New Listening Room
 

Let's say it is a bit drafty there at the moment... slab should be poured on Friday.

What we're looking at is from just behind the listening position in our living room, which will be where our stereo/5.1 setup will be. The trench parallel to and about 2/3 from the bottom of the photo is where the far wall with our front speakers and TV will be. The two conduits forming a "V" lead from the rear speakers and converge in a niche which will accommodate most of our gear. They converge about 2 feet behind the wall, at the back of the niche.

The niche will contain the pre-pro, pre-amp, rear speakers' and front center speaker's amps. Like we had in our old house, the front speakers will be powered by Mc MC2301s, which will be on a low rack between the front speakers. Goal is, of course, to have all the wiring contained either in the floor or walls, so a lot of planning has gone into the configuration.

We seek to make it as clean looking as possible and have some flexibility should we switch gear or configurations in the future. I'm hoping the placement of the rear speakers' wire outlets on the floor is reasonably close to where we ultimately place those speakers. It's a bit of crap shoot since it's an open floor plan, (kitchen is behind the listening position). The wiring will also accommodate having our turntable on a rack just to the left of the niche, allowing for albums to be stored below the TT, on the rack.

I do missing having a basement for all the storage, as well as the ease of running wires under the floor whenever we made a configuration change, but living on the coast doesn't give us that flexibility.

https://www.audioaficionado.org/atta...1&d=1580133227

Paul... Congrats, exciting times ahead! :banana:

Paul.......Good looking slab rough-in. Don't forget to run a conduit from your WiFi Router location to the stereo rack and television locations for Ethernet cables.

That's awesome! I'm sure it'll look great once finished. +1 on what Dan said so you're not in a bind trying to run cables after the fact.

- Buck

Thanks guys!

Dan, that audio niche will be placed in our walk in closet, which will have the cabling from AT&T (which has a monopoly on fiber optic cable in the neighborhood), so we'll run that through the wall. The builder outsources to a local securiity company the low voltage and data cabling, and we'll have something like nine such outlets throughout the house. We've had a good experience in meeting and communicating with them about what we want, from the garage door openers to the thermostat to the security etc. etc.

Since 80BJr. works for Google now, we wanted to stick with Google/Nest products and they've been accommodating even though that's not their normal go-to brand.

I definitely welcome any thoughts/ideas as we progress. We'll have a pre-drywall meeting with the builder to finalize/confirm wiring issues. Our setup is out of the ordinary for them - seems that most of their customers who even bother with some sort of hifi usually opt for a Sonos solution.

One visual vs. sonic thing we're going to do is to run a couple circuits about 7 feet above floor level with a lot of slack/loops along the way to accommodate wall-mounted picture lights that we will put above some of Boss-Girl's paintings. At this stage, we don't know where we'll have that lighting, so we'll have the circuits available to tap into once we settle in.

Here's the audio niche, looking from the living/listening room. It is situated in our master closet. The installer knows his stuff and I'm happy I've been down here to work directly through some of his questions and suggestions.

With the new construction I had hoped to avoid compromising on the setup, and have been largely successful with on that count. An exception to that will be the Wireworld XLR cables running from the preamp in the closet to the MC2301 monoblocks that will be out on a low rack between the front left and right speakers. I had two considerations: 1) be able to retrieve the XLR cables should we ever move or want to use them elsewhere, and 2) hide them from view in the listening room, i.e., run them through the wall. Unfortunately, running them through the wall was problematic since the studs are load bearing and already have drill holes for other cables, and my 25' XLR cables are not long enough to travel in a dedicated conduit up to the ceiling level and back down again (the orange tube running vertically is such a conduit, and the one we have will cary HDMI cables to the TV; if the XLR cables were 35' long, this would have been what we would have done). I'm therefore most likely going to run them under a channel on the floor of the walk-in closet or a wall-mounted cable raceway, then just up to a ring opposite the ring where they'll come out to the amps in the living room. We'll have some built-in shelves in the walk-in closet so we won't see the channel or cable raceway anyhow.

Being on a slab vs. a basement like we had in Atlanta does present its challenges, but careful planning has so far been paid off. I'll post a photo of the room with a view same as the original pic.

Shoutout to Masterlu and others who over the years have shared their construction projects here. I've learned a lot, and been inspired by what you have posted as you built your listening rooms and theaters.

https://www.audioaficionado.org/atta...1&d=1580133292

Here's the living room, with the niche towards the left of the photo. To the right, just outside the picture, is the sliding glass door to the patio. It's an open floor plan, with the photo taken from the kitchen. The round covers in the floor in the foreground will be electrical outlets. The wire in the foreground will be used to pull through the speaker wire we will reuse from the old house. In retrospect, I would have placed those floor apertures a bit farther from the wall, as there is more room for traffic than I envisioned from the drawings.

We wired the ceiling for rear speakers, which gives us choices once we're settled in. My one reservation about having the rear floor standing speakers is they may be really awkward in an open floor plan - this isn't a dedicated listening room (ah, downsizing!). Does anyone have thoughts about in-ceiling speakers as rear speakers in a 5.1 setup, and things to watch out for? My plan at the moment is to just have caps in the ceiling, and only do something there if we opt not to have floor standing rears.

https://www.audioaficionado.org/atta...1&d=1580133356

Is it me???? I don't see any pictures! :dunno:

Paul... run Cat 6 cable everywhere you remotely even think you need it; a spool of 500’ is dirt cheap. Also, I highly recommend using Quiet Batt anywhere you want to sound proof; I’m happy to pass on my discount pricing.

Pictures are up, and visible. :yes: