We recently had our floors redone, and I've been unhappy with the built-ins I built about 9 years ago when we just moved in and I had much less experience working with wood. I'm now rebuilding the shelves and am taking the opportunity to make adjustments to the home theater to please the wife. She was not happy about the AVR sitting on the base cabinet top, so I'm trying to decide which new location will be best. I know the below setup isn't ideal, but it's the best I can do with what I have to work with.
Below are a couple of shots of the symmetrical room this is going into. Not exactly an acoustical heaven, but my previous setup yielded results I was happy with after running YPAO on my RX-A3060. The speakers will remain in the same locations, but I need to move my AVR off of the base cabinet top and out of sight to meet my wife's demands.
I'm thinking about 2 locations for the AVR:
1. Inside the base cabinet behind closed doors - My main concern with putting the AVR here is heat. I know there are cooling options out there, but I'm a little nervous committing myself to this option, cutting holes all over the cabinets to install fans, only to find out I can't evacuate enough heat. Or to evacuate enough heat, it will require too many fans and ugly the place up beyond WAF.
2. Place my AVR and other HT components on a rack/cabinet in the back left corner of the room behind the LP. Even if enclosed, I should have more options for airflow than I do in a corner cabinet up front. My main concern here is that my cable and wire runs will be too long. However, from what I read
here, I can use a hybrid fiber HDMI for TV/AVR (Ruipro), and 10 AWG wire for all of my speakers (all 6ohm) and expect to see little to no degradation of signal or performance. My longest speaker wire run will be about 77ft, next longest drops to about 50ft. HDMI would be about 30ft.
A couple of things I need to mention:
- The back and right walls are external walls. The wall to the left is the garage
- I can't run speaker wire over (solid perpendicular beams) or under (concrete slab).
- No wires across the floor. There will be exposed sections of floor that can't hide wire runs.
Am I thinking about this correctly, or have I missed something? The first picture is the proposed layouts, and the second picture was from the original cabinets that are now gone. The green lines are my speaker wires.
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