2025 Fitness Learnings

After my wife started a new workout routine, I resumed lifting weights again in 2025 after an entire decade of not doing so.  I was previously just doing linear progression for bench press, squat, deadlift, and sitting overhead press -- do 3-5 sets of each and if I succeeded, add 5 lbs for the next session.

I haven't kept my records from back then, but I want to say my estimated 1RM (rep max) was 225lb for squat, 250 for deadlift, 165lb bench press, and I have no idea what for overhead press.  I had followed the program for about a year.  But I found it very taxing basically to always be trying to exceed your previous record and I did not enjoy the sessions and did not feel they were worth the time.  So, I stopped.

Today, my 1RM (actual, not estimated) is 280lb for the squat, 325lb for the deadlift, 215lb for bench press and 145lb for a seated overhead press.  I made it past my goals of reaching the "intermediate" level of strength as listed in Strength Level.  I'm no expert, but I wanted to write about what I learned this year that let me progress so much further.

Learning Approach

After trying linear progression and reaching a similar point as I did a decade ago, I decided to go beyond Starting Strength and just read a large variety of material and watched a lot of different YouTube videos.  While there are general principals that hold true for nearly everyone, there's also a lot of individual variation, so I found it informative to see what people advocated for and why they thought it worked for them.

Goals

1. Do some sort of regular routine because I thought it might help my wife stick with her goals.  Most activities are more fun when people you know do them, even if you aren't quite doing them together.
2. Chase higher strength numbers.
3. Look better for my wife.  It's not something she asked for or anything, but I figured it would be appreciated.

Ten years ago, I only had the second goal.  But I got to the point where I was thinking--being stronger hasn't actually been more useful.  Mark Rippetoe, in Starting Strength, notes that people are happier when they are stronger.  But I determined that I was happier not feeling beat up from really tough workouts and was happier spending my time doing something else.

Looking better seemed like a kind of superficial and vain thing back then, but it's been much more motivating to look fit than to be stronger.  I still have strength goals and most of my training is structured around increasing the amount I can lift, but I no longer think of it as a useful thing.  It rarely comes up in practice.  But it's fun to chase a higher number.

Anyway, figuring out your goals is important because it really affects what your training program should look like.  While being able to lift more weight and having bigger muscles are clearly correlated with each other, there's some key differences in approach that I'll explain later.

Key concepts: Stimulus, Fatigue, Recovery

Your muscles do not actually get stronger when you are working out.  Working out provides the stimulus for your body to get stronger and your body actually gets stronger during recovery.

Recovery is largely rest, lack of stress, and nutrition.  For me, I aim for 8 hours of sleep and 1g per lb of body weight of protein a day.  I also take 5g of creatine a day, a capsule of fish oil, and half a dose of multi-vitamin.  If you don't have your recovery sorted out, some of your exercise is going to waste.

The amount of useful stimulus you can provide is limited by fatigue.  There's various types of fatigue.

1. Muscle fatigue.  You do actually want to achieve this in a session because it turns out that's what is most stimulating, but beyond 5-10 sets to failure or close to it per session for a target muscle you are increasing recovery time without increasing growth.  You want your muscle to adapt and recover before you stimulate it again, which ranges between 24-72 hours depending on the muscle.
   
   
2. Soft tissue fatigue.  This is stress to joints and tendons.  This usually accumulates more slowly compared to muscle fatigue across the course of multiple sessions during your more high intensity sets, but also recovers more slowly.  This is the reason why I periodize my training -- where I ramp up the intensity over the course of 5 weeks and drop back down to something only slightly higher than where I started.  Some people prefer to take a deload week instead.
   
   
3. Systemic fatigue.  If you do enough hard exercise, you'll get to the point where anything physical seems daunting, even if it uses different muscles than the ones you worked out with.  If you continue working out some fresh muscle group when you've reached your systemic limit, any growth to that muscle group will come at the expense of growth to other stimulated muscle groups.
   
   You'll reach a systemic limit before you reach muscle fatigue for every muscle group, so this means there's some prioritization to be done.  I find I usually reach a daily system limit around 6 exercises in a session and that I need to take rest days to manage this

Strength vs Hypertrophy

If you ask for training advice, people will tend to ask if your goals are more about increasing your strength or doing hypertrophy.  Strength is measured by the amount that you can lift.  Hypertrophy is measured by the size of your muscles, often for looks.  But wait, isn't getting your muscles bigger also how you lift more?  Why does the difference matter?

If your goal is strength, of course larger muscles will help, but there's a lot of other factors as well.  Technique matters a lot and a more efficient movement can let you lift a lot more weight without actually requiring your muscles to exert more force.

How this manifests in your exercise routine is that maximum muscle stimulus is from going to failure or near it.  So, for hypertrophy, you are going hard all the time and you don't actually care if what you are doing is efficient for moving a large amount of weight.  But for strength, it's beneficial to do some lighter work to practice technique.  You just can't practice a movement a lot if you're going at it hard.  You want it heavy enough that you can tell if the movement feels easier or not, but not so heavy that you get tired too quickly.

Time and Stimulus to Fatigue Ratio

Time is a pretty major factor in determining what routine will work best for you.  If you can only work out twice a week, two to three days apart, it's probably best for you to do full body workouts because you'll probably be recovered by the time of your next workout.

If your sessions are furthermore very short, something like 30 minutes, then you'll also probably need to favor big compound exercises that target many muscle groups at once, just because they're the most time efficient.  These exercises tend to have a somewhat worse stimulus to fatigue ratio -- but with a limited amount of time, time is your bottleneck, not fatigue.

If you have a lot of time, you may favor exercises with really good stimulus to fatigue ratio.  They will tend to have less raw stimulus per unit of time, but if your bottleneck is fatigue rather than time, that's just how it goes.

Most people can work out more than just twice a week, but can't spend that long each session, so they have to devise a split where some exercises are performed one day and different ones are performed a different day.  A good routine takes into consideration your goals, the fatigue factors mentioned above, your personal experience in how quickly you can recover from various exercises, and the trade-off between raw stimulus and fatigue.

Fatigue and Recovery has a lot of individual variation 

It seems generally true that bigger muscles take longer to recover after exhausting than smaller ones.  But how much time it will take you may not be the same as the average person.

How comfortable a movement feels affects soft tissue fatigue and this will also vary from person to person.  Some people find deadlifts beneficial for their backs.  For others, it feels terrible.  Some people have shoulder pain doing flat bench press, while others do not. 

I'd recommend beginners to just try out one of the popular programs to establish a baseline, but at some point after a year or so, it's definitely worth tweaking things to fit your personal needs. Find exercises that are comfortable to you and hit the muscle groups you want to target.  Figure out your recovery time -- if you feel sore when you are supposed to work out that muscle again, you either need more recovery or less stimulus.  On the other hand, if your muscle has been feeling fresh for days, you should be taking less time or adding more stimulus.

Risk of injury goes up a lot if you work out while fatigued. 

How many sets?  How many reps per set?  How much resting time between sets?

For the lighter technique practice work, I like doing 5x5 with 1 minute rests.  It's not too fatiguing, it's heavy enough that you have a sense of what is working better or not, and you get enough total reps in that it's a decent amount of practice.

For most hypertrophy exercises, I do 3 sets and aim for getting to 0 reps in reserve (RIR) by the last set.  The number of reps in each set I prefer between 5 and 12.  Anything less than 5 and the gap between 0 and 1 RIR is sort of large and anything more than 12 it's hard to accurately estimate your RIR and it's more time consuming.  But there are some exercises where I'll do more reps than that just due it being easier to superset (where you do multiple exercises in a row before resting, to save time), or because of some difficulty getting the weight safely into position, or because it's just annoying to add a 5lb increment instead of a 10lb increment with my adjustable dumbbells.  I have a rest period of 2 minutes after my first set, and 2.5 minutes after my second.  Any less than that, I'll often fail before hitting my last rep, which might actually be fine in terms of growth, but it's mentally taxing.

Consistency is key

Pretty much any routine you can stick to is going to be better than one you have trouble sticking to, so don't be afraid to sacrifice optimal growth for consistency, because it turns out consistency is optimal anyway.  If something just isn't fun and you don't have the discipline to do it anyway, do something else. 

Case study: breaking down my own routine

Let's see how I've applied some of these principles in practice.

Here's my current routine: I have a weekly rotation that I structure into a 5 week period.  Here's what the last week of a period looks like for me:

Tuesday

1. 1RM (215lb) bench press, 4x5@60% of 1RM.
2. 1RM (280lb) squat, 4x5@60% of 1RM.
3. 3 supersets of
1. 8 weighted dips @ 0-2 RIR (reps in reserve) (55lb)
2. 8-10 bulgarian split squats @ 0-2 RIR (75lb).
4. 3 supersets of
1. 16 reps of lateral raises @ 0-2 RIR (10lb)
2. 12 weighted decline crunch @ 0-2 RIR (45lb)

Wednesday

1. 5x5 deadlift@60% of 1RM.  (sometimes paused deadlifts)
2. 5x8 dumbbell bench press @ 0-2 RIR (55lb)
3. 5x5 seated overhead press@70% of 1RM
4. 3 supersets of
1. 14 laying dumbbell curl @ 0-2 RIR (25lb)
2. 14 dumbbell skull crushers @ 0-2 RIR (25lb)

Thursday

Rest day.

Friday

1. 1RM (325lb) deadlift, 4x5@60% of 1RM
2. 1RM (145lb) seated overhead press, 4x5@70% of 1RM 
3. 5x9 incline dumbbell bench press @ 0-2 RIR (45lb)
4. 3 supersets of
1. 8 weighted chin ups @ 0-2 RIR (45lb)
2. 8 weighted dips @ 0-2 RIR (45lb)

Saturday

1. 5x5@60% squat (sometimes pause squats, sometimes pin squats)
2. 5x5@60% bench press (sometimes tempo bench)
3. 3x9 bulgarian split squat
4. 3 supersets of
1. 14 laying dumbbell curl @ 0-2 RIR
2. 14 dumbbell skull crushers @ 0-2 RIR 

Sunday, Monday

Rest days. 

What do the previous 4 weeks of the period look like? 

The only thing that changes is the top singles of bench, squat, deadlift, and seated overhead press.  I start the period at 40lbs less than my 1RM and increase it by 10lb each week.  The 1RM generate the most soft tissue and systemic fatigue, so I periodize to deal with that.  I also found that I was failing my PR attempts when I was only doing a 4 week period but I have not yet since switching to 5 week periods.

This approach is most heavily influenced by Ben Johnson, whose YouTube channel introduced me to the concepts of a top set backoff, doing lighter skill work, and periodizing as a way to manage soft tissue and systemic fatigue.

 Why does my routine look like this?

1. The thing I'm happiest about is that this routine is feels both easier and more effective than the linear progression route I was doing before.  I was feeling beat up and every session was a challenge with linear progression and hit a plateau, whereas with this approach I only really have one really challenging PR attempt every 5 weeks and I haven't hit a plateau yet. 
2. Because my bench press numbers a year ago was lagging behind percentile-wise compared to my other lifts, I wanted to prioritize that.  So, it's the only lift where it or a direct variation happens every session.  There's only one heavy top single and the rest of it is either lighter skill work, or hypertrophy with dumbbells that don't add a lot to soft tissue or systemic fatigue for me.
3. Notice that there's a lot of light sets of 5 at 60% of 1RM for the big lifts where I care about the numbers.  This is the lighter skill work where you practice getting better at the movement more so than just increasing the size of the muscle.
4. When I followed Starting Strength, I used to do squats every session, but it's not a priority for me.  Also, my deadlift seemed strangely low compared to my squat, only 20lb higher or so and I have normal length arms.  Separating my 1RM for squat and deadlift to different days made a tremendous difference to my deadlift numbers.
5. Dips are there as an an assistance exercise for bench press.
6. Bulgarian split squats are there as assistance exercise for squats and deadlift.
7. Dumbbell presses I find much easier on the shoulders and to recover from than barbell presses, so that's why I go near failure and do hypertrophy work with dumbbells instead of barbells. 
8. I found I had to increase the weight for seated overhead press from 60% of 1RM to 70% because I didn't really have any direct assistance exercises for that movement and it lead to failures during PR attempts.  If you feel fresh for a PR attempt and you fail despite plenty of recovery time, it probably means you need more stimulus.
9. Curls, weighted chin ups, skull crushers, lateral raises, and weighted decline crunches are all purely for looks.  They all deal with muscles that I felt weren't adequately developing with the strength lifts.
10. Put the lifts you care about the numbers for the most first when you are the most fresh.  This means PR attempts go first.  Assistance and hypertrophy stuff goes last.
11. I've changed exercises around and which order I do them based upon experimentation.  Which exercises feel better?  Seem easier to recover from?  Allow you to progress on your lifts?  Are time efficient? 

Other notes

Equipment

I got a lifting belt, Cobra grips, wrist wraps, and lifting shoes.  The belt and grips make a big difference.  I'm not as sure about the shoes, but I definitely feel more comfortable with them on.  Some people say that a belt or grips means you aren't working out your core or your grip as much, but I say why let those bottleneck your progress if you aren't explicitly trying to improve those?  And if you are explicitly trying to improve those, why aren't you picking exercises that target those aspects more directly?

I also got safety straps, which let me do pin squats without clanging noise and also let me set the bar at the exact correct height to load the deadlift.

Technique

I did improve in technique quite a bit.  Instead of including specific tips here, I would say that what cues work will vary from person to person and just watch a large variety of content and do some experimentation.  Make sure to do some lighter skill practice sets -- heavy enough that you can tell if there's a difference, but light enough that there's plenty of repetition.

Injury prevention 

I always warm up starting with just the bar and tend to load up in no more than 50lb increments (except the deadlift, where I jump from just the bar straight to 135lb).  I've experimented with faster and found that my lifts got less consistent.  I've never injured myself doing a working set, but I have going too fast and sloppy during a warm up.  As you get older, the more important this is.

Always lift with good technique.  Don't overreach and perform heavy lifts when you are already tired.  I'd stick to the less fatiguing and lighter lifts for going to failure, not barbell movements aside from failed 1RM attempts.

At some point, I started getting some degree of shoulder pain from both the barbell bench press and overhead press.  It stopped after I started doing shoulder dislocates (which is a terrible name because they don't actually dislocate the shoulders) between each set.

Sometimes I get back tension from squats or deadlifts and I find dead hangs to help, or actually just doing more deadlifts at 60% of 1RM for some reason.  I think sometimes discomfort is not due to actual damage, but is a preventative mechanism your body employs and you just have to carefully remind it that some movements are still safe to do.

 

 

 

 

Intro to Inazuma Miscellany

 

 I found the intro of this piece more pretty than the rest of it, so I just did the intro. I spliced together two takes because one of them has Bennett showing up, but I flubbed the second part a little. This only took a couple of days of practice. 

Home Theater Stuff

Update November 2025

I've since added an 84" perforated drop down projector screen from Vividstorm and a Valerion Visionmaster Pro (1).  I use the screen for movies and the TV for video games and shows.

At a viewing distance of 7.5', the perforations are noticeable and there's some moire effect on scenes with bright solid colors, but I prefer being able to keep the center channel higher.  There's a bit of audible degradation for the center channel even after re-calibration, but it's pretty slight.  I'd prefer a woven screen, but I wasn't able to find one at this size and was a tensioned drop down that wasn't multiple thousands of dollars.  Understandably, projector screens usually come in larger sizes.

I also added the costs to the equipment list at the bottom. 

Original

 

So, I've been upgrading my home theater.  Some pictures:

It all started when my 12-year old Panasonic plasma television died.  I hadn't been using the television very often, so I replaced it with a relatively cheap 55" Hisense U7N.  But it turns out that even cheap TVs with HDR look really good compared to an old plasma suffering from burn-in.

So, I decided to get a 4K capable receiver, only to discover reconnecting my speakers that my small subwoofer had died at some point, too.  Well, I had gotten that 14 years ago, so maybe it was time to get a real subwoofer, one that I would definitely notice if it died.  And since the receiver supported Atmos, maybe while I was at it, I'd get some height speakers.

As it turned out, I found I really enjoyed the new subwoofer and Atmos, so over the course of six months or so, I slowly researched what else I could do to improve my home theater experience.  Using a calibrated mic.  Acoustic treatment.  Tactile transducers.  A second subwoofer.  It was a real "if you give a mouse a cookie" situation, as my wife would describe it.  And now here I am writing about my home theater journey, in case it is helpful or interesting to anyone. 

Display

TV or projector?  I prefer TVs due to their ability to be used in more lighting conditions.  The main downsides are that they are much smaller and you can't place speakers behind a TV, unlike an acoustically transparent screen.

A 55" TV from my seating position at 7 feet occupies about 32 degrees horizontally.  It's a little large for normal shows, which I rarely watch; about the right size for games; but a little small for movies, my primary use case, which normally target 45 degrees.  I would go 65" or 77" next time.

OLED has the best picture quality but has burn-in issues and are more expensive than mini-LED.  Most people will say there is a negligible amount of burn-in after 5 years, but I like to keep devices until they completely die and had my last TV for 12 years.  I spent the last few of those years with a burned in image, so I decided to go mini-LED.  A quick visit to the excellent TV review site rtings.com and I ordered the Hisense U7N.

Receiver

After discovering that the new TV looked amazing compared to my 12-year old plasma with burn-in, I decided it was time to get a 4K capable receiver.  I went with a Denon AVR-X3800H.

I'm of the opinion that a receiver's effect on sound quality is pretty minimal so long as the receiver supports good calibration options and sufficient power, so it's mostly a matter of features.  I went with Denon because I had the impression that they were slightly more reliable than Onkyo and Integra.  The X3800H has the better Audyssey XT32 sound calibration and is the cheapest Denon with multiple independent subwoofer outputs.  While I wasn't initially planning on getting multiple subwoofers, I had heard so much about the benefits of multi-sub and figured it would be nice just in case without needing to buy a separate device like a MiniDSP.

The choice ended up being very good for me as I did eventually get another sub, tactile transducers (which uses another one of the 4 sub outputs), and ended up really liking some sound calibration software called A1 Evo, which only works with Denon and Marantz receivers.

First Replacement Subwoofer

When hooking things up to the new receiver, I realized my subwoofer was dead.  It was a small 8" Aperion Bravus I bought when I lived in a condo that only went down to 35hz at -3db.

Given that I didn't even know when it died and now that I live in a house, I decided to get a subwoofer with much more impact.  I wanted it to go to at least 20hz and I wanted it ported because, while the listening area is fairly small, it was part of a much larger basement and ported subwoofers just have more output.  I also needed it to take up less than 20" x 20" horizontally to give me more options for where it could be placed.  The Hsu Research VTF-TN1 met all this criteria, though it turned out that I only need to turn its gain up to roughly 25%, so probably I could've gone with a sealed sub.

Experimenting with various locations, I found I was happiest with it nearfield, directly behind the main listening position.

So, how much difference does a real subwoofer make?  A lot.  I had some bass demos, and one of the clips is the Gas Station attack scene from Terminator Salvation.  I was not very impressed with that scene with the old system--I guess it had nice explosions.  What I hadn't realized was that my old system had actually failed the bass test and that you were supposed to feel the giant terminator walking around.

Speaker upgrades and Atmos

My speakers at the time was a 5.1 setup using the Aperion Intimus line.  4T towers for LR, 4C center, and 4B surrounds.  They were really good for the price, but sounded a little thin at louder volumes in the larger basement.

I considered getting more Aperions, but doing more research, found that they don't usually measure that well.  Objective measurements don't tell the full story as people don't hear the same way a microphone does, but speakers that measure well rarely sound bad and I appreciate the scientific approach.  I wasn't sure about getting more speakers that measured poorly even if they did sound pretty good to my ears, but I also did not want to go through the hassle of selling my existing speakers and definitely didn't want to just throw them away.

So, I decided to take a risk and do a mix and match.  I bought speakers from Ascend Acoustics, who publishes measurements.  Normally, you want speakers all from the same brand so that, as a sound pans around, it doesn't shift in timbre.  I got a pair of Sierra LX for the left and right speakers, a Sierra-2EXv2 for the center, and a pair of HTM-200SE2 for the front heights.  I moved the Aperion 4Ts that were the previous left and right speakers to be surrounds, and the Aperion 4Bs to be the rear heights.

There is a small timbre difference after doing speaker calibration, but it doesn't bother me.  Very similar to the timbre difference between the Sierras and the HTM-200SE2s, actually. 

The Ascends are excellent and have no thinness problem.

How good is Atmos?  Height position vs top position?

A common question is whether Atmos speakers are worth it.  It's a pretty subjective question that depends on your priorities.  I find well-done Atmos effects a lot of fun when they happen, but it is also true that this is only present for maybe 20% of content that I listen to and typically for a small portion of it.   When it happens, though, it's really cool and it happens often enough that I consider it worth it.

I did experiment with the speaker position.  The "heights" position have the speakers closer to the walls and less directly above you, whereas the "tops" position is more above you.  I felt there were trade-offs and neither are clearly superior.  There's often action happening on the screen that pans up, and heights just sound more natural when that happens.  However, if there is something panning from front to back above you, or if it's something like rain on a rooftop, the tops are much more convincing.

In the end, I kept the tops position because it was more fun.

Tactile Transducers

So, I mentioned that being able to feel the action was game changing.  However, I experienced two problems:

1. Sometimes I wanted to feel more oomph, but if I turned the sub up, the audible portion of the bass was too much.  I wasn't able to EQ things to get both tactile impact and not overwhelming bass.
2. If I was sitting in one of the sides of the couch instead of the center, there was much less impact.  Remember, the sub is directly behind the main seat.

Tactile transducers are devices that connect to your seating or platform and directly impart movement.  I got a pair of Earthquake MQB-1s with an XJ-300ST amp and it solved both problems.  The Denon X3800H receiver can be configured to set one of the subwoofer outputs to tactile transducer, which both allows you to set a separate high-pass filter and avoid using that output during calibration.

Taking Measurements

About 30% of the apparent sound quality has to do with the room, so I was curious how my system measured and whether there were any issues with the room.  I also strongly suspected that having a wall on the right side but none on the left made for an imbalance.

So, I bought a calibrated microphone (Umik-1) and took measurements with this excellent and free software called Room EQ Wizard.  I found the decay time to be pretty decent, with some room for improvement above the bass level, and a lot of room for improvement at bass frequencies.

Acoustic Treatments 

Standard advice is to prioritize treating first reflection points and corners.  I bought some 244 panels and a 6A Alpha Pro from GIK Acoustics online and found a couple of their tri-traps on Craiglist.

Treating the first reflection point in the side wall and the rear wall made a very noticeable difference in the sound.  At first, it sounded pretty bad.  Turns out, you should re-run speaker calibration or else things will sound weird.  After doing that, things we much improved.  The soundstage was made less wide, but imaging was considerably improved.  Decay times improved some, but the perceptual effect was greater than what the graphs would imply.

Treating the ceiling did not affect the soundstage, but surprised me by also improving the imaging, even for content that did not use heights.  It gave sounds a much more distinct vertical location.  I thought that vertical imaging did not matter for non-Atmos content because there aren't speakers with different vertical positioning to image with, but it was nice to have things like voices sound like they come from a more distinct point than sounding smeared vertically.

Treating the corners made some small improvements to bass decay time, but I discovered later that it's much easier to treat bass issues with multiple subwoofers.  I'm not sure I would recommend treating corners if you haven't tried multiple subs already.

Multiple subwoofers

If I was so happy with the Hsu and only had its gain at 25%, why would I want another subwoofer?  Higher quality bass.  It's hard to get an even bass response with a single subwoofer for a single seating position.  It's impossible to do so across multiple seating positions.  Things sounded bloated at the right side of the couch.

I got a Speedwoofer 10s Mk2 which only goes to about 22hz.  But as my issues with peaks and dips were above 30hz, it did just fine to flatten the bass response across multiple listening positions.

Painting the room and changing bias lights

While I prioritize audio over video, I did find it distracting that the walls were yellow.  So, I painted them the most neutral and non-reflective gray possible, a flat Sherwin Williams Westchester Gray.

I had also transferred some LED bias lights from my old TV to the new one, but found they were a little too bright.  So, I got some MediaLight Mk2 lights, which are dimmable and have high CRI, and found they were an improvement as well.  I find having bias lighting to reduce eye strain in high contrast situations.

A1 Evo

I had bought the Audyssey app but ultimately had trouble getting the bass dialed in so that there was both enough impact and no sign of bloat on some test tracks involving acoustic bass.  I had heard about A1 Evo from forums and decided to try it out.  While it was a little confusing figuring out how to get the right sweep measurements, eventually I figured out that you can just use the odd.wtf script and generate sweeps with the standard Audyssey mic hooked up to the receiver.

The results from A1 Evo sound better than whatever I tried with the Audyssey app and solved my bass bloat problem, so I recommend it. 

Moving from 5.2.4 to 7.2.4 

A little devil on my shoulder kept on whispering that 7 bed layer speakers might be noticeably better than just 5.  So, I got another pair of HTM-200SE2s for use as rear surrounds an and AIYIMA A07 amp to power them.

There's not a lot of movie content where having sound directly behind you is important.  I did find that surround effects seem more enveloping than in my 5.1 setup.  For video games, however, rear surrounds are utilized far more actively where there can be a lot happening behind you and it's useful to get accurate positioning information.

Overall, it's nicer but not a big deal compared to properly set up 5.1.

Content Playback 

Originally, I bought a Panasonic 420 because I figure since I did not have an OLED, probably I wouldn't care a lot about Dolby Vision.  The internet suggests that actually it's the opposite, where the worse the TV is, but more Dolby Vision is beneficial.  At any rate, I almost never actually play physical discs because I saw how many people complained about minor scratches messing up their 4K so I pursued a way to transfer them to disk.  And I discovered later that I don't really care about Dolby Vision over normal HDR.

I ended up getting an Ugoos AM6b+ and installed CoreElec.  It's one of the few players that supports all versions of Dolby Vision and lossless audio.  I stream from my Synology 923+ using Eero Pro 6E with wireless backhaul.  I had initially tried very hard to get it working with my FireTV Stick and thought I did not have enough network bandwidth and got an ethernet adapter and a long cable, but it turns out the FireTV Stick just isn't powerful enough to handle really high bitrates.

I rip discs using MakeMKV and a Verbatim 43888 that I bought from Amazon.co.uk.   

What's next?

At this point, the home theater is pretty much complete.  I might get some diffusion panels for the ceiling and back, but they're more expensive than absorption panels.  Whenever my current TV dies again, I will go for a 65" or 77" instead.

Appendix

Equipment list

Prices are rounded but include tax. 

Visuals

• 55" Hisense U7N ($550)
• MediaLight Mk2 bias lighting ($100)
• 84" Vividstorm Slimline Motorized Perforated Cinima White screen ($650)
• Valerion VisionMaster Pro (1) Projector ($2200)

Audio equipment 

• L/R: Ascend Acoustics Sierra LX ($1600 + $260 for stands)
• C: Ascend Acoustics Sierra-2EXv2 ($900)
• Ls/Rs: Aperion Intimus 4T (All the Aperion stuff totaled $1200, including an 8" subwoofer and center channel not listed here)
• Lsr/Rsr:  Ascend Acoustic HTM-200SE2 ($415)
• Amp powering sr: Aiyima A07 ($100)
• Tfl/Tfr: Ascend Acoustic HTM-200SE2 ($415)
• Tbl/Tbr: Aperion Intimus 4B (cost already included)
• Receiver: Denon  AVR-X3800H ($1200)
• Sub 1: Hsu Research VTF-TN1 ($1250)
• Sub 2: RSL Speedwoofer 10S MKII ($500)
• Tactile transducers: 2x Earthquake MQB-1 ($700 with the amp)
• Amp powering transducers: Earthquake XJ-300ST (cost already included)

Room treatment 

• Sherwin Williams Westchester Gray flat paint ($100?)
• 5x GIK Acoustics 244 absorption panels ($700)
• GIK Acoustics 6A Alpha Pro combo absorption/diffusor panel ($300)
• 2x GIK Acoustics Tri-Trap ($150 used)

Total: $13,290, plus a little more for wire, speaker mounts, media console

Sources

• Ugoos AM6b+ with CoreElec, streaming from a Synology 923+
• Panasonic DP-UB420
• FireTV Stick 4k
• Nintendo Switch
• Asus ROG Flow x16 laptop 

Key trade-offs

Movies benefit from pretty much as large a screen as you can get, but too large a screen will cause strain for shows or video games.

 

Acoustic treatment to get a low decay time and to make the room more "dead" is great for surround material, but stereo music benefits from the reflections in a more "live" room.

 

Rear surrounds are probably not worth it over a 5.1 setup unless you are either very picky about surround or if you play video games that support surround.

Spectrograms

Here's what the spectrogram of the right speaker from the main listening position looked like before acoustic treatments:

Here's the after:

 

 You can see things are more even above 80hz, which is where the crossover is set.  But overall, I found it difficult to correlate the graphs with the actual effect.

How much is good enough? 

This is a personal question.  Not just due to personal taste and budget, but also simply physical limitations.  There's no point in getting more if you can't hear the difference unless you are trying to impress others for some reason.  I used to be able to distinguish in a double-blind test the difference between a well-encoded 192kbps MP3 and a lossless track in college, but I can't do so any more.  Even if you can hear the difference, you may not care about some types of differences.

But it's a hassle to audition equipment.  How will you discover your limits without spending too much time and money?  How can you figure out what you care about?

One trick is that headphones are much more convenient to try out and cost about 10x less for roughly the same quality of sound.  You won't get really get body-shaking bass impact, though.

As for figuring out what you care about, ready some testing tracks and clips that are a combination of your favorites that you are intimately familiar with and reference material that others agree are high quality and can stress some particular aspect of video or sound.

Testing Material

Standard advice is to use what you are familiar with, but what if what you are familiar with isn't particularly good for evaluating things?  It can be helpful to learn about what others use and what specifically they look for.  I used a lot more than just these, but some that I thought were particularly helpful:

1. "Amaze" Dolby Atmos trailer.  Does the sound of the bird flying seem connected and consistent as it pans across the room?  Does the thunderstorm have impact without getting muddy?
2. "Train" by Holly Cole.  Does the bass sound full without getting bloated?
3. First ship battle from Master and Commander.  Do you feel the cannon fire? 

Video Playback

While I purchase a lot of discs, I rarely use the actual Blu-Ray player.  I got a bit paranoid about disc scratches and instead use MakeMKV and a Verbatim 43888 to rip the discs to my NAS (a Synology 923+).  For a while, I was trying to get my FireTV Stick 4k to play back the files, but it was choppy.  I thought it was due to poor network bandwidth, so I upgraded my wireless to Eero 6E routers, which improved but did not solve the playback problems.  Eventually, I eliminated the network as the bottleneck via an ethernet adapter and a long cable and purchased an Ugoos AM6b+.  It's the most common device that can playback all Dolby Vision formats and lossless audio, though it turns out that I don't really care about Dolby Vision over standard HDR.

Poltergeist Rag by William Bolcom

I discovered this piece while looking for music to play in the background of my wife's D&D campaign. We had heard rumors of a haunted piano bar, so I looked for ghost-themed music and came across Bolcom's 3 Ghost Rags. I had played the Graceful Ghost when I was much younger, but hadn't realized it was part of a series of 3.

The piano bar ended up not being haunted, but instead was in a time loop. When the three rags played all the way through, the loop would end with a catastrophic meteor strike killing everyone in the bar and we'd start again and had to figure out how to escape the loop. It ended up being because the pianist had made a deal with a demon to become the "greatest pianist of all time" and we had to destroy the piano and then defeat a crazy aberration hidden in the basement.

Anyway, I really liked "Poltergeist", so I decided to learn it. The ending could be... a little more polished, but I decided this take was good enough. It's got a cat, after all.

2024 Glacier National Park Trip Report

We had some flight vouchers from a cancelled trip that we had to use and my wife and I happened to both have time off in the summer, and of course our 7-year old son was out of school.  Summers in western Washington are great, so where could be fly to that was at least as good but wouldn't exceed the cost of our vouchers?  We decided on Glacier National Park, as it's only fully open during the summer.  This is a trip report.  Most of the pictures are of animals since after I switched to telephoto lens, I usually did not switch back to something that could take landscapes.

Prep

Since none of our family are avid hikers, we did a series of training hikes near where we lived that I thought were very important to prepare us, especially for Grinnell Glacier.

1. Rattlesnake Ledge
2. Mashel Falls
3. Mt. Pilchuck
4. Little Bandera

I would say that I thought that Mt. Pilchuck and Little Bandera would normally be more technically challenging than Grinnell, though shorter, but as you'll see later in Day 4, nature decided to up the challenge.

Downloading offline maps for Google Maps and the official NPS app proved very handy for navigating.

Day 1 - Sunday, August 25 - Travel Day

We found out that SeaTac airport was under some sort of cyberattack.  When we checked in at home online, we were advised that checked bags may not make it to the destination.  We had planned to check a bag because hiking poles are not officially allowed on flights.  However, we had read online that often TSA lets them through if they are fully disassembled, so we decided to risk bringing them in carry-on.

Security did let us through with hiking poles.

A second hiccup was that the rental car agency, Alamo, did not have any compact SUVs available, which was the option we had booked.  We had to decide between a full size car, a pickup, or a minivan.  There was some concern about the conditions of the roads which had made us prefer a compact SUV, but after doing some research on the phone, we found that the roads were either fully paved or pretty well-kept gravel that anything other than a sports car would be able to handle and that the bigger risk was that large vehicles would find parking and going through the narrow parts of Going-to-the-Sun Road more challenging.  So we went with the car for the best fuel efficiency.

We messaged our AirBnB hostess whether or not they had bear spray we could borrow at the place in Whitefish, and she let us know that some previous guests had left some.  They had also left bug spray.  We bought food for breakfasts and lunches and sunscreen that we were originally planning to bring in the checked bag.

Day 2 - Monday, August 26 - Hidden Lake

We had heard that parking was dicey at Logan Pass unless you got there before 6:30 AM and we didn't really want to get up early enough to try that.  So, instead we aimed for getting the express shuttles at Apgar visitor center.  We got in line at 7:35 AM and got on the fourth shuttle at 8:25 AM.  It was technically not "express", because it made stops along the way, but still one of the smaller shuttles that went all the way to Logan Pass without a need for a transfer.

Hidden Lake was my wife's favorite hike.  Beautiful peaks, meadows, trees, and of course, the lake.  We saw a good amount of wildlife.  The descent to the lake and the climb back up was pretty steep, but nothing like Bandera in Washington state that our family had done before.

Bighorn sheep

Golden-mantled squirrel

Blue Copper butterfly?

Mormon "Cricket"

Hoary Marmot

Columbian Ground Squirrel.  Video of one chirping.

American Pipit

Townsend's Warbler

Rocky Mountain Parnassian

Mountain Chickadee

Pine Siskin

Western White butterfly

Mountain Goat

Day 3 - Tuesday, August 27 - Lake Bullhead

My wife was not enthusiastic about the plan to drive from Whitefish to Many Glacier early in the morning to do Grinnell Glacier on Wednesday, so she checked for cancellations at Many Glacier hotel or Swiftcurrent Motor Inn and found one!  So, on this day we drove the Going-to-the-Sun Road over to the east side of the park and entered Many Glacier to hike to Lake Bullhead.

We saw much less wildlife this day.  While some people reported seeing a bull moose near Lake Bullhead, we ended up not seeing any.  We stopped by Fishercap Lake and ate lunch at Red Rock Falls on the way.  Our son enjoyed tossing rocks into each of the lakes.  We did see a few things, though.

Green Comma butterfly

Paddle-tailed Darner

White-spotted Sawyer

Canada Jay

Day 4 - Wednesday, August 28 - Grinnell Glacier

So, while the previous days had highs of 60s and 70s, today had a high of 40F with rain and snow!  We bought gloves and my wife bought a beanie from the gift shops in previous days in anticipation of this, and they definitely came in handy.  We double-socked and brought a bunch of layers.  The normal Grinnell Glacier trailhead was closed for repairs, so we parked at Many Glacier hotel around 6:25 AM (because we were worried about parking) and enjoyed breakfast inside the hotel before heading out.

I was looking forward to trying to spot some elk or moose at Swiftcurrent Lake or Lake Josephine, but sadly did not see any.  Our back-up plan was to just hike to Lake Grinnell if things seemed too miserable, but we ended up deciding to stick with the glacier by the time the trail forked. 

The cold rain turned to snow as we headed further up.  We sort of had views, but obscured by fog and snow. The hike itself had nice varied terrain and interesting water features.  My wife spotted a bighorn sheep sleeping in a field below:

About 1.2 miles from the top, my wife and son decided to turn back due to the snow sticking to the ground.  My son didn't have any hiking poles and it was getting pretty slick at spots.  I pressed on.  But here's what it looked like at the top:

There were some pine siskin foraging in the snow.

At some point, I realized that my hands had gone from warm to wet and painfully cold.  I also then noticed that water had made it past my waterproof boots and that my socks were soaked.  I had two layers of wool socks on, so my feet never got too cold, but I had to keep on flexing my fingers to keep them from going numb.

I'm normally a pretty slow hiker, slower than my wife and son, but I half jogged on the way back down just to generate heat.  I did spot the bighorn sheep still in the field, now awake and eating.  But it was extremely difficult for me to get any shots through the snow with my cold hands and this ended up being the best of the lot:

After making it back down to Lake Josephine, I headed to the boat dock hoping to skip the last 2 miles back to Many Glacier Hotel.  I had originally bought a boat tour to gain entry into Many Glacier before my wife managed to snag reservations at Swiftcurrent Motor Inn.  But the next boat wasn't for another 20 minutes and there were already so many people waiting that the operator said I was likely to have to wait for the one after that, another 45 minutes after the first boat.  So, I decided to walk the last 2 miles back.

When I got back to Swiftcurrent Lake, the paved part of the trail, the people a couple dozen of feet in front of me started backing up and talking loudly about bears!  There were two cubs and a parent sort of strolling on the path towards us and we had to back up quite a bit before they decided to cut across the plants and then cross the bridge across Swiftcurrent.  As there were people in front of me with bear spray in hand, I took the opportunity to take some photos.

The way back after that was uneventful and I re-united with my family at the lobby of Many Glacier Hotel and drove back to Whitefish.

While the weather and lack of views were unfortunate, I felt like the hike through the snow was quite the adventure and the bear encounter was exciting.

Day 5 - Thursday, August 29 - Avalanche Lake

We decided to end with Avalanche Lake and to take the shuttles again.  Logan Pass was closed in the morning due to snow, so we figured everyone who wanted to go there would probably end up parking at Avalanche instead.  Plus, we didn't want to get up super-early after the grueling experience yesterday and figured with the larger shuttles running to Avalanche compared to the small ones that go to Logan Pass that we wouldn't have to wait as long as we did last time.

We got to shuttle line around 9:20 AM and discovered that so many people were parking at Avalanche that many of them had improperly parked in the over-sized vehicle turn around loop and thus, they couldn't actually run the larger shuttles.  Apparently, there's no tow trucks and it didn't sound like they even fine people who are improperly parked.  Plus the reservation check line for Going-to-the-Sun was 20 minutes since they had to explain to everyone that Logan Pass was closed due to snow.  We didn't get to Avalanche until 12:20 PM or so.  But that still left plenty of time to do Trail of Cedars and Avalanche Lake to cap off our trip.

I didn't find the Trail of Cedars to be as wondrous as any of the previous hikes, but I appreciate there being a very accessible hike.

The Avalanche Lake hike was very nice.  A lot of cool water features, woods, some views, and Avalanche Lake itself was very pretty.

Creek

On the way to the lake, we noticed a lot of people stopped looking into the woods, so we stopped to ask what was going on.  Bears.

After waiting 10 minutes or so, the bears decided they wanted to cross the trail.  The crowd of people parted ways like the Red Sea and backed up.  It was a cub and a parent.

At the lake itself, we mostly saw birds.  Our son played with rocks at the lake and we relaxed for a while before we headed back.

Stellar Jay

American Dipper

? were flying low and fast across the lake

 

Day 6 - Friday, August 30 - Whitefish and return home

Since we had a flight in the afternoon, we took the time to relax in the indoor pool and hot tub of the community building the AirBnB belonged to and then walk around the Whitefish shops and eat lunch at Buffalo Cafe before taking our flight home.  We accidentally navigated to the Kalispell airport before going to the correct one, but we had plenty of time to fix that.  Our hiking poles also made it through as carry-on and our trip home was pleasantly uneventful.

Photography notes

Pictures were taken with a Sony a6400.  All of the animal shots were taken with the Sony 70-350mm G, with shutter priority set to either 1/1000 or 1/1250.  I also used a Cascade Mountain Tech trekking pole as a monopod, fitted with a Ulanzi U-80l mount.  I carried the camera on a Peak Design clip attached to my backpack.

Both the Sony A6400 and Sony 80-350mm G are weather sealed and I took advantage of that in the Grinnell Glacier hike with all the snow and rain.  So, it went through hours of rain and snow and did not seem any worse for the wear.  I would not have managed to get pictures of the bears on the bridge if the camera were not readily accessible.  However, when the hotshoe contacts got wet, I'd get annoying messages about incompatible accessories and would have to remove the hotshoe cover and dry it off a bit with my gloves.  Luckily, this didn't happen when I chanced across the bears.  I hear a piece of electric tape does pretty well to prevent this.

Physical Minis on a Digital Tabletop

I'm happy to say that we've recently realized a long standing dream of mine: to be able to play D&D using physical minis and dice on a digital tabletop.  This is a write-up describing the set up, in case it helps others considering something similar.

Here's a picture of the set up in gaming mode:

...and here it is in normal dining table form:

The key components:

1. A television laying flat to display the maps on.
   
2. A table with built-in storage to hide the TV when not playing.
   
3. Software that makes it easy to display the maps and manage encounters.
   

The Television - 43" Hisense A6H

With a TV, you need some way to level it and some plexiglass to protect the screen.  I went with a case from digitaltabletops.com for around $525, as they seem to make it their business and are clear about which TVs they're sure their case works with.  I would give them a 4/5:

1. Definitely accomplishes the primary goal of leveling the TV and protecting it, and it looks pretty good.
   
2. There's some minor cosmetic gouges in the wood that are hard to notice unless you are looking.
3. There was not enough protection during shipping and two of the corner legs were broken off.  I was able to super-glue the pieces back together.
4. There's a minor gap of a few millimeters between the screen and the plexiglass due to the lower bezel of the TV.  I can understand how that's impractical to eliminate this gap in a case meant to accommodate a variety of TVs.  You can still easily tell which square a mini is in.
   

The TV is a 43" Hisense A6H.  It's relatively cheap at $240.  It's the largest size that fits horizontally inside a wide Wyrmwood Modular Gaming Table with player desks on each side.  It has wider than average viewing angles, which is more important for our use case than typical TV usage.  It doesn't have a raised bezel on the top or sides, only the bottom, so there's not much of a gap between the plexiglass and the screen.  It's 4K, which seems good considering how close people will be viewing it.  It has Chromecast built-in, which can be handy for casting the maps from Chrome without needing to use an HDMI cable, but I've found that our network connectivity is not robust enough to avoid video compression artifacts.

Its main downsides of not being bright enough for usage in the sun or not having dark enough blacks for usage in the dark aren't relevant for our use case of playing in the evening with the lights on.

Alternatives considered

1. The Frame TV from Samsung is more expensive ($700 for an old version) and has worse viewing angles.  But it lays flat, so you don't need a case to level it, though you might want to raise the TV up a bit.  Since the plexiglass doesn't have to integrate with a case, you can make sure that it's completely flush with the screen to minimize the gap.  Not having seen this set up in person, I don't know if I would have preferred this over what I have now.
   
2. A projector is smaller and completely eliminates the gap between minis and the picture.  But it's difficult to get a bright picture in a lit room, casts shadows, and the light fixture in our dining room prevents us from ceiling mounting it.  It'd also be a pain to bust it out and put it away again. 
   

The Table - Wide Wyrmwood Modular Gaming Table

The table is a medium wide Wyrmwood Modular Gaming Table in rustic elm.  It's one of those gaming tables with removable leaves and a vault to store ongoing board games, puzzles, and other similar things.  For example, a television.  My family is very happy with the table. It's beautiful, very solid, and perfect for this use case.  There's plenty of reviews and videos about this table, so I'm going to avoid going over well-covered features and instead focus on some of the points that are specifically relevant for why we chose it, more subtle considerations, or things that surprised me.

1. The table is 31" high, which is higher than the standard dining table height of 28-30".  Since it's listed on their site, it shouldn't be a surprise.  What surprised me is how much the additional inch bothers me.  You generally want the surface to be at elbow height or lower.  It's probably the thing I like the least about the table, but lowering it would risk the table getting in the way of bigger people's legs.  It's just the cost of having a 4.5" gaming vault, which is needed to fit the TV case with a height of 4".  We just plan on getting used to it.
   
2. I specifically got this over some similar tables due to its leaves system being water resistant to spills with its magnet, groove, and gasket system.  I didn't want a liquid spill to immediately soak the TV.  Some tables deal with this by having a single piece of wood instead, but that's pretty hefty.  And it's actually pretty convenient to lift just the end topper up like a lid to access the insides.
3. Some people have reported warping of the topper leaves over time, especially on wide tables.  If it warps within the first few weeks, Wyrmwood would definitely cover replacement, but I was concerned about it in the long term.  So, we got the finger-jointed topper leaves which should be more resistant to warping as it is glued together from multiple pieces of wood.  While I don't prefer the look, my wife does, and it was cheaper.
   
4. Our wood choice has knots that were unfilled for us.  We would have preferred them being filled with clear epoxy.  Some people have been complaining that theirs were filled with non-matching wood filler, so I don't know what is standard practice for them.
5. The magnets on the topper leaves trigger the sleep behavior of my wife's laptop.  So, she has to be careful of her laptop placement.

Table Layout

This part is likely not relevant to most people, but it's the part I spent the most time planning around.  It's figuring out the table layout.

Since our primary use case for using the gaming vault is D&D, we had the issue of needing to provide a surface for people's character sheets, laptops, and so on.  Some of the options we discarded:

1. Doing this in the vault did not seem very comfortable.
2. The table edge is not wide enough by itself.
3. Wyrmwood sells player desks for this purpose, but we didn't want the table to be any longer to fit in the room.  So while we could use player desks along the width of the table, we couldn't along the length.
   
4. Wyrmwood also sells hobby vaults that could help, and having two hobby vaults on each end of the table would do the trick, but they reduce the overall capacity of the table--making us unable to store the player desks in the table when not in use.

What I really wanted was to be able to keep some of the topper leaves on at the end.  But the way they stay in place is with rubber studs intended to be at the corners of the table, so they only stay in place when all the topper leaves are installed and are quite loose otherwise.

So, what I ended up doing was putting some cabinet bumpers on the sides of the player desks and using the player desks to stop the toppers from moving.  It's still not extremely secure this way--with enough force, the player desks can be moved sideways--but in practice it works just fine with our group.  Others have suggested just using cabinet liners.

 

I did get one hobby vault for the DM.  But so far, we haven't really needed to access the inside of it in the middle of a game. And it turns out if you leave two toppers on both sides of the table, the player desks with furniture bumpers fit in the middle pretty much perfectly resulting in all of the toppers being very secure:

 

This also gives more storage space overall.  The downside would be inability to access this storage while stuff is on the toppers, as you'd have to lift it up vs sliding the hobby vault lid forward, and the increased height compared to just using the hobby vault.  We'll be evaluating which set up we prefer.

Software - Foundry VTT

Foundry VTT is pay $50 once software, which I prefer over subscriptions.  Since my use case is playing locally, I don't need a hosting service.  Foundry seems very popular and has a great variety of third-party content and modules, some of which make hybrid play with physical minis on a TV very easy.  The key ones for me were:

1. Lock View -- Easily size the grid to physical 1" squares on the TV and lock the view so that token movement doesn't trigger panning near the edges.
2. Monk's Active Display -- Hide unnecessary UI elements.

One of the things that I like to do when I run games is to play music and sound effects, but it gets hectic to manage.  Foundry supports automatically playing music when switching to a scene, and a module called Automated Animations supports automatically playing a matching sound when you roll an attack or cast a spell.  JB2A is a module that can supply the animations and on their Discord is a link to a bunch of sounds.

Alternatives considered

I play Level Up Advanced 5th Edition (A5E) rather than D&D straight, and it turns out Foundry has gaming system support for it that seems already pretty complete and has active development.  I hadn't realized that when I bought Foundry, but for that reason alone it's going to be hard to beat.  But here were my thoughts on other options prior to buying Foundry:

1. Arkenforge.  I actually bought it when it went on sale since it's explicitly made for in-person play.  However, having the option for remote play is nice and Foundry just has a lot more support in pre-made content and modules.  I also preferred the Foundry UI over Arkenforge.
2. Roll20.  During the pandemic and after the DM of one of my groups moved, Roll20 was what he ran and I deeply appreciated being able to continue playing.  But it was always a little flaky and its advanced features require a subscription.
   
3. Fantasy Grounds.  I haven't actually tried this one, but did look into it since I've been hearing about it over the years.  But it seems general impression I get is that it doesn't seem to be improving as quickly as Foundry.
4. Maptool.  This was my first VTT that I used over 20 years ago, but as it never comes up as a recommendation I figured it had been superseded.