It's been several years since I was here last to catch up on current AV and build a HT. I was one of the very first to get on board with Artison LCR products in that project (which have been fantastic), while also hiding away all of my components via RF remote. The RF was ditched after only a couple years and I was on the Roomie home automation bandwagon early in 2012, using IP control primarily and some IP/IR control for some components. When I start a new project I like to get as far on the front end as I can.
To that end, today I started my next project, an entirely new home. I have a general layout in mind so I will summarize that and then see if there are hardware/wiring/software considerations that I should look into.
Basic setup
- 2 full home theater setups
- Upper side surrounds in main HT (artison mezzanine)
- 1 pair of zone 2 speakers in dining room (mezzanine)
- Artison LCR fronts and rears each (masterpiece upstairs, portrait downstairs)
- Artison RCC640PC sub upstairs living room (in wall, hell yeah!)
- Artison RCC320 sub amp
- Velodyne spl-1500R downstairs main theater
- Denon AVR 4306, looking to add another AVR likely latest Denon
- Samsung 1080p, looking to add another TV (60 inch) upstairs (need help on that)
Wiring and Placement
I am currently running all wires to the mechanical room downstairs. I ordered all of my wire from Blue Jeans Cable, including 1,200 ft of 12awg speaker wire (pulling from a giant wire spool is so much easier!!!) and an 80 ft Belden HDMI, amongst others. My plan is to place a rack of components in the mechanical room and connect them all via IP for control (all on Roomie Remote), and connect ALL speaker wires, HDMI, pre-amp, etc, at that location. To each TV location I have the electrician running power, coax (digital antenna), and 2 cat6 lines. I am also running a flexible conduit to each TV location in case I need to chase new wire types at some point in the future. I was also thinking to hardwire one location upstairs and one location downstairs for an iPad on the wall for Roomie interface.
Are there any other wiring considerations I should make? Considering I am going to buy a new AVR anyway, is this the most efficient way to do 2 HT setups?
I'm also doing a full Insteon home automated lighting setup with Insteon Hub Pro, and also a new Eero wifi router network that purports to make all of these interconnected systems seamless. These were my best finds via a bunch of online sleuthing, feel free to suggest others.
What's the general consensus on TVs nowadays? If you were going to do 2 HTs like this, how would you wire it? Any technology I'm missing?
