Sound in Surround

Sure we are a little late to the party, but we are just now getting our now theatre setup with 5.1 surround sound. Neither Eric and I have ever had surround sound as we are ex-apartment dwellers and always considered it rude to get a subwoofer and rear speakers setup properly when living right on top or next to other people. But now that we have no one below us and large brick party walls separating us from our neighbors, it seems like time for kick-ass and super loud surround sound to go with our 63" television and our blu-ray player.

You might remember back a couple of years ago during our renovation when Eric had the foresight to run all the cables into the walls and under the floor so the speakers would be pre-wired. You might also remember us having to pretty much redo all of that when we bought our TV and had to reframe the wall in wood to handle the weight. Well I am proud to report that we needed to redo all those jacks and wires YET AGAIN because we switched our plan midstream for what types of speakers we wanted. We were originally going to go with B&W models that would line up straight under the TV for right, left and center, but when the cost was entirely too prohibitive we changed course. Eric found these KEF speakers and surround sound setup and we made it a gift to ourselves to split the cost of them for Christmas. We paid most of the cost by selling my old speakers on eBay but we are still using my old, underpowered Marantz receiver until we can afford our ideal one—everything in stages!

So yes we essentially wound up redoing the whole wiring setup 3 times before getting it right, but what can you do? It was just moving some wires and sheet rocking some holes—nothing too difficult, but just time consuming, detailed oriented work. We got the speakers and the sub set up last weekend and watched a few blu-ray discs—wow, it's loud! And that is with our underpowered receiver so I can't imagine how good it will sound when we get the right one in a few months. But this weekend we went back and did all the finishing work to patch and paint the walls and get everything 100% done. And we're about 95% done—we accidently broke the IR receiver when we were changing out the faceplate to one that Eric painted piano-black to match the TV and the speakers—annoying but what can you do? We have another one on order. The missing IR plate is the hole you see right under the TV power button, but everything related to the speakers is done.

We've got some more detail work to do there, like painting the cable jack and the AV tower piano black as well to match all the components, and caulking and painting over those tabs that are holding down the IR wire, but this is all small stuff.

For the rear speakers we couldn't get the cables into the brick wall but we do have the speaker and subwoofer jacks back behind the sofa so no cables are exposed. We also bought a cable that matches the brick color more that we will change out those white cables with, but again that will just take a couple of minutes. Not the best photo of the rear speakers but I picked it because you can see Jules on the sofa mid-defensive attack against Monk—rawr!

Speaking of Monk, he's about 8 months old and has recently discovered the radiators. We put the basket in front of the living room radiator and that has become a favorite spot of both cats. Monk also seems to have a penchant for lying on his back with his legs up in the air at any given time. Radiators are like crack for kitties, as seen below:

And because they are much cuter in photos when you can hear them squawking, here's a photo of Maui and Ringo. Double chicken action as Maui tells Ringo to kiss his big red butt

Comments

[Tijmen Stam]

Nicely done! I hope I one day can afford a flatscreen quarter the size of yours! :-P

However, could you show me a picture of the thing that holds all your equipement at right?

I right now have an idea of redoing our TV setup - we now have a little cabinet that's totally unfit for the size of DVD's, wasting too much space, with a big CRT TV on top. I had the idea of buying a flat screen TV, hanging it from the wall and hanging a lot of "blind" shelves from the wall for the DVD's (and for easy vacuuming - the TV cabinet is our largest accumulator of cat's toys and occasionally you'll see one of our cats staring below it just not able to reach one) however as all our equipment is deeper than a DVD, I don't know of a good way to store it...

Tijmen

[~dana]

Hi Tijmen--the TV was actually pretty reasonably priced. We went with plasma and it was half the price of LCD's that were a big smaller. We are very happy with it!

This the rack we have our equipment in
http://www.bello.com/index.php?partition=show_product&prod_id=100

I'll take a photo of ours once we get it all organized cause it's just a mess of wires right now. We were a bit stuck as we renovated the space and put a closet in there about 8 months ago and had just enough room in the corner for a tall skinny tower. We actually found this rack and bought it before we put the closet in just to make sure there was room--it just squeezes in! The only issue with it is that it is not black like the rest of our components but it's nothing some piano black spray paint and high gloss lacquer can't fix in the spring!

[Corey]

Sounds like a nightmare running all that wire. I also have brick right behind the couch, so I was lazy and just got a soundbar. It looks swanky, and it was much easier to install. :-)