Rebuilding built-ins, Reassessing HT setup

P

PIR8

Enthusiast
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.

HT1.jpg


HT3.jpg
 
witchdoctor

witchdoctor

Full Audioholic
Thanks for posting the photos. The angles and distance of the speakers from the MLP are key. Your room is 13 FT wide and the recommended angle of the L-R channels are 22 to 30 degrees. If you move your sofa forward toward the speakers in the front of the room you can dial in those angles as a first step. Check this link for more info:
For the speakers in the back of the room I have mine on a wireless setup (check Rocketfish or Amphony brand)
If you have your receiver in the front of the room it is easy to check settings without turning on the TV for on screen display. So I would dial in the speaker and seat positions as a first step.
Next I see those windows on the right side of the room and mirrors on the left. Sound waves don't like glass. I would take down the mirrors and consider curtains closed when you are listening.
After you get your speakers placed sub placement is important and I think Gene has a video on his youtube channel that will be helful. Hope this helps.
 
P

PIR8

Enthusiast
Thanks for posting the photos. The angles and distance of the speakers from the MLP are key. Your room is 13 FT wide and the recommended angle of the L-R channels are 22 to 30 degrees. If you move your sofa forward toward the speakers in the front of the room you can dial in those angles as a first step. Check this link for more info:
For the speakers in the back of the room I have mine on a wireless setup (check Rocketfish or Amphony brand)
If you have your receiver in the front of the room it is easy to check settings without turning on the TV for on screen display. So I would dial in the speaker and seat positions as a first step.
Next I see those windows on the right side of the room and mirrors on the left. Sound waves don't like glass. I would take down the mirrors and consider curtains closed when you are listening.
After you get your speakers placed sub placement is important and I think Gene has a video on his youtube channel that will be helful. Hope this helps.
Thanks, Witchdoctor. Closing curtains is certainly doable, but my wife won't sign off on the removal of the mirrors. Since this is the main family room/living room, I have accepted that there are certain things that are off the table for her. She likes the sound, but hates all the black boxes around.

I've tried wireless in the past, and I just wasn't sold on the performance. Plus, I'm not sure how cleanly I'd be able to pull of having a receiver plugged into the wall on each side for the rear surrounds. I can't span the distance with a single receiver, and not have a cord to navigate.

Since the previous speaker locations were tolerable to the wife, I'm trying to stick to those locations, maybe with some of the adjustments you mentioned above. While it may not have been a perfect setup, it sounded pretty great to me. Since she's never been a fan of the AVR on the builtin shelves, I was trying to relocate it out of sight. Just wondering if running 77ft of 10AWG around 3/4 perimeter of the listening area is a bad move. That's about double the previous amount of wire from the previous AVR location.
 
witchdoctor

witchdoctor

Full Audioholic
If I had to run 77ft of wire I would want to make sure it uses excellent shielding. That length of wire can act like an antenna and pick up a lot of noise. So if it is your only solution try and get the best quality cable you can for that length.
 
highfigh

highfigh

Seriously, I have no life.
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.

View attachment 57165

View attachment 57166
If y ou have a basement below the cabinet, you could install a tube from the top of the base cabinet and put a 12VDC 5" biscuit fan in a junction box in the basement. The AVR should have a 12V trigger and this can latch a relay that controls the power for the fan- you'll need a wall wart 12VDC power supply because the AVR's trigger won't handle the current needed for the fan. The tube can be 3" if you use a 4" fan that moves enough air- make sure the CFM is as high as possible. If the fan is too noisy, you can use a voltage divider circuit to slow it down- this consists of two resistors- one in series, another in parallel.

You could also use an AC Infinity cooler-

 
P

PIR8

Enthusiast
Thanks, highfigh. No crawlspace. Just wonderful concrete slab. It would be nice to use the built-in cabinet to house the AVR, but I fear committing myself to this location and then finding out that I can't evacuate enough heat. If just exhausting the air isn't enough, I'll need to try and pull cool air in. But because it sits in a corner, I can only draw from the toe kick or the same side as the exhaust (and where the sometimes running gas logs are).

that's a lot of cutting into brand new cabinetry only to find out it's not enough. That's my main fear with keeping it in the front cabinets.
 
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