohms. I realize they are inductive but that is about the lowest I've seen on something supposedly 8 ohms. IRC lower than those famous 8 inch EPIs.

Anyway, by "AKer" I meant a member of Audiokarma. Them people are really into this stuff. Some of these guy have systems up into six figures, but that is really usually more than one system. They are into restoring old Marantzes, Pioneers, etc. and a bunch of high end brands I had never heard of. Separate arms and turntables, homemade solid plinths. Changing like ALL the caps in an amp or speaker crossover. Things like that. And tubes. There is a whole tube section and they are building tube amps. In fact I sold some big irons to a guy in Chicago last year, I'll have to dig up his phone number an find out what he did with them. They were a hundred bucks but worth it as they are Chicago BO-15s which are kinda hard to come by. They are full Williamson with BOTH screen and cathode taps. I have actually come to prefer solid state.

 

On Friday, October 30, 2015 at 7:35:27 AM UTC-5, thekma...@gmail.com wrote:

jurb...@gmail.com wrote: ">"Anywho, the cause of your "washed out"
image is (1) Being so used to the
exaggerated settings of Vivid or dynamic.
and (2) - nudge that Contrast up a little
higher - 85% or so. I keep mine at
90/100. "


"And you are probably white clipping. "

-got anything positive to add, jurb?

Do you know what white clipping is ? It is like when the display hits its maximum brightness than 100 IRE. Say between 70 and 100 IRE it does not get any brighter. It makes the picture white out on bright scenes.

Sometimes you are not aware of it. Without side by side comparisons you'll never know if it is in the source or the set.

I'm curious about that sensor you mentioned, what, it detects the color temperature ? Something like that ?

 

jurb...@gmail.com wrote: "- show quoted text -
Do you know what white clipping is ? It is like when the display hits its maximum brightness than 100 IRE. Say between 70 and 100 IRE it does not get any brighter. It makes the picture white out on bright scenes.

Sometimes you are not aware of it. Without side by side comparisons you'll never know if it is in the source or the set. "

I usually set it via a scene with sunlit clouds in it if I
don't have my patterns with me.

"I'm curious about that sensor you mentioned, what, it detects the color temperature ? Something like that ? "

No! You're talking out the wrong end again. The
sensor senses ambient room light, and raises or
lowers the backlight to compensate. Has nothing
to do with color temp.

 

"...aises or
lowers the backlight to compensate. Has nothing
to do with color temp. "

So you are referencing color temp to nothing ? There has to be something you can see to tell you if there is the proper amount of red, green and blue. How do you do that ?

 

On Saturday, October 31, 2015 at 8:34:38 PM UTC-7, jurb...@gmail.com wrote:

"...aises or
lowers the backlight to compensate. Has nothing
to do with color temp. "

So you are referencing color temp to nothing ? There has to be something you can see to tell you if there is the proper amount of red, green and blue. How do you do that ?

I don't think he does. He appears to rely on the stability of the newer TVs and just sets up the user controls.

G˛

 

jurb...@gmail.com, stra...@yahoo.com:


http://www.steves-digicams.com/accessories/spyder3_display_calibrate8.jpg

!

 

On Sunday, November 1, 2015 at 5:46:55 AM UTC-5, thekma...@gmail.com wrote:

jurb...@gmail.com, stra...@yahoo.com:


http://www.steves-digicams.com/accessories/spyder3_display_calibrate8.jpg

!

Yup, that's what I was talking about. I knew there must be something out there.

 

Hey Tim R, haven't heard from
you in a while.

 

[Tim R]

On Tuesday, November 3, 2015 at 6:42:10 AM UTC-5, thekma...@gmail.com wrote:

Hey Tim R, haven't heard from
you in a while.

I did what you all said, the family isn't complaining. I haven't made up my mind if I like it or not, but I don't watch much TV, it's mostly for the wife and daughter.