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AND THEN THINGS TURNED UGLY
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Everything seemed to be going well when I called in Hudson Valley Home
Media to spec out the basement’s low-voltage prewire, which I assumed
would be an easy job since the central demarc panel was in the adjacent
basement area. But when Barry discovered that my theater would run
sideways across the width of the room, he laughed and said the room’s
dimensions wouldn’t allow for a screen bigger than 80 inches. “You might as
well forget the projector and just get a 65-inch plasma,” he said.
Since there was no way I was going to have a home theater without a
projector, the idea of dividing the space evenly between the theater and
the recording studio became history. Instead, there’d be one multi-use
room with a projection screen at one end and the studio at the other. But
then Barry pointed out another problem: For the screen to be centered on
the far wall, it would have to fit under the soffit on the right side of the room.
That would limit the screen’s size, since it had to be a minimum height off the
floor. Had I known that the screen was going on that wall, I would have run
the ductwork straight down the wall instead of straight out into the room.
Proving that misery loves company, there was yet another issue: I had sheetrocked
the ceiling rather than install a dropped acoustic-tile ceiling. Unfortunately,
when the rest of the house was wired, I had Barry run the low-voltage
cables under the basement ceiling joists instead of through them, since I
thought they’d be hidden. That meant all the wires for the family room
(which is just above the home theater) would now have to be ripped out
and re-run through the joists. Fortunately, Barry’s team was able to divert the
upstairs RG6 and Cat5e cables to wire the basement equipment rack, and
then run new wires through the joists for the upstairs gear.
After Barry’s team was done, I ran audiophile-grade 12-gauge speaker wire
through the walls to all the speaker locations, and pulled RG6 cable through
conduit behind one wall to the subwoofer locations. (RG6 is better for long
subwoofer runs.) Then I rushed to insulate all the walls, the HVAC/equipment
room, and the soffits with kraft-faced fiberglass insulation before the
drywallers arrived. After the room was sheetrocked and sanded, I painted
the walls and ceiling, had a carpet installed in the theater area (reserving
some extra carpeting to cover a planned seating riser), and then laid a
Pergo-style wood floor in the studio section of the room, which I wanted to
sound a bit livelier for recording purposes.
I seriously considered installing a fiber-optic star ceiling panel system from a
company called iSky, but ultimately wasn’t sure how it would look given the
two soffits. Instead, I installed acoustic ceiling tiles, which resemble tin panels, directly on the drywall in a framed section
of the ceiling over the theater, and then painted them with bronze-colored metalflake paint. The tiles add a nice design
element to the room, and help provide additional sound insulation for the upstairs family room.
Once the walls were done, I ordered speaker-terminal wall plates that can handle spade connectors from PartsExpress
(a company that saved my butt several times by overnight-shipping parts and cables I’d neglected or forgotten to
order) for the front three speakers. The RG6 cables for the subs terminate at a coaxial wall plate with an RF-to-RCAadapter.
GEARING UP
Since the mistakes had propelled me way over my construction and wiring budgets — and I still had to buy a projector
and screen — my goal was to use as much of my existing equipment as I could. But rapid technological changes in the
video world had rendered a lot of my high-end gear nearly obsolete. For example, neither of my home theater
preamp/processors — a Krell Showcase and a McIntosh MX132, superb units both — have HDMI inputs or outputs, or
support for the new lossless audio formats. I also wanted a processor that could do a good job deinterlacing and
upscaling standard DVDs. That search led me to Integra’s DTC-9.8, a 7.1-channel preamp/processor with four HDMI
inputs, built-in decoding for both Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio, HD Radio, and Silicon Optix’s HQV Reon-VX
video-processing chip.
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