Birth of a Media Center
After having our family room flooded by the remnants of
Florida's hurricanes, I decided to finally build a media center while everything
was torn up and disconnected.
Over the years I've been designing and redesigning this thing. Every time I
think I have something I can live with, another idea pops into my head and I
start from scratch. With thoughts of a projector dancing in my head, I finalized
a design which will incorporate a roll-out screen for my new Panasonic AE700
projector.
This pic shows the current (temporary) setup.
I invited (heh heh) my nephew over for the weekend to give me a hand. Here's the bare wall with only my dual Tempest sub left.
Removed the sub and sheetrock and pulled new wire runs to the projector. We installed a 2" conduit in the truss bay above the family room.
Here the wall was insulated, sheetrock installed on the
laundry room side and plywood on the family room side.
After 2 days of work we got the gear hooked back up
temporarily. Notice the new platform that everything will sit on. The hanging
strip with the clamps is to test out different screen material to see which is
the best size and fit for our room. The opening in the wall will have a door
fitted to it from the back side to access the back of the rack. Instead of
re-wiring the line arrays, I'm just using my old JBLs for now.
Here I hung a piece of laminate for a temporary screen. This
one didn't work out, as it was too reflective.
Here's a shot from the laundry room.
And finally the newest addition to the family.....We're so proud....sniff!
I got the receptacles wired. I had 1 dedicated line and added 2 more.
During the week I got some more of the wiring done and made a door for the back of the rack opening. Saturday we worked on the soffit assembly which will house an enclosure for a center channel and 4 12" subwoofers. For the center channel I'll just add a baffle and drivers. The sub will be an IB (infinite baffle) which will have 4 AV12s (2 each side) firing into a manifold that opens to the family room. The volume of air in the trussed ceiling will then be used as the "enclosure" for the IB, some 600 ft^3 feet.
More work done on the soffit. Drivers are installed and wired to binding posts mounted through the back panel.
Here's a shot of the finished access door.
I got the soffit buttoned back up and wired the AV12s to the amp. We'll see if it really can handle a 2 ohm load. I had to reduce the gain on the amp to -12dB to level match the output. The center channel is temporarily thrown in and the JBLs were put back to surround duty. The only thing that is still not wired up is the rear center channel, which will sit above the projector.
Which brings me to the completion of stage 1 of the project. All the demo and rough work are done. The next stage is the fabrication of the casework, which will take place at the shop. So this is pretty much how it will stay till that's done.
