[mythtv-users] OT: monitors, room set up, sound blocking and distance-to-screen

[Bearcat M. Sandor]

Folks,

I feel like this is a dumb question but here goes anyway. I'm hoping 
someone will think of something i haven't.

I have an htpc set up in my office. In fact, the way my living space is 
set up, the only room i can comfortably have my stereo in is my office.

So that i can listen to music while i work, i sit at my desk with my 
monitor in front of me. My floor-standing speakers are about 7' away and 
pointed at me in the classic 30 degree stereo angle.  To put it another 
way, my listening spot is my desk. There is a monitor on this desk. A 
23" wide screen.

When i want to listen critically i take the monitor off the desk. The 
sound stage improves  etc, because the monitor is not blocking some of 
the sound from my ears.  Well, i'd like to have that all the time.

Obviously a solution would be to get a huge screen, put it on the wall 
behind the speakers and just do my computing on that. I don't have that 
kind of money for that (Probably $10K at least), and not sure i could 
install such a thing anyhow as i'm renting this home.

I've looked into getting a small amount of acoustically transparent 
movie screen and a mini-projector to duplicate a 23" screen which i 
could put on my desk, but the mini projectors are still not up to 
performance levels.

Any ideas i might not have thought of?

Also, is there a formula to figure out how big a screen at a given 
resolution, at a given font size one needs at a given distance for 
comfortable viewing assuming 20/20 vision? For instance, if your working 
at 1920x1080 at a nominal font size of 10 how big does a display need to 
be?  All i've found is simple calculators for HDTV viewing.

Thanks,

Bearcat M. Sandor