Illusory Follies Andrew Flanagan's Blog

Wiring (update 2)

Bill had commented on an older post about wiring and had asked for an update. I had thought I had posted one but couldn't find any when I just looked.

So, basically, at this point, the following is complete:

• TV is installed in the main room. Wires are cable tied to the cantilever arm and go through a nice-looking plastic grommet in the wall. My options were to buy grommets at Lowe's (surprisingly, they were like $6 each) or simply steal some from some of our furniture (the little holes designed to have wires go into for your computer stuff). I went with the stealing.
• All speaker wiring is done. I have speakers installed everywhere except the sub-woofer (which I installed in the back center. At some point I want a sub-woofer but the high-cost and low utility (hey, the kids are napping whenever we watch anything!) has delayed my purchase.
• All wiring for Phase 1 is complete. This is a nice, official way of saying that there will be a phase 2 and we're not there yet. However, for this first phase, we have all audio wiring (to 5.1 speakers) installed, two power outlets (4 plugs) are installed and the cable re-wired and split (in the wall). In addition, all wiring through the wall to the TV is complete. I may change what I have going through the wall to the TV at some later date, but for now, it's everything we need.
• No more mess in the main room (just the TV on the wall, speakers on the wall, and two floor speakers). Now we have extra room and I'm considering getting a nice leather chair (in black) that matches our surprisingly well-constructed Ikea couch.

Here are the pictures:

New shelves in closet. The small top shelf is just for wiring and equipment. We'll likely use the lower shelf for the printers. There's another shelf below that's outside of the shot. Notice the nice blue paint. It's not fun painting in a closet -- no room.

Here's the rather cluttered high shelf. It's close to the door and has all the audio/video equipment as well as the phone and two computers. The upper computer is just there temporarily. (I'm not sure exactly what to do with it -- need a computer?). It does have some spare room on the shelf for remotes and DVDs and such.

Here's a shot of the same thing without the flash. This is what it looks like when you open the door. I tied some tube lights into the power plugs on the back of the receiver so that if you're using it, there's a strip of light that goes around the edge of the door frame on the inside. I considered a brighter light, but you don't need to see much and anything too bright is annoying.

Here's a cable-filled shot of the new power outlets, the cable outlet and above (a little hard to see) the 5.1 audio outlet 5 stereo and one mono plugs (for the sub-woofer).

Here are two shots of the surround speakers. I found the mounting shelves at Lowe's for a pretty good price Looks a lot nicer than having those horrible little plastic arms.

Here's a shot of the front. This shows the TV mounted on the cantilever arm, the center channel (mounted a bit high but tilted appropriately) and the right front speaker (just on the floor). All the equipment is in the closet directly behind the TV. I dislike how I couldn't mount the TV in the center (but the arm does swing over and it's very close). The mind is a funny thing -- voices (played on the center channel) do sound like they're coming directly from the TV even though though they're clearly not.

Here's a shot of the binding post. Hey, it looks professional! It might look nice to use banana plugs instead of bare wire, but that's too fancy...

Here's the unused sub-woofer binding post behind the couch. This is an RCA-type plug so it's a little easier to connect than the screw-on/banana plugs used for the stereo binding posts.

Here's what behind the TV looks like. You can see the plastic grommet in the wall (which is very functional). The arm itself is attached very solidly to a stud and the cable ties may not be pretty but they're not normally visible, so it's no problem.

I'm considering as part of Phase 2, the following:

• CAT5, DVI and USB runs throughout the house. Realistically, probably just to the office and the "kitchen office" nook.
• An upgrade of our main room TV (the in-laws have a bigger one -- it's time to upgrade! hehe...) and moving the upstairs TV to my office (for use with the computer)
• Dispose of an old inkjet printer, move the newer inkjet to the closet, and get a laser printer also for the closet.
• I'm considering (just considering) replacing my Linux machine with a dedicated "always-on" 8-core Mac. The brand new Mac Pros are just so darn cool. I could realistically do a 3-drive, RAID 5, 1TB array with the Mac and still have room on the main drive for "non-critical" stuff. I have a 1.5TB array now on 4 drives but the extra 500MB is somewhat unnecessary for redundancy. Down the road, I could upgrade to a 2TB (3x1TB HDs) setup if I needed to expand. The new machines have max RAM capacity at 32GB -- that's simply amazing (and expensive).

Note to scoffers: This does NOT mean I would give up my Linux server -- I would simply virtualize it and run it in all the spare RAM I'd have.

But except for the printers I'm not really thinking this is going to happen anytime really soon. Maybe by the end of the year. Just maybe.