MitchRoss.com
Pastor's Husband, Geek Dad

This christmas my wife got me home theater system. 1000 watts of Dolby 5.1 goodness.

I ran into a few minor challenges, so I thought I'd share my solutions. If you're a serious audiophile and home theater geek, these may be old problems long ago solved for you.

What do I do with the rear speakers?
First thing I did was string the cables across the room to test everything worked. Check. OK, now how do I hide those cables?

A little Google work later, and there were a few common solutions, which I didn't like. There are wireless remote speakers- but you're trading one cable for another. You need to plug them into an outlet. There's also the small issue of the wireless conversion causing a small delay, but most surround systems have settings to account for that.

The other common, and better solution is flat speaker cable that you run under carpet. (Google for those words to get a thousand vendors...) Down sides: a little expensive, and you're walking and wearing on the cables. I've seen the shredded mess that network cabling under rugs turns into. Just not liking this option, even if they say it will last.

Not happy with either of those options, I started digging around the home theater forums. A couple places there was mention of running cables under or behind floor trim. That was closer to what I wanted.

I discovered that the tack boards that hold the carpet down are typically 1/4" to 1/2" away from the wall- making for a small channel big enough to run cables.

Here's a picture of my installation. The only tools I needed were pliers to grab & pull up the carpet - and a coat hanger to pull under some trim I didn't want to remove. Most the installation was as easy as pull up, drop cable down, and step on the carpet to tack back down. My kind of solution!

Tuning the setup
The system has a built-in tuning system, but it felt a little sparse. Here's a usefull bit of trivia: many THX mastered DVD's have a built-in home theater tuning section. For example, on all 3 of the original Star Wars disks, under the options menu, there's a THX logo. Select that logo, and you're off into the official THX tuning guide. There's sections for both audio and video. Cool stuff.

I suppose I'll get more serious as time goes by, and I'll be hitting the forums for detailed fine tuning. Until then, the kids and I are going to be rocking out to Star Wars.

Excellent Geek Dad Moment: having the 4 year old yell "Yeaaah!" when an Imperial walker explodes.

---