As a long term lurker and occasional poster to these forums I thought it was time that I documented my various setups. Unlike some of the threads on here this isn't a diary of me as I put my setup together as everything is now finished. Whilst I have some pictures there isn't a lot to view in terms of the rooms as they were being worked on as I didn't take that many pictures. From a building perspective I don't think we did anything that was out of the ordinary.
WARNING: Long rambling posts ahead. Feel free to skip to the pics
Whilst I've had an interest in home theatre setups for over 10 years now I've either never had the time, money or will to build a setup that I was really happy with. I've always used all-in-one home theatre setups from the likes of Sony with varying degrees of success accompanied with the inevitable speaker cable spaghetti.
This changed over a year ago when I was made redundant and bought a Dell 30” monitor for the computer in the spare bedroom/office. I already had a Bose 2.1 computer speaker setup and started playing around with media centre, ripping and streaming from a Thecus NAS box I had. It took a few months of playing around with media centre and the various front ends/meta data gathering tools to get it to behave as I wanted. But I was pleased with the end results and found myself using this spare bedroom to watch films rather than popping in a DVD in the lounge. So when the ageing Sony DAV S800 setup in the lounge bit the dust it was time for an overhaul.
The requirements for the lounge were:
- Replace the 32” CRT screen with something a bit more modern (and bigger)
- 5.1 sound
- access to the DVDs that I had ripped to my PC
Limitations were
- Room layout. Though the lounge is a reasonable size (5m x 5m) the size of the fireplace and the positioning of the sofas meant I would be looking at a corner setup
- No visible wires
- Equipment not to be particularly visible.
After a bit of research the following equipment was selected
- Q-Acoustics QAV 7.1 system
- Onkyo TX-SR876 AV Receiver
- Sony KDL-40W4500 40” LCD
- PC housed in an Antec Fusion Case
- Logitech Harmony One remote
It quickly came apparent that the Onkyo is a bit of an ugly monster and it would be difficult to hide it discretely in the lounge. So before I wired everything up the decision was made to hide the equipment (PC and receiver) in the garage behind the lounge with a HDMI cable coming through the wall into the back of the TV. Other than having to purchase long cables for everything the cabling wasn't too difficult and didn't involve much damage to the house, just a couple of holes drilling to allow the cables outside. Whilst doing this I discovered the existence of brush plates that seem to be popular on these forums.
Moving the equipment into the garage took care of the discrete appearance requirement but gave me a problem with remotes so purchased a pair of Powermids for this. The computer is controlled using a keysonic keyboard/trackpad combo. The RF receiver for this is plugged into a USB hub that has been positioned within the AV cabinet below the TV.
Two of the Q-Acoustics surrounds, ceiling mounted
WARNING: Long rambling posts ahead. Feel free to skip to the pics
Whilst I've had an interest in home theatre setups for over 10 years now I've either never had the time, money or will to build a setup that I was really happy with. I've always used all-in-one home theatre setups from the likes of Sony with varying degrees of success accompanied with the inevitable speaker cable spaghetti.
This changed over a year ago when I was made redundant and bought a Dell 30” monitor for the computer in the spare bedroom/office. I already had a Bose 2.1 computer speaker setup and started playing around with media centre, ripping and streaming from a Thecus NAS box I had. It took a few months of playing around with media centre and the various front ends/meta data gathering tools to get it to behave as I wanted. But I was pleased with the end results and found myself using this spare bedroom to watch films rather than popping in a DVD in the lounge. So when the ageing Sony DAV S800 setup in the lounge bit the dust it was time for an overhaul.
The requirements for the lounge were:
- Replace the 32” CRT screen with something a bit more modern (and bigger)
- 5.1 sound
- access to the DVDs that I had ripped to my PC
Limitations were
- Room layout. Though the lounge is a reasonable size (5m x 5m) the size of the fireplace and the positioning of the sofas meant I would be looking at a corner setup
- No visible wires
- Equipment not to be particularly visible.
After a bit of research the following equipment was selected
- Q-Acoustics QAV 7.1 system
- Onkyo TX-SR876 AV Receiver
- Sony KDL-40W4500 40” LCD
- PC housed in an Antec Fusion Case
- Logitech Harmony One remote
It quickly came apparent that the Onkyo is a bit of an ugly monster and it would be difficult to hide it discretely in the lounge. So before I wired everything up the decision was made to hide the equipment (PC and receiver) in the garage behind the lounge with a HDMI cable coming through the wall into the back of the TV. Other than having to purchase long cables for everything the cabling wasn't too difficult and didn't involve much damage to the house, just a couple of holes drilling to allow the cables outside. Whilst doing this I discovered the existence of brush plates that seem to be popular on these forums.
Moving the equipment into the garage took care of the discrete appearance requirement but gave me a problem with remotes so purchased a pair of Powermids for this. The computer is controlled using a keysonic keyboard/trackpad combo. The RF receiver for this is plugged into a USB hub that has been positioned within the AV cabinet below the TV.
Two of the Q-Acoustics surrounds, ceiling mounted
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