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My primary gear is controlled by a 1973 Kenwood KR5200 Receiver on top of the fridge in the kitchen. It has three channels, and powers:
I love the wooden enclosure, and would die for the matching graphic EQ (only for the VU meters). I'm going to give control of the roof speakers to an old Onkyo I have when I rewire next summer, but it works great for now. It's almost exclusively used for itunes and has an airport extreme connected to it's reat constant-power and aux input, so the lack of a remote doesn't matter. Because I just finished the basement in my 1915 row house, I was able to run speaker wire through holes in the floor all over the place in the basement, and back up through other holes to the first floor again. Once I put a shelving system up in the living room (saving for a Visoe system), I'll connect an old turntable I have to the phono input.   The veneer on these Polks was walnut when my Uncle gave them to me. I fixed that with some krylon, put new feet on, replaced the fuses, and stashed the grilles. The flash betrayed a bit of the brown sneaking through in this shot. What kind of karmic danger would I be in I gave the Kenwood the same treatment? It looks good now but it would look grande in black too.  In the basement, I've got a 42" Panasonic plasma and some old Infinity Primus 250s with a matching center speaker, all run by an Onkyo 605. The rears are junk speakers from a friend's old bookshelf system, and I have them hidden up in the rafters behind the duct work - I think they are a Radioshack brand – can't see spending much given what is expected of them. I'm using an Infinity 8" powered sub placed next to the sofa. It isn't earth shaking, but I don't watch much that would make use of it, and without it the mains are anemic.  In the closet, in addition to the Onkyo, I have a mac mini connected to the TV for Plex, a modded xbox, a time capsule WAP + NAS, another 1TB NAS, my firewall and cable modem, cable box, an HP laserjet printer, a APC-1500 UPS keeping it all from caring about power outtages, guitar amps and gear and all kinds of other crap, all racked on metal shelving. IR blasters are amazing. Get one.  I had no good way to hide the cables on the painted brick wall, so I ran with the industrial look of the duct over the sofa and ordered a 10'x4" spiral round from a local sheet metal shop. With the end-cap and reducer it was under $50, and allowed me to run power, speaker, VGA and composite cables from the closet behind that painting. I then ran everything back behind the speaker with a smaller spiral metal conduit, and mounted a proper electric jack on the brick behind the TV. The duct is hung on steel braided cable. Just over the center channel you can hopefully make out the IR-blaster sensor mounted in the duct, pointed at the sofa. The recessed Ikea lighting is banked in two switches so that I can toggle off just the lights in the middle of the room, killing the glare on the TV.  The duct is too long by 5 feet just for the sake of symmetry. Pulling cable through it was.. awkward. Pushing the IR blaster through the hole I put in it involved masking tape and scrap wood. I used old sheilded extension cord instead of romex for the power run and can't detect any interference from it, even though the vertical conduit is stuffed.  The secondary channel on the Onkyo runs around the basement to some old Aiwa bookshelves on top of the kegerator in my home brewing area.   Oh, and a tape-out loop from the rear of the Kenwood in the kitchen down to the Onkyo means that both floors (and the roof) can blast the same music for parties. Almost all of this junk is second hand. I bought the TV and Infinity gear as starter equipment back when I had an apartment and had hoped to upgrade to better speakers by now, but there hasn't been budget for that yet. writequit fucked around with this message at 01:25 on Oct 11, 2009 |
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Oct 11, 2009 01:20
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Legdiian posted:After swapping out my old XBOX for a HTPC, I think I'm done moving stuff around in my rack. Holy crap, is that a full two-post rack? The cut outs are brilliant. I assume you can stand behind it to adjust interconnects?
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Oct 11, 2009 04:43
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Sultry Fungus posted:You have the most amazing home, nice work! Thanks!
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Oct 11, 2009 04:44
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Pickpocket posted:writequit, where do you live? Bawl'mer, Hon. writequit fucked around with this message at 03:20 on Oct 15, 2009 |
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Oct 15, 2009 03:18
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mcsuede posted:Do you have higher resolution photos of your basement you could email me? There are a few ideas that I love that I want to show my wife for our basement renovation. Great job. Sure, no problem. Play along at home! Content: The basement's existing home theater seating just had to go: 
writequit fucked around with this message at 03:41 on Jan 18, 2010 |
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Jan 11, 2010 00:25
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usurper posted:Great project! One thing about that dryer vent, you may want to run rigid aluminum 4" pipe vs. that long of a flexible pipe. There are some fire restrictions/etc about running something like that through the floor/cabinets with that length of flexible pipe. You can google for it, but more here: http://www.dryerbox.com/dryer_venting_guide.htm Thanks much — added to my to-do list — should be an easy fix. Praesil posted:Not an AV question, but what did you do to the bricks to make them shiny like that? I like that look alot. The bricks took two days and a half dozen braided grinding wheels with an angle grinder. The paint they'd been covered with was resistant to the the few chemicals I half-heartedly tried. It's not a proper (much more intensive) brick re-pointing, as I was going for the old-and-abused look anyway. The bricks are ~100 years old, and interestingly completely inconsistent. Some would take an entire wheel and not show any damage (or ablate the paint-saturated surface), others got chewed up by the grinder and cleaned with one pass. Then I just hit the wall with a few coats of simple rattle-can spray urethane to give it some warmth. The urethane is scientifically engineered to tighten up the acoustic imaging in the water closet and really bring the soundstage right out front, I noticed the timbral improvement immediately. Flush! It's like being there! writequit fucked around with this message at 18:35 on Jan 18, 2010 |
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Jan 18, 2010 04:08
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