structured audio.

So back this past summer at a yard sale I found a pair of bookshelf Technics speakers. I think I paid five bucks for them. They matched the ones I bought way back in high school that I’m still using on my home system (partly because I’ve never seen anything for not a huge wad of cash that sound better and partly because they just keep kickin’). A little while later I scored another subwoofer at Goodwill (the first one I found - a Klipsch - is being used on my studio monitor setup) - an 8” KLH that was in perfect condition for twenty bucks.

And then I got to thinking ... hmm, I could put these in my bedroom. More importantly - since my walls were still missing - I could modify the speakers to in-walls and run all the necessary audio cables and such and move on the plan I came up with a while back to get structured audio in my bedroom.

So I got to work with a Wonderbar and hammer -

and in no time I had them all taken apart (they were all just glued anyway). I rescued the crossovers from within each box and set them aside. Now the real work ensued.

I realized I needed to route all the inside edges of the front baffle in order to give them a lip that would hide the uneven hole in the sheetrock I would be cutting for them. And then I had to cut strips of the black contact-type paper veneer from the sides I was throwing out and glue them onto the 1/8” edge I created after routing. It was a bit arts-and-crafts but it turned out looking pretty good. And so - with all of that done - I now had a pair of in-wall speakers (for $5 and an afternoon's worth of work).

I calculated the volume of the boxes before I cracked them open with the Wonderbar and converted the measurements to what I would need the volume to be in the wall. But first I had lots of cables to run from the bedroom to the basement closet. Two 48’ lengths of in-wall speaker cable (I had gotten a 250’ spool from Amazon for $20) - and the rest of the structured wiring ... four Cat-5 runs (two for a new outlet where I’ll be putting my desk and two for a possible future TV and Mac Mini/Apple TV), a 50’ length of Toslink digital audio cable (picked up again from Amazon for $30) assuming the TV/Mac Mini will have digital audio out (my receiver down there I’m using initially doesn’t have digital audio in but I wanted to at least get the cable in the wall for now), and I bought a RG6 splitter to split the cable coming in the house in my bedroom going down to the basement for the modem - the split goes in the bedroom wall up to where the possible TV will go. Last but not least - I had the thought of moving the electrical outlet from the floor up to where I’d be installing some 2x4 brackets for the TV mount - that way if I do get a TV and mount a Mini or something up there the power will be right there.

(that's looking up through the hole I cut in the basement ceiling to the wires coming from the bedroom - I had to use my fishtape across the basement from here to grab them and yank them through to the closet on the other side)

(in the networking closet - the speaker wire and my old receiver I bought back in college that will serve the purpose of bringing audio into my bedroom)

(the outlet I moved up from a foot above the floor to 5' up and behind where the TV would be mounted)

I had already wedged some 2x4s in the walls to make the same volume as the speaker boxes - 

The rest of the process then for each ‘box’ in the wall was to mount the crossover network and stuff it with some acoustic fill I got from some Infinity speakers I grabbed out of a 'free' bin at a yard sale a few years back (I may remove or adjust the amount of fill based on how dampened the speakers are once I get them installed after the sheetrock is up).

And the wall looked like this (complete w/ those 2x4 horizontal brackets for hanging a TV wall mount centered between the speakers) -

So now it’s time to hang sheetrock. It’s crazy. I think I’ve had these walls torn apart for something like, oh - I dunno - three years. At least. I lost count. But tomorrow I will hang drywall and that will be that. So before I can I had to test to make sure everything worked - so I had to connect the subwoofer to the binding posts in the wall - then connect the speakers to their respective crossovers and hook the wires up in the basement to the receiver and fire it up -

It worked! But the last little bit I needed to test was to make sure that the VNC would work to drive the server downstairs from my old Powerbook - thankfully the Chicken is still available for 10.5 cos the screen sharing built in works spotty at best. Yeah - I’ve probably mentioned how much of an un-fan I am of 10.5 ... but anyways - the Chicken worked great and my plan to turn up the volume on the receiver louder than I’d ever need it - then control the volume of iTunes on the server through my laptop (and track selection etc.) - worked perfectly -

So the only thing that remains is a little RFI that I may need to get a powerline filter to kick. Otherwise everything is up and running and all set to hang sheetrock tomorrow. Oh - but I might run a couple more speaker cables ... for surround sound.


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Cost of project

- $5 Technics bookshelf speakers I found at a yard sale that I converted to in-walls
- $20 KLH 8” powered subwoofer from Goodwill
- $20 250’ spool of 18-guage in-wall speaker wire from Amazon
- old Pioneer receiver I had lying around (but something similar - an old receiver - could probably be found easily on Ebay or craigslist for less than fifty bucks)
- $20 Leviton 8-in/out single-gang speaker wall outlet
- several days worth of work modifying the garage sale speakers to in-walls and running all the cables and building the stuff in the walls

structured wiring part two.

It's raining now I can hear outside the window. Sitting on the couch next to it. Wasn't raining a couple hours ago when I ran out to the garage. Thankfully didn't really rain all weekend. It was nice. A light light sprinkle maybe wandering around downtown Seattle Friday night but we didn't have rain shells and it was fine.

So today I set out to finish the first stage of this structured wiring business. It was supposed to be a relatively simple ordeal - last night I had spent an hour or so down in the basement closet on a ladder crimping Cat 5e connectors to the ends of all the cables I had run -

To run the cables into the house I had used a piece of scrap PVC plumbing, drilled through the drywall from in the crawlspace and caulked around the PVC to hold it in there.

But then the first thing I discovered this afternoon when I set out to start was that all the patch cables I already own were wired the Type B way while I had arbitrarily decided to wire all of my stuff (ports and crimped connectors both) Type A. Good times. Should have checked beforehand. Duh.

Oh well, so that meant I had to rewire all the ports. Then cut off all the connectors I fastened last night and redo. Not the worst thing I guess. So this is what the one in Julian's bedroom looked like (labeling and all) after rewiring and with that decora quickport plate -

The two blanks will likely be RG6 cable in/out.

But once all that was done, I tested - made some more patch cables with my crimping tool, double-checked the ports and the connectors, etc. etc. etc. Had to run two surge protectors cos of the stupid transformer plugs for the two switches, router/switch and modem (cos I also needed to plug in the backup drive and Mac servers) and then I started plugging everything in -

I had drilled a 2" hole in the shelf to stuff all the cables through and then back up - as opposed to cutting them off to length (I had guessed how much I needed when doing the cabling for each run - better to have too much than get all the way across the house and realize I didn't have enough). That way I have extra cable if I ever need it (and with, well, all my shirts back on that side of the closet that wiring mess is pretty well hidden anyway) -

In order to accommodate two Mac servers and a monitor (which is probably something like a hundred pounds), I had to get creative ... the height between the shelf and the ceiling was perfect in that it was just enough room to fit a G4 tower, but that meant I couldn't reinforce it with some 2x4s underneath (cos that would raise it an inch and a half and then the G4s wouldn't fit). So I drilled and found some studs (I could see the crap drywall tape and nails giving away where they were) to secure some shelf brackets underneath and help support the weight of all the computer gear -

Then it was just a matter of heaving them up there and connecting the firewire backup drive to the main server (Titanium) and both it and the backup/auxiliary server Radon (my former Logic workhorse) to the switch -

(where I spent cramped up most of the day ... )

The monitor is up there for now, but likely won't stay. I can control both the Macs via a VNC client on my laptop so they don't need a keyboard/mouse or monitor. So now everything is humming down there instead of, well, in my bathroom. It sounds much more natural to hear the sound of hard drives spinning away in a closet.

And, uhh, someday I'll have my actual bedroom closet back and - well - won't have to use this one anymore. I'm just happy not to have to step on/over the cable that ran from the bathroom out to the living room corner that I had gotten used to doing for the last year or two. Good times.

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So the really frustrating part of the day came when I went to connect the Mac Mini and it - uhh, didn't work. It said the ethernet cable wasn't connected. But. It. Was.

So I tested the same port/cable configuration on Julian's iMac. Worked fine. And the LG ethernet TV. Ditto. So WTF.

As in - WTF!!!???

Ooh boy.

Oh, and the new G5 ... same thing. No ethernet cable even though it was connected. And with the whole Type A/Type B fiasco it took me longer than it should have to realize maybe it was an OS deal instead of maybe me mis-wiring one of the ports or connectors. But finally I Googled around and discovered pretty quick people on the Apple forums complaining about the same problem - an unconnected ethernet cabled despite it being plugged in.

And after perusing some of the responses it looked like the resolution was to manually dumb down the port from gigabit (1000BaseT) to 100BaseT. But why? I have gigabit switches ... and all my Macs were set up on gigabit before. The only thing that I changed now is instead of the wires running directly from each switch to each Mac - now they run from the switch to a port, and then a patch cable from the port to each machine.

I have no idea ... I'm going to be Googling some more to find out why cos it sorta irks me. I want gigabit. But oh well. Reminded myself even though the day was sorta crappy cos of that, a crappy day for me would be a stellar one for far too many people ... always try to keep some perspective.

And I know I've said I hate plumbing but - I think I hate networking even more. Or at least as much. And when I said how I hated plumbing I mentioned how I never use that word. Except for plumbing. And now for networking.

And by no means is this finished - I plan on installing an actual panel for this stuff, and like I said I still have more Cat 5 and RG6 and possibly speaker wires to run ... but the stuff is out of the bathroom now so I can get to gutting the rest of it. That'll be fun! No, really.

structured wiring part one.

So I have been meaning to get around to starting this little networking project for some time now. Last spring I think it was I bought a 500' spool of RG6 and a thousand foot box o' Cat 5E cable (and subsequently found probably another 300' or so at a garage sale the following week which I picked up for something like five bucks). And the crimpers and everything etc. etc. But then it sat and collected dust cos, well, there were bigger fish to fry.

But with the remodel of our Jack and Jill bath looming, I need to get the - uhh, networking sh*t out of the, uhh - bathroom. So, our current networking solution -

G4 server with Apple LCD/keyboard/etc., OWC backup firewire drive, cable modem/router and switches. Oh, and our printer. Yeah, that's right - sitting in the bathtub (that's going to be gone, along with the windows and in its place a beautiful Kohler jetted tub with granite deck and paneling and ... ). And a scanner and other various things lying about in this room that I half-gutted like three years ago and then let it sit. It's slightly embarrassing. But it's going to hopefully be beautiful but that's for another post. Don't get me started.

Anywhoo, I needed to get the computer crap out of there. Which meant crawling under the house, likely a big reason why I had not been all that motivated - up until now with being forced to - to get the structured wiring underway. But after a long-ish day and most of it done, I can say it really wasn't all that bad. Thanks a ton to my little helper who saved me hours of headache cos I could sit under the house after drilling holes up through the sole plates of the walls feeding him cable after cable and he'd yank them up and label each one and then tape them to the wall -

Since my house sits pretty high it's quite spacious under there, and someone had the foresight to install a light fixture so I just sat in the dirt waiting for Julian to finish labeling each cable before feeding him another. I had to get creative with some, but nothing a handy fishtape could not solve. So after it started to get dark, I was pretty much wrapped having gotten cable from the living room and Julian's room (the two rooms needing to be cabled right away) and got the cable dropped (as in video cable for our internet connection) from my bedroom down through the basement ceiling (thanks fishtape!) over to the basement closet where I ran all the other networking cables today (where the electrical panel is) and where all that stuff now in the bathroom will live -

And then once all the cables were run from the various rooms (there's still another set of four Cat 5E runs to make in the front living room corner, a set of four from my bedroom, and some more cable and possible audio/video - speaker wire and such - runs to be made but that's for another day and now that I know it's not too terrible and I have access to everything I need it won't be bad), I got to work splicing the ports onto the ends of each cable (thanks Katie for immortalizing this moment haha) -

(and still planning on getting that Gator rack case for the audio/video equipment and moving it to a different location, then mounting the TV on the wall above where the white paneling will be ... )

I wrote out a schematic for all the runs and ports I am planning on (for now, the diagram will get more complicated as I add in the cable/audio/video stuff) and just went off that and the labels Julian and I had taped to each cable -

It was a simple matter. I ordered these Leviton decora quickport adaptors for electrical boxes where - instead of placing a single low-voltage wall box - I was adding the ports to where an outlet already existed. And I'm cutting out the old, single-gang box and replacing with a double-gang with the quickport adaptors. Easy peasy.

And yeah, I feel accomplished. Finally I can get a proper spot for our networking stuff - and I've got a big chunk of the groundwork laid for any further structured wiring I want to design (HDMI, an audio system in various rooms of the house, etc. etc.). I've overlooked voice for now, but the sweet thing about Cat 5E cable is it can do just about anything - from up to four voice lines to high-definition video - it's über-flexible and expansive. So once the cables are there, it's just a matter of figuring out what do with them. And they can be changed out on either end really easily.

OK - and yeah, like I said - this is just making way to completely gutting this bathroom that has been hideous and more or less unusable for years and start on the remodel of it which I have been planning for something like three years or so. Good times.

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Food for thought:

- existing G4 tower server storing all music/movies and backed-up with existing setup (external drive and SuperDuper! backup software)

- existing Mini connected to main home audio/video system in living room

- old G4/G5 tower or mini or whatever as sub-system for bedrooms - running iTunes of course (same iTunes library file from the G4 server used by all Macs in the house) and connected to my old Pioneer receiver (with A/B speaker configurability) plugged into an outlet with a simple programmable timer (like the kind people get to turn their lights on/off while they're on holiday) so it turns on/off when I want it - turn volume up as far as I'd want on the receiver and the Mac and leave it - that way I could control all the transport functions of the music/video in iTunes/DVD player/QT or whatever and the volume on the Mac using VNC and my laptop - I would never have to touch the receiver or worry about having an IR feed from each room back to it

- in-wall speakers (with possible in-wall sub?) in my bedroom and either Julian's bedroom or the kitchen - connected to the old Pioneer A/B speaker outs

Anyways, just thinking aloud ...