rroobbcc's Listening Room/Home Theater Project

Although a bit later than promised, I wanted to take the time to introduce you all to my Listening Room/Home Theater project.

Back in the late 80's and early 90's, as I was just getting my audiophile feet wet, I fell in love with one particular magazine... "Audio/Video Interiors". While I appreciated the full integration of audio and video into the home environment, what really inspired me were the dedicated, no-compromise listening rooms and home theaters which AVI documented. And while back then I decided that one day I would claim such a room as my own, circumstances and finances would conspire against my dreams. So now, some 17 or 18 years later I finally find myself in the situation to turn my dream into a reality. A little over a year ago my wife and I purchased a new home which includes a large unfinished basement. The moment I saw this basement the gears in my head started turning, and a plan started to take shape.

Our basement is effectively a copy of the first floor of our house. So it probably wouldn't surprise many of you that the space below the livingroom was the most logical location, due to the size of the room and flow from room to room. In its raw form the room is approximately 19' by 17' with 9' ceilings. It will shrink slightly as the walls are completed, with the final dimensions to be closer to 18.5' by 16'. While I realize that acoustically it is supposed to be better to have a deep and narrow room, the flow of traffic through the entire basement level dictated that a wide and shallow orientation would be most practical. While that may be a bit of a compromise, I hope that the other areas where attention will be directed will cover over it.

One last point to cover is that I will be doing most of the work on the LR/HT myself. I have never done anything like this before, but I believe I have done my homework, and it isn't exactly rocket science. I do plan to have a electrician do the slave breaker box that will feed power to the whole basement, and my uncle's AC company will put in the AC/heat. The rest will be the fruit of my own labor (and my kids are helping too).

Here are some pictures of the space, as well as an initial diagram of the planned layout of the room (NOTE: Not all equipment choices are decided).







Stay tuned...

Rob

definitely, i'm really looking forward to see this project progress from start to finish.

I´m watching, I´m watching......

Gee, that´s one heck of a project to tackle on your own. Congratulations are in order.

Like Dingus said, I too I´m looking forward to the next developments.

Jorge

Oh man...that's gonna be awesome. the project looks fantastic. A cubic listening room...

I've been making good progress framing and insulating the LR/HT, and plan to invest a significant amount of time this weekend. One of the things I am realizing is how important it is to plan ahead with a clear idea of your overall goals. The thing at the moment that is keeping me awake at night is how I want to decorate the theater with trim and molding, as well as how I want to finish the ceiling. While this may seem unimportant at this point in time, it has a big influence on where various speaker, signaling, and electrical cabling needs to be run. I would like to have some type of vertical column effect, but that means I have to know whether to account for face plates being mounted on the columns or simply near them. Faceplate location obviously effects where the cables are run. Additionally, I would really like to maintain access to the ceiling area "just in case", but I am not so keen on the idea of a drop ceiling. And of course all of this will have to blend beautifully with whatever I come up with to conceal the AC duct that runs through the top of the front wall. Ahhh... decisions, decisions.



Speaking of cables, I picked up a nice set of "jumpers" made by Raymond Cables to go between the wall plates and my left, right, and center channel speakers. The center channel is even bi-wired if only for this last hop. Of course these things won't do much good if all I have is zip cord in the walls. But don't fear, yesterday my 250' roll of Monster Cable Z2 Reference speaker wire arrived. I know a lot of people groan about Monster Cable, but I paid $250 for this roll as opposed to the $1250 MSRP. I'm not sure that I could have found a better alternative for $1/foot. I will share more about cabling and other wiring in a later post.





Look for a post early next week which will cover this coming weekend's progress.

Rob

me too, me too

Great job.
Concerning power cables...are you intent to do an independent electric circuits from the main board to your listening room?

Yes. In fact there will be a total of twelve 20amp circuits dedicated to audio/video. 4 for 2ch. audio, 6 for HT audio/video, 1 for subwoofers (might do one for each subwoofer), and 1 for the projector. All lighting and normal outlets will be on a separate circuit. I have 1000ft. of 20amp electrical wire to play with. For insurance purposes, I will let a certified electrician take care of hooking up everything in the breaker box, as well as inspecting my work.

Rob

Yes. In fact there will be a total of twelve 20amp circuits dedicated to audio/video. 4 for 2ch. audio, 6 for HT audio/video, 1 for subwoofers (might do one for each subwoofer), and 1 for the projector. All lighting and normal outlets will be on a separate circuit. I have 1000ft. of 20amp electrical wire to play with. For insurance purposes, I will let a certified electrician take care of hooking up everything in the breaker box, as well as inspecting my work.

Rob

Awesome!

Attached Image (Click thumbnail to expand)

Yes. In fact there will be a total of twelve 20amp circuits dedicated to audio/video. 4 for 2ch. audio, 6 for HT audio/video, 1 for subwoofers (might do one for each subwoofer), and 1 for the projector. All lighting and normal outlets will be on a separate circuit. I have 1000ft. of 20amp electrical wire to play with. For insurance purposes, I will let a certified electrician take care of hooking up everything in the breaker box, as well as inspecting my work.

It has been a while since my last update, but I have been making slow but steady progress on my listening room/home theater. As you can see from the pictures I have finished the framing and have applied insulating to all of the walls of the room. While only the outer walls required insulation for climate control, I want to try to keep as much sound from escaping the room as possible, which is why all of the wall will contain insulation. In addition to the insulation, I am also putting down a layer wood before the layer of drywall. While I could have used two layers of drywall, I read somewhere that layering materials of different densities actually blocks (or absorbs) more sound than multiple layers of the same density material. I don't know if that is a scientifically verfied statement, but it does seems to make some sense to me.



Before I could start putting up the wood and drywall, I had to wire the room. To ease this task I pulled all of the insulation out of the ceiling area. For speaker wire I used a 250' ft roll of Monster Cable Z2 Reference. I figured it best to put a high quality cable in the wall, instead of regretting it later. I actually ran wire to six surround locations. Four locations are intended for a 7.1 configuration using wall-mounted (not in-wall) speakers, while the other two are positioned for two surround speakers on stands in a 5.1 arrangement. I ran both speaker wire and RCA cables (45ft. MIT AVt1) to the subwoofer locations. This allows me the flexibility of using either powered or passive subs.



In the end I ended up running ten 20 amp circuits to the room. Four for the 2ch audio (I still dream of owning a few Krells one day), four for the Home Theater electronics (will one day go with seperates instead of a receiver), one for the subwoofers, and one for the general purpose power and lighting. You may also notice that I am using cut-in electrical boxes, instead of nail-on boxes. This is because the thicker walls made a nail-on box unworkable. However, the wood layer still allows the cut-in boxes to be mounted very sturdy in the walls.



With all of the cabling in I have just started getting the insulation back in the ceiling and getting the wood and drywall up. I am hoping to make more progress on this in the next few weeks.



As always, stay tuned...

Rob

I can´t see no pics at all, not even those in the first post.

Jorge

The pics are being served up by my comcast personal webpage. I know they are doing some changes to their personal webpage infrastructure (we are going to have up to 1GB of space), so perhaps that is the issue. I have noticed it being an issue over the last few weeks.

pics are fine now, looks like the project is coming along just fine.

Looking just great. That's going to be an awesome listening room.
You're doing a great job.
Tanx for sharing.