Stuart’s A/V install project–Part 4

Hello welcome back to part 4 of my AV install project. As of today my system is mainly all installed tested and working. I have no Internet connection in our new house until the 15th of June which is a bit of a pain as I cannot re-program my Harmony remote controls until then, also another problem I have and I don’t understand why this is a limitation of Media Center on the XBOX 360? Is that I cannot play AVI files in My Movies, it comes up with an XBOX dashboard message saying I need to download a media codec to play the file. I’ve obviously already downloaded this and its just not working because I am not signed in to XBOX Live. Seems stupid to me. I am however able to play DVD rips in VIDEO_TS folders via My Movies with its in-built transcoder however.

I still need to buy a Linksys DMA extender for the kids bedroom and some Denon speakers to match the Denon amp I have for this room. I also have an issue with the Component video wiring in the living room, I get ghosted text in the XBOX UI. I don’t have this problem with the XBOX upstairs on Component so something is not quite right. Also I am not happy with the TV bracket for the kids small 19” Samsung TV and I might change it for another type. Other than that everything has gone well and worked out exactly as I’d planned.

Master Bedroom

I used the exact same wall mount bracket as downstairs. I have to say for the money about 37 pounds these are really good brackets and I am very happy with them.

Below you can see the AV wall plates in the master bedroom. The speaker one is a little close to the power socket but I had to squeeze it in between that and the channel in the wall to the left of it.

I was a little worried about the HDMI wall plates they were cheap ones from Farnell CPC and had no mention of HDMI 1.4. I put in the walls HDMI 1.4 cables also bought cheaply from CPC. I’ve now tested the HDMI wall plates and they all work with my XBOX 360 OK. I might have a problem in the future if I introduce HDMI 1.4 kit like a 3D TV etc but as I have no new equipment that will actually use HDMI 1.4 its not a problem currently.

There is 1x HDMI, 1X Composite, 1X Component, 1X TV RCA Audio Out, 1X iPod Dock RCA. The speaker binding posts – the left pair are for the two bedroom ceiling speakers and the right pair of binding posts will be for the single stereo speaker in the bathroom. You can also see a pair of network points and an old NTL cable socket. The ceiling speakers are better than I said in the last post, now I have the correct amp installed in the bedroom they sound much better and quite bassy if you want them.

AV cables exiting the brushed faceplate, I used that plastic cable tidy stuff to keep all the cables neatly together. Two more network points behind the TV for future use and one double power socket.

I had to solder on every single RCA connector which was allot of connectors overall. Not too difficult and I was even using a dodgy old soldering iron with a broken tip.

Here you can see the AV connectors which I labelled up so I don’t get them mixed up.

Back of the TV which is a 37” Samsung LCD.

TV flush to the wall, I wanted the TV mounted in the corner out of the way, as on this wall the door in to the bedroom is just to the right of this picture.

TV pulled out away from the wall.

XBOX 360 hooked up for the first time.

I’m yet to put in our chest of drawers which will sit under the TV and I will have the XBOX and amp sat on top, not sure if the wife will be happy about that, her gear will have to go in the bathroom, how’s that for WAF.

Cambridge Audio Azur 350A and XBOX 360 slim.

The Cambridge Audio Azur 350A is a lovely entry level amp but I should have bought an older Azur 540A. The 350A has a remote control but it has no standby mode so you cannot turn the amp on and off with the remote which is a major draw back. I will have to use one of those Inteli-Plugs I wrote about previously.

In the picture above you can see the two RCA cables from the wall, the back of these connect to another RCA wall plate at the opposite side of the room where my iPod dock sits next to the bed.

XBOX 360 4GB Slim, I put in the hard drive out of my old white XBOX which died so I have much more than 4GB storage now.

Video Games sound amazing via the ceiling speakers!

This is the opposite side of the bedroom to the amp, where my iPod dock will sit on the bedside table. That adapter plug thing you can see is a Z-Wave HomePro lamp module so I can control the bedside lamps via mControl and my iPod touch and also in the Media Center UI.

I’m using my trusty old Logitech Harmony 555 universal remote for this room.

In part 5 - I have some newer pictures of the living room, today I wired up the 5.1 surround sound speakers which sound great, the neighbours are gonna love me! I also have some pictures of the children’s bedroom and their TV install, see you then.

Stuart’s A/V install project–Part 3

Hello welcome to part 3 of my AV install project. I’ve got some more photos of upstairs to show today. In my bedroom I am wall mounting my old 37” Samsung LCD TV. This was an early model that cost me 800 quid at the time and its only 720P not 1080P. I managed to convince the wife we should have a new TV for the living room, she agreed but only if we could have one of the new ultra slim LED models, more about that later. I plan to put my XBOX 360 in the bedroom also as I like playing video games in there and the rest of the family can still watch TV in the living room. We will have the Nintendo WII in the living room as its more family orientated anyways.

I wanted ceiling speakers in the bedroom, I would have gone for Nile Audio or Quest ceiling speakers as I have used both previously on installs and can recommend them, but too much for my small budget. So I had to find something cheaper but still with “decent” specs. Another good choice would have been Polk or Kef speakers but again out of my budget. After some research online and on eBay I found some speakers by Adastra. I’d never heard of them before but they had quite low frequency response which cheap speakers don’t normally have. The ones I bought at trade price were model 952.534UK 6.25 inch diameter. The frequency response was lowish at 45Hz. Lower frequency response gives you a more bassy sound.

I’ve got the speakers installed and had a quick test, they sound reasonable for the money but not fantastic but I guess you get what you pay for, but for the price, which was cheap I am happy. I also plan to later add a single stereo ceiling speaker in the bathroom I’ve already cabled for it, the model is a 952.537UK and drive this speaker from the Speaker B option on the amp in the bedroom.

Master Bedroom Ceiling Speakers

I had a problem with the speaker cables I used a 5.1 speaker wall plate and just took out the center speaker binding posts, leaving me with two pairs of binding posts, this wall plate is at the bottom of the wall in the corner near the window. I had to get speaker cable from there up in to the loft some how. The wall the speaker plate is on is solid brick, instead I planned to go under the floor and to an adjacent stud partition wall and up inside this stud partition wall. I measured and drilled a hole in the loft down in to the stud wall and at the bottom I cut out a single gang socket hole, using the fishing reel I was unable to get the metal rod up or down the full length of the wall as there were wooden studs going horizontally as well as vertically. My plaster was in the room plastering the block wall as I was trying to route these cables, I said can you patch a small channel in this plasterboard? He said sure, I then got the axle grinder and put a small channel right the way up and chiselled out the horizontal wooden studs to get the cable past them. A bit drastic but it was the only easy way I could see of getting the cable up in loft and I wasn’t going to use surface trunking in the room!

Small channel in the stud partition wall for speaker cables going up in to the loft.

TV wall mount in the master bedroom

This is very similar to what I did downstairs, just no TOSLINK optical but an RCA audio wall plate instead for TV audio out. I also added an RCA wall plate (Red / White audio) at the other side of the room where my bedside cabinet will be, so the iPod dock there can connect to the amp at the other side of the room which will be under the wall mounted TV on a chest of drawers. I ran two Kelsey UNI-1 cables under the floorboards between to the two RCA wall plates at opposite sides of the room.

The photo below is back in the living room, the day I got our new LG 42inch LED TV. The model is 42LE4500 and its pretty much the cheapest 42 inch LED TV you can buy right now. Personally I would have gone for a fatter LCD with more features like Internet TV but my wife insisted we should have a ultra slim LED one and this was the only more in my budget range.

Ignore the amp you can see, that is a Cambridge Audio A1 MK3 amp that is going in the cupboard under the stairs to drive the kitchen speakers from the WHS audio out which will also live in the cupboard. The TV bench is a rather nice Alphason APP1000 unit I bought off eBay for about 75 pounds, my HTPC, AVR and Nintendo WII will live in there.

Well I think that’s it for part 3, more soon in part 4, please leave your comments if you have any questions.

Stuart’s A/V install project–Part 2

In part one here I wrote about a little Audio Visual install project I am currently doing at my own house in England. I am further on into the project than these new pictures suggest, but I’ll do a series of posts showing this project from start to finish, the final finish could be a few weeks away yet.

I am on a pretty tight budget so I have made some purchase decisions that reflect this, but hey that’s life. However most of the components needed I have purchased at trade prices which certainly helps, although some items were purchased via eBay like my HDTV wall mount brackets as they were the cheapest out there.

These pictures where taken on my iPod touch so you will have to excuse the pretty poor picture quality on some of them.

Ideally I would have wanted a small comms cabinet but there’s that budget thing again to think about, so I opted for a simple 1U wall mount bracket, these are manufactured by StarTech. I bought a 24 port patch panel off eBay, more than I will need in this house. I so far have 14 network cables terminated in to the back of it, I may add another 4 or so, two in the kitchen and another 2 ports behind my lazy boy chair in the lounge for when I am sick of the WIFI being crap and I can just use a LAN cable with the laptop.

1U Wall Bracket plus Patch Panel – Cupboard under the stairs.

To route the cables from this cupboard to the location in the living room where the Network wall plates are, I used a cable fish tape like this one to pull the cables under the floor space. Totally invaluable tool and I used this for most of the cable installations under the floors and through walls.

Living Room – Plastered

I was going to get my brother to do the plastering he’s pretty handy but not a professional plasterer. However as I was putting in new ceiling speakers upstairs I decided to have all the ceilings upstairs plastered smooth, so called in an expert and had him fill in the walls as well.

For the channel in the wall for the AV cables I used 100mm x 25mm trunking. I thought this would be plenty wide enough to be able to fish in cables at a later date. The new electric socket for behind the TV was just a spur from the socket below and I used capping in the wall to protect the mains cable.

The metal back boxes for the AV wall plates are 35mm deep, I did initially buy 47mm deep ones but these were far too deep for my block walls. The electrical socket back boxes are just a standard 25mm deep.

In this photo you can see the network and speakers cables going down under the floor space, the network cables all obviously go back to the patch panel and the speaker cables go to 5.1 positions in the living room.

Its very important to label up each end of each cable so you know which cable is which when numbering your network points up. I also bought a cheap network cable tester off eBay like this one, this was useful as it did detect a few pins on some cables I had either wired up incorrectly or not fully punched down into the patch panel / network wall plates.

On the picture below, I’ve got the wall bracket on the wall, my living room is an odd shape, I have a small porch - stud partition wall / internal door coming into it and the stairs are at the back of the living room, there’s only one place the 3 seater sofa can be positioned, so my only option is to have the TV in the corner near the bay window, so I could not have a flush to the wall type bracket, instead I’ve gone for a full motion pull out and swivel / tilt type bracket, which was about 40 pounds off eBay from a company called Intec Brackets

On this picture you can see the speaker wall plates in the living room, these have binding posts, I bought some banana plugs to easily connect the amps to them. There is 5.1 plus Sub and the other speaker socket next to it is for the speakers in the kitchen, I’ve not got a proper AVR yet but when I buy one, Zone two will connect to the kitchen speakers. The next wall plate is 4 network points.

These are the other AV wall plates in the Living room, top left is Composite video + audio, right of that is Component video RGB plus audio, bottom left is a TOSLINK optical point for digital audio directly out of the back of the TV, to the right of this is an HDMI wall plate.

On the left near the radiator you can notice an NTL cable socket. I’ve not decided yet if to go for Virgin Media cable Internet or try and get this new BT Infinity fibre optic Internet if its available in my area? I’ve routed both a coax cable from this NTL socket and a CAT5e cable from the back of the BT master phone socket into the cupboard under the stairs, so I can have either type of modem installed in there.

I’ve simply used one of those brush face plates for the AV cables exit at the top of the channel, I’ve also added two network points behind every TV. None of my HDTV’s are Internet ready or have LAN connections, so these are for future use.

The AV cables still need cutting to length and terminating with RCA connectors.

Well I think that’s about it for part 2, see you again in part 3 soon.

How to make big holes in your walls and floors and rewire your home!

I’ve not been online much as late or posted anything, I’ve been very busy for the last two months renovating and decorating our house in England. As the house was totally empty I took the opportunity to completely start from scratch as far as infrastructure and cabling was concerned, when I lived there previously I had cable running under carpets and round skirting boards and even had a CAT5 string connecting downstairs to upstairs running outside of the house, all this was messy and generally drove me mad.

My aims were to have a fully wired computer network with multiple network points around the house, centralised in the cupboard under the stairs with a network patch panel, my Windows Home Server and gigabit switch / router would also live in here out of sight.

I wanted to properly wall mount 3 HDTVs one in the living room, one in the master bedroom and one in the children’s bedroom. I didn’t want to have cables hanging down or use surface mounted trunking at it just looks bad. I wanted to bury the cables into the walls and have proper A/V faceplates. This meant some serious remodelling with an axle grinder and a big hammer and chisel. Not work for the faint of heart when cutting 30mm or so in to block walls.

I am using DVBLink’s TVSource with my WHS but sometimes I have issues with it and I get no signal messages in Media Center, so I always planned to be able to by-pass Media Center altogether for Live TV and be able to just use the in-built tuners in the HDTVs. Initially I will only be using a Freeview aerial on the roof, I may add a Satellite dish later for FreeSat. So I needed to run new Coax cable from behind each of the wall mounted TV’s up in to the loft to connect to a distribution amp which will then connect to the aerial. I used 100 metres of high quality Belden Webro WF100 Coax cable.

Another goal was to wire for speakers and lots of them. 5.1 speakers in the living room, wall mounted stereo speakers in the kitchen above the units, these would also service the outside deck area in the back garden, a pair of ceiling speakers in the master bedroom and a single stereo ceiling speaker in the bathroom, the speaker cable, all 100 metres of it! has been installed under floors and in walls so you cannot see it, none of this running it round the skirting boards malarkey. I’ve used proper speaker connection wall plates with binding posts for easy connections to the amps using banana plugs.

Using these AV wall plates meant making my own audio and video cables for connections like Component and Composite and RCA audio type connections. For the audio cables buried in the walls and under some floors I used 50 metres of Kelsey UNI-1. For the video cable I used URM70 Coaxial Copper Braid Coaxial Cable. The wall plates needed to be soldered on the backs and phono connectors soldered on at the TV end. I also buried in one 1.4 HDMI cable with HDMI wall plate on each TV installation, the downstairs TV also has one TOSLINK optical cable plus wall plate for Digital Audio out from the back of the TV.

I’ve taken some photos of the work and will write a few more blog posts with more details of my setup and hardware I will be using and showing the progress of my project, which is not currently finished or fully tested but is nearing completion.

Before I started I mapped out my plans in Visio, I have pretty much stuck to these plans and not allot actually changed from the concept I had in my head apart from I decided to also wall mount the little Samsung TV in the kids bedroom as well and a few sockets moved locations etc.

Lounge / Kitchen Plan

Click for a larger image here.

Master Bedroom / Bathroom Plan

Click for a larger image here.

Photos of the Living Room – Initial channelling of the wall.

To be continued…

Your SqueezeSlaves not playing in sync ?

Here’s a quick tip which might help if you are using the Squeezebox software emulator called SqueezeSlave on your HTPC’s and if you’re having problems playing them in sync? Check your network cards Jumbo Frames settings!

I updated the Intel GT Pro network card drivers on my WHS the other day and I must have changed the Jumbo Frame setting - Today I could not get my HTPC and WHS both of which have SqueezeSlave installed to play in sync, the Windows 7 HTPC was playing about 16 seconds behind the music in the other room playing from the WHS box.

Going round in circles playing around with the sync options and delays in the software settings with no joy, I then updated the version of the SqueezeSlave.exe on each machine to the latest version from the web and also updated the Logitech Squeezebox Server software on the WHS box to the latest nightly build, but the problem persisted.

Browsing the Squeezebox Server webpage on the Windows 7 HTPC in IE seemed very slow to load pages and after pressing play on a track I could see the counter counting but would hear no sound until it hit 16 seconds in. I then looked at my laptop which also has SqueezeSlave installed and that was syncing and playing fine with the WHS (No Jumbo Frame setting available on the WIFI NIC properties).

I then remembered I’d updated the NIC drivers on the WHS the week before, checked the Jumbo Frames settings and saw that the Jumbo Frame setting on the WHS was higher than the one set on the HTPC. I set them both the same at 9KB and hey presto the HTPC started playing the tracks immediately and browsing the Squeezebox Server webpage has speeded up no end.

Both the Windows 7 HTPC and the WHS are now playing in sync again with no issues. I thought I’d throw up a quick post about it as this may help someone in the future with a similar problem and also as a reminder for myself!

If you have PC’s around your home - using Squeezebox Server software and SqueezeSlave software, is a free way to have a whole home audio setup – you just need to add a local amplifier and speakers in each room. I use the iPeng iOS app to control it all.

My Movies for iPhone update released

A new update for My Movies for iPhone was published yesterday in the Apple app store, version 1.51 new features include:

Adds Personal data option, including categories, notes, tags, location, purchase information, value, personal ratings and personal title and sort title settings.

Adds Facebook integration

Add remote control for My Movies for Windows Media Center

Adds remote control for Dune Media Players

Adds option to download more actors

I’ve been looking forward to this upcoming update and can’t wait to try it out!

For more information about My Movies for iPhone see here.