Unfinished Basement Setup Advice

[revoman]

I'm in the process of finishing my basement and thought I knew what I wanted to do with my AV setup. After debating and searching for information I decided it was time to reach out for help when I ran across the Audioholics youtube video on home theater do's and don'ts. That lead me here and I hope to get the help I need to finalize my AV setup before we sheetrock our room.

As most, I have enough knowledge to get me into trouble. What I'm looking for in the way of help is potential position issues, additional layout options/ideas, science/technical information about speaker positioning, and maybe even product ideas. My budget is fairly small for audioholic standards, but I want to set things up in a way to allow component upgrade when the time comes.

I've attached basement layout. Framing is complete but can be modified (depending on my level of motivation). Total basement area is 1420 sq/ft with the main living/entertainment room being 37'x12' (framing cut into the allotted diagram a bit). The TV will be hung on the wall on the right between the main room and Bedroom 1 which has a 2nd framed wall and been insulated with R13. The ceilings have been insulated with R19 and the walls with R13 for sound. Planning on single sheetrock walls and ceilings (reason: cost).

The main room is a multipurpose room for entertaining & tv watching. Our computer will be located in the far left corner between the two windows. The middle area will be open with a fold out ping-pong table. And the right side will be for Media. The plan is to maintain a 3 ft walkway along the bottom wall. There is also a 10"x10" box in front of the maintenance closet covering ducts and such.

The main seating area will be next the closest window and puts the front of the couch at 10.5 ft from the TV. The couch is the same length as the media wall (112" how did I get that lucky?) and will be placed directly in front of it.

Media wall (112 inches wide) will have a 3 gang inset box for cables & power behind the TV. Below TV will be a small media cabinet and behind will be boxes for power, coax (sub), LCR x 2 (floor standing & in-wall/ceiling), optical return, 2 hdmi to tv, multiple ethernet. Also, 2 gang box between the door and the av wall for power & coax for sub. Plan is to use my existing floor standing equipment and eventually transition to in-wall/ceiling equipment. Have arranged things so I can upgrade to a large 4k TV in the future (room for up to 85", overkill I know).

Questions about the media wall:
- Do I center my TV on that partial wall, or in the room. Wall is 112" room is just over 12'.
- Do I center the speakers around the TV or in the room?
- Compared to my current equipment how bad will the sound from in-wall/ceiling speakers be?

Questions about my room:
- I would like to leverage in-ceiling speakers for surrounds...
- What arrangement will work best (5.1/6.1/6.2/atmos/60's hi-fi)?
- Do I extend the sound stage for music by adding more surrounds further back in the room?
- Do I connect sound to the bathroom/craft room/back patio?

My current AV equipment consists of the following (circa 2008):
TV - Panasonic 50" Plasma
Receiver - Pioneer VSX 01TXH
Sub - Velodyne MiniVee 8"
Left & Right - Yamaha NS-555
Center - Yamaha NS-C525
Surround - None currently
Bluray - Panasonic ???
Other - Roku, Nvidia Shield TV, Xbox 360
Cables - Optical for TV audio return channel, HDMI & ethernet to everything else.

Recently purchased but returnable (don't hate on the choices please):
Monoprice 300ft 12AWG Copper Speaker Wire
Monoprice 1000' 23awg cat6
Monoprice CL2 coax cables
Monoprice CL2 hdmi cables
Monoprice optical (as my TV uses optical for the audio return channel)
MP in-celing speakers x 6 (http://www.monoprice.com/product?p_id=7605)
MP in-wall center x 1 (http://www.monoprice.com/product?p_id=4881)
MP in-wall sub x 2 (to augment velodyne (http://www.monoprice.com/product?p_id=4928)

Questions about equipment:
- Do I just bag the idea of in-wall/in-ceiling sound?
- Can I augment the sound of my velodyne sub with the passive in-wall subs?
- How can I plan placement to allow upgrades in the future without breaking the bank?


Other suggestions/comments are appreciated but please keep them constructive. My current equipment was the best I could afford at the time and I'm trying to finish a basement. 5 year plan is to do some serious audio/video upgrades so I'm looking for advice on how to best prepare for upgrades.

Thanks in advance!

-Nate R

 

[Latent]

Questions about the media wall:
- Do I center my TV on that partial wall, or in the room. Wall is 112" room is just over 12'.
- Do I center the speakers around the TV or in the room?
- Compared to my current equipment how bad will the sound from in-wall/ceiling speakers be?

Questions about my room:
- I would like to leverage in-ceiling speakers for surrounds...
- What arrangement will work best (5.1/6.1/6.2/atmos/60's hi-fi)?
- Do I extend the sound stage for music by adding more surrounds further back in the room?
- Do I connect sound to the bathroom/craft room/back patio?

Questions about equipment:
- Do I just bag the idea of in-wall/in-ceiling sound?
- Can I augment the sound of my velodyne sub with the passive in-wall subs?
- How can I plan placement to allow upgrades in the future without breaking the bank?

-Nate R

Ideally you would center the TV to the room not the wall. But there are some issues here relating to the ideal placement of front left and right speakers. These should be between 22 degrees and 30 degrees from center based on dolby recommendations etc. Another good rule of thumb is that the speakers should be as wide apart as you are sitting from them. Seems your seating location is around the 12' mark (but i would advise you to put a temp seat where you think it should go and measure this distance as it is very important to work out good locations for speakers). This as wide as you are from them rule places them around 26 degrees left and right of center which is in the middle of the 22-30 degree range. But for your room it means the speakers should be placed as wide as possible in your room putting them in the top right corner and the bottom right corner partially blocking the opening to the bathroom/bedroom_1. in wall speakers won't work in this opening obviously. If you were to use in room speakers which will probably sound better then you can bring the fronts forward a couple of feet which may allow you to not block the walkway as much but even being placed too close to the side walls may not be ideal for many speakers. If you bring your listening position forward then your speakers can be closer together and maybe in-wall speakers may work better and the closer you are the bigger your screen will be. could maybe center to the partial wall instead of the whole room in this situation.

lots of cheap in-ceiling/wall speakers are not going to sound any where as good as proper speakers. Higher quality speakers may help a lot if you had to do in wall but I would try to avoid having your front three speakers in ceiling if you can avoid it. If you have to go cheap for now I would work out where you would place speakers in room if money was no real object and then while the walls are exposed run in wall rated cheap 12 gauge speaker wire to these locations. You don't have to terminate or expose them just run them to the right position and leave a few feet curled up in the wall cavity and record somewhere the locations so you can dig them out easily if needed later.

As for surrounds I would look into dolby atmos speaker placement guidelines as placing or pre-wiring for this may be a good idea. for this room a 5.2.4 setup would be ideal with 4 in ceiling speakers and 2 closer to ear level surround locations. The ideal for home theater use would be 5 identical bookshelf speakers with 3 for LCR and two surround plus the 4 height effects speakers. The surround speakers would probably get wall or stand mounted between the two windows on for the left speaker and off the side of the stairs for the right one. Getting surround back speakers to make it 7.2.2 or 7.2.4 may be hard to find placement for these extra speakers without effecting the usefulness of the rear of the room but maybe in ceiling surround backs are worth considering (But I think that if you have 4 atmos height channels you don't really need the surround backs as much as the rear atmos speakers can fill this in a little.)

As to extending sound to the back or other rooms this is up to your personal preference and if you decide there is really a use case. You could wire in two more speaker runs for speakers either at the back corners of the room or in the ceiling. If you upgrade to doing atmos etc from a high end AVR you will have zone2/3 output options built into the new unit so you can use these for the extra rooms. Yamaha has a very good multizone/room system built in called MusicCast which could work well if you go for there brand and most other vendors have decent multi zone support.

As to the in wall passive subs you would need to power them with additional amplifiers. I would be cautious to go down this road as sub placement can play a big role in how good the bass sounds in the room and you can't easily move these around like you can with normal standalone subs. So unless you have someone help you place the subs correctly you may just be wasting your time and money. May be best to save up and get a couple of decent sub's when you can.

I will leave you with the Dolby atmos guidelines document as this has some useful info in it.

http://www.dolby.com/us/en/technologies/dolby-atmos/dolby-atmos-home-theater-installation-guidelines.pdf

And finally I have another tool I've been working on which may be helpful for speaker placement planning which you can look at and use:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1QV7xhPvzATnaQ6fI5jqs8CxpQWJoFhorngBmEnXFq38/edit?usp=sharing

This document you can enter in your rooms dimensions and current/planned speaker location info and it graphs the speaker placement and shows you how close to in spec it is. I've pre keyed in some of the measurements already for you but some will need adjusting as i'm not sitting in your room with a tape measure.

 

[revoman]

@Latent Thanks for the detailed response! While this helped eliminate my ideas of using cheap and in-ceiling speakers, I now have more things to consider. But I will search the forum and watch the videos at this point.

To summarize the information you provided:
1) Evaluate my seating position as it may need to be moved forward
2) Consider room/floor speakers to move sound stage forward
3) Don't do the cheap speakers/subs (deep down I knew this )
4) Review the Atmos guidelines for consideration
5) Evaluate the room for an unlimited budget and run the 12 gauge wire to those locations now.

I really appreciate the help.

-Nate