In Home Stereo Installation (Pictures!)

[Chester]

Here is our IHSS (In Home Stereo System) I know... ceiling speakers suck and typically do not have the best sound; I did not really get to pick the speakers since the people who wired the house basically picked what they always use... I did pick the placement of the speakers in the ceiling. I tinned all of the ends of the wires, picked and setup all of the equipment, and installed all of the rockwool, activated charcoal in the enclosures in the ceilings. Everything has been EQ'd with REW too I also use my ear-EQ system, based on the equal loudness curves at 80 db (ISO 226:2003) as a 'house curve' of sorts... Everything has also been EQ'd using REW on a per-channel basis; so every speaker has its own unique eq, except for in the kitchen where there are 4 speakers (2 in parallel) so they use an average of each channel

The speakers used are MTX H825C's. The amplifier is a Crown CTS-8200 (200 watts/ch @ 8 ohms) with a Crown K1 driving the subwoofers. Everything is EQ'd crossed/over using a Crown USM-810. The USM-810 is driven by a Shure Auxpander 8x8 matrix mixer which can route any input to any channel in the house. The sources are a Numark HDCD1 (sort of like a big ipod with 2 outputs), a Tascam Radio tuner, and an 1/8" jack for an ipod, computer or whatever else you would want to plug in.

Here is a bag of activated charcoal An idea taken from KEF, activated charcoal helps at lower frequencies to increase the apparent size of the box... also the weight hopefully will help deaden some resonances from the gypsum board...

Rockwool (2" thick, cut to 1"thick pieces)

3M Super 74 foaming adhesive is what I have found works best for rockwool










The Backboxx things typically would not be very good however the entire attic area (on the drywall) has been coated with a hard polyurethane foam (vapor barrier) which gives it better stiffness, the barrier is a bit like "Great Stuff" found at hardware stores, but ~1" thick.







The tweeters are adjustable, They are all angled at 15 degrees 'inward' (toward the opposite channel) for uniformity; I used a modified laser pointer which was fixed on top of the dome tweeters to help point the tweeters at the correct point on the floor...






The Kitchen speakers are the "averaged" ones



Comments and feedback welcome

[recruit]

Wow! some excellent work there matt, such a tidy install and beautiful place you have

[Chester]

Thanks! the kitchen sub needs to be replaced eventually since it is on 10" and does not fill the space well at all (without distortion)