home Theatre - wiring/speakers

www.kansas-electrician.com

For the ultimate in home theatre systems, have the experts do the work!!! A mass of wiring will not only create extreme confusing but most likely result in overloading and power failure- or in many cases, electricial fire.

To achieve a professional look:

 


You will want to avoid what happenes to most do-it-yourself-ers:

Speakers

• In-wall/In-ceiling speakers can be used in most rooms. Plan on four to six wall speakers for a home theater system. Other rooms only need 2 speakers. In-wall speakers are best, but ceiling speakers can be used in bathrooms or other rooms where wall speakers are not possible.
• Even if you do not use in-wall speakers, you will still want to run the speaker wires through the walls to hide them. Determine where the speakers will be and put a wall plate behind that location. Wall plates for floor standing speakers should be at the standard 12" height. Wall plates for speakers mounted to the wall should be directly behind the speaker. Just make sure that your wall plate doesn't interfere with the speaker's mounting bracket.
• Some speaker distribution systems can support volume controls in each room. These are usually a Cat-5 wire (check manufacturer specs to confirm) that runs from the amplifier to an in-wall volume control. These volume controls look a lot like lighting dimmers. These types of sound distribution systems can be expensive and there are cheaper alternatives. The advantage of these systems is that the control panel will let you can control the volume of all speakers throughout the house, change the input source, skip through songs, or even act as an IR receiver so that you can use your remote controls from any room.
• A cheaper method of controlling volume in each room is to use an impedance matching volume control. This is a volume knob that is run in-line with the speaker. This means that you run both the left and right speaker wire from the amp to the knob and then from the knob to each speaker. These systems don't let you do anything but control volume, but they are a lot cheaper and can be used with any type of amplifier/receiver.
• There are also impedance matching volume controls that are meant to be located with the receiver. These are speaker selectors that take in 1 or 2 pair of speaker wires and then split it up into 2, 4, or 8 different sets of speaker outputs. Some speaker selectors simply turn each pair of speakers on & off. Others let you select from 2 different inputs. Others have separate volume knobs for each speaker output. These are the cheapest and easiest solution to implement. You just need to run speaker wires from the speaker selector to each speaker.
• Speaker wire comes in 2 and 4 conductor wire. Sometimes, using the 4 conductor wire can be cheaper and easier. Instead of running separate wires to each speaker, you run the 4 conductor wire from the amplifier to the first speaker and then to the second speaker. You use less wire, and 4 conductor wire isn't that much more expensive than 2 conductor wire.