Hey guys, I haven't posted on these forums for a couple of years (I'm more of a browser type guy lol), but I thought I'd share with you some before, during, and after pics of my home theatre which I installed earlier in the year.
First off, the before pictures;
NOTE: I forgot to take a picture before I tore everything out, but was able to dig these two up from 5 years ago. It looked excactly the same except the paint colour on the walls were changed in December of last year.
Specs
Receiver: Pioneer VSX-D1S Dolby Pro Logic
TV: 50" Pioneer rear projection
Speakers: Can't remember what make they were. The two speakers on the top shelf were spliced together to form the center channel.
Subwoofer: Paradigm PS-1000
1991 - 2010
I was only 5 years old when my parents installed this setup shortly after the basement was renovated. It was state of the art for it's time, and I had such fond memories of playing the NES on it in the early years, and then later with the PS1 and PS2. But after 19 long years, my gaming had taken a toll on the system. Some of the speakers were shot, and my PS2 really did a number on the tv. So after saving some money up, I decided it was just a little bit overdue to finally upgrade (and I think GT5 was still scheduled for a spring release at that time too lol). I took two weeks off in the beginning of January and got down to business.
With everything removed, I had to put down some laminate flooring since it was pretty much just a bare subfloor underneith the old shelves.
After that, I picked up my speakers, and with the help of my dad, got to work in feeding the new speaker wires underneith the baseboards and through the walls.
As the plaster was drying, I had to start looking for a tv stand for my just delivered, 58" plasma. But after going to Ikea and other furniture stores, I realized that nothing out there was going to be a) adequate enough for the size and weight of the tv, and b) have an open, centered shelf big enough for the center speaker to sit in. So I went ahead and built my own to the excact specifications I needed.
With the plaster now dry, sanded, and painted, I could now start hanging up what were orignally the rear speakers in the 5.1 setup.
After 2 full weeks, I now had my system up and running
However, there was still some unfinished business. I knew from the very beginning that I wanted to have a 7.1 system, but my wallet was screaming in agony, oh and there was also the small matter of there not being any shelving to hold all the DVD / BluRay movies, my games, and my parents old VHS collection (see the before pictures lol, luckily my dad, after a while of me trying to convince him, allowed me get rid of half of it). So in April, after saving up my pennies again, I bought two in-ceiling mounted speakers, and got to work installing them.
This ended up being a lot more messier, and a headache, than I had thought it would be. First off, because our house is almost 80 years old, the drywall covered up the original ceiling which was made of lath and plaster, which made it really messy and a pain in the 🤬! to cut through, and to make matters worse, once I made my two holes using the template for the speakers, I ended up discovering a floor joist running smack dab through it. More cursing ensued. I used a stud finder to locate the joists, but made a silly mistake in scanning for them by going across the ceiling width wise, instead of running it lenthwise along the ceiling.
What I had thought at the time were the joists it was detecting, was nothing more than the 1x2 strapping holding up the drywall.
To fix this mistake, my dad, using a chair, my tool bag, a paint roller handle, and his ingenueity lol, rigged this up (as shown in the picture above) to hold a piece of drywall in place as the plaster was drying once I had moved the hole to a proper location.
As I was waiting for the plaster to dry, then sanded, and then adding a little bit more and repeating until it was strong enough to support the speakers, this gave me time to design and build some shelving. Luckily, because I work at a hardware store, we started carrying a type of melamine that I realized went extremely well with my rosewood coloured tower speakers, and the Brazillian rosewood stained tv stand that I had built, so I went ahead and built two shelving units to custom fit.
Finally after a full week, I was able to install the rear speakers. In this photo I intentionally left one cover off to show how they are actually directed at 30deg towards the back of the seat.
Finally, after a lot of labour (of love)
and money
, my masterpiece was finally complete.
Specs
Receiver: Pioneer Elite VSX-21TXH
TV: 58" Panasonic Plasma TC-P58V10
Speakers:
-Center: Paradigm Monitor CC-290
-L/R Towers: Paradigm Monitor 7
-Sides: Paradigm Monitor ADP-190
-Rear (in ceiling) Paradigm CS-60R-30
Subwoofer: Paradigm PS-1000
I kept the same sub to save some money even though it's 19 years old, and plus, to me at least, it still sounds excellent, and it can still shake the whole house off it's foundation
.
I'm not gonna lie, I knew I wanted the center speaker to be a tight fit, but after measuring a hundred times when creating the opening, a little bit of poo came out when I thought she wasn't gonna go in lol.
The icing on the cake came when my parents, through a friend of a friend who were moving to their new place, sold them their extremely comfortable Lazy-Boy sofa and matching love seat for $100.00
Anyway, my apologies in advance if this post is too long, but I hope you guys enjoyed it.