As some people know, I'm very into 2channel audio listening and home theater.  I'm also a bit of a Klipsch fanboy.  I'm also intersted in acoustic science and this has all led to a listening room that is considered by some to be a bit over the top.  Recently, I've built four Silverlight applications related to my Audio/Home Theater hobbies.  I'm going to briefly introduce them here, and get into code in future articles.

Group Photo

Every year, Klipsch has an event that has come to be known simply as The Pilgrimage.  This boils down to a trip by hardcore Klipsch nuts to one of two sacred locations: the original home of Klipsch and present day manufacturing center in Hope, AR, or the engineering labs in Indianapolis, IN.  In the 1930's and 40's folks at RCA, Bell Labs, James B Lansing and Paul W. Klipsch were inventing what we call Hi-Fi.  There's a lot of fascinating history at these events, a chance to see new stuff under NDA, play with engineering equipment, and so forth.  Every year a group photo is taken.  This time, I thought creating a Silverlight application with "hotspots" would be the best way to annotate the photo: tie people's first names and forum names to a face. 

The picture scales to the size of your browser, so with a big monitor you can start to see some of the detail in the high-res original photo.  Mousing over people displays as much name as they wanted to give, forum name, and where they're from.  If you participate in any Internet community that has a real-world component, something like this to tie someone's internet handle to "Oh yeah I had some beers with him..." is pretty neat.

The application is live at http://www.klipschcorner.com/silverlight/2008/PilgrimageFaces/

Listening Room Carousel

My Klipsch site, KlipschCorner.com, has a feature where crazy people like myself can share photos of their listening rooms.  I have previously posted my conversion of the "carousel" example to a nicer Silverlight 2 appliction, and I just updated it for Beta 2, the code will be coming of course.

The application is live at http://www.klipschcorner.com/HTCarousel.aspx?Id=1&Title=Damon's Palladium Paradise

Room Mode Calculator

Many people don’t know that the shape and size of your room can have a much larger affect on sound than what equipment is in the listening room.  Everyone probably learned in high school science class that when waves collide, constructive or destructive interference can be created.  When those waves are sound waves bouncing around your walls what you end up with is not hearing what’s actually in the recording.  In order to model this behavior before building a room (or to help make educated guesses on an existing room), a room mode calculator is called for.  This tells us what frequencies stack up and what the distribution of modes is:

The application is live at

http://www.klipschcorner.com/Tools/ModeCalc.aspx

Palladium Deep Zoom

Let’s say you were really into Klipsch speakers.  Let’s further say that Klipsch came out with a product that was considered by early reviewers to be among the best speakers in the world.  Would you let the fact that they cost $20k stop you from purchasing them?  You probably would!; but then you would not be me.  You would take tons of photos to meticulously document the un-boxing and setup process so that audio fans everywhere could live vicariously through you, and so that is what I’ve done.

The application uses the standard mouse wheel/click zooming about as well has showing a blurb about each photo as you click on it ala the Hard Rock site.

The center channel zoom app is live at

http://www.klipschcorner.com/PalladiumZoom.aspx and the floorstanding speakers at http://www.klipschcorner.com/PalladiumZoom.aspx?model=p39f

As soon as I get caught up on some other things, I’ll dive into creating some articles that get into the useful parts of the XAML, C#, or Blend2.5 tricks it took to create these applications.  For now, I hope some people will appreciate these awesome speakers!