AV & Media Room Design

Robert Green · 2007-06-16T19:54:25+00:00

I've come to the somewhat sad conclusion that a media closet just isn't bigenough, especially when Father Time means less agility and willingness tomove around on one's knees or in tight spaces. My next house will need awhole room devoted to PC's, DVD players, etc, etc.Since I'm going to be moving soon, I would like to be more proactive indesigning a whole house AV system than in the past, when things just sort ofgrew together as I acquired them. I envision starting from scratch. Aboutthe only specification I know about in advance is that it will have to be a"wheel-friendly" house like a rancher, preferably with a basement, but notnecessarily.While I realize the end design will be very closely coupled to the spaceavailable, there are certain concerns that are universal. For me, theprimary concern is good access. Has anyone turned a large-walk in closetinto an AV media room? Was it large enough to allow swing-out or roll outequipment racks?I was also thinking that large "frames" like doors made out of pegboardcould divide a room in half so that I could swing them open and access theback panels of the AV gear and provide storage for cables, adapters andother gear. A normal bedroom split in half would work, with the second halfof the room a place for an exercise bike or something that could be easilymoved to one side of the room to allow a panel to swing open. The biggestproblem I see is that a room that had good access to the front and back ofthe equipment stack would really have to have two doors.Another consideration for me is that my dad (who helps with setting up onoccasion) is in a powerchair, and although it's got a pretty narrow turningcircle, it needs room. My dad's chair and my new Roomba's gotten methinking about how important unimpeded access for wheeled devices will be inmy future. I'll have to measure the height, but I think the wheelchair armsareI hate the idea of having to give up a whole bedroom-sized room for AV gearbut there seems to have...

Jun 16, 2007 22 Replies

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Marc_F_Hult 19 years ago

After a burglary relieved us of audio gear (later recovered by the police) and enough of our difficult-to-replace CD collection to serve as a warning, I moved much of the AV equipment into the basement with the other HA infrastructure. And since there is only a crawl space under most of the house and the space in the full basement that does exist is at a premium, I (bravely? naively?) chose to shoehorn all the gear and wiring into an otherwise wasted part of the basement that was poorly accessible owing to the air-handler, boiler, water heater and duct-work. IOW, I created lotsa obstacles to a 'clean' installation. I am once again addressing these realities owing to the partial retirement of CyberHouse and its physical sequelae.

(One advantage of the 'federated, PC-centric approach is that although much of the HA system is disconnected and in boxes on the floor, hanging from the ceiling and/or in my Porch Sale, the What-Me-Worry Napco security system has remained completely unperturbed and fully operational.)

Part of my solution is to use two surplus 5-foot-tall, roller-mounted 19" racks. These are open on all sides which provides excellent cross ventilation, but create yet another challenge/problem -- namely how to connect the moveable racks to the extensive wiring on the wall.

The solution for the 'computer' rack is to connect it to the rest of the world only through a 12 gauge extension cord powering a 120VAC isolation transformer on the rack and two fiber optic cables (one is gigabit ethernet; the other is audio). This tether is long enough to let me move it anywhere in the basement. An important advantage of the galvanic isolation provided by the use of fiber, transformer and rubber wheels is a high level of protection from lighting/transient electrical sub-systems damage. We have suffered repeated equipment failures despite whole-house surge protection at the meter installed by the utility. The damage was partly of and apparently partly because of the plethora low-voltage gizmos attached to the computers.

At last count, the HA system controlled by a PC on this rack had about fifteen RS-232, RS-422 and RS-485 devices. They are no longer connected directly to the PCs, but via

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multiport Ethernet--> RS-xxx hubs which in turn are connected to the PC's via fiber. An added advantage to this approach is that the RS-xxx-connected devices can be controlled by any computer connected to the Internet (as we used to say, "anywhere in the world" ;-). This also provides a means for failover from one computer to another and permits the re-allocation/reconfiguration of individual serial devices from one computer to another with a batch file or a few clicks/keystrokes and without physically unplugging and replugging.

I also 'rolled my own racks' (pun intended) using with 19" rack rails from

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like these

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bolted on to

24x18x6" steel HA 'sandboxes' from our local

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. I'll post some pictures when the HA system looks presentable again. Right now that part of the basement looks like the I35W bridge in Minneapolis.

... Marc Marc_F_Hult HA and Electronics Porch Sale jist beginning at

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RickH 19 years ago

On Jun 16, 2:54 pm, "Robert Green" wrote:

Are you building from scratch or buying an existing home?

If you are buying an existing home then the main concern will be location (and maybe not access) so that any wires do not have to be pulled so far. The home you get will make this decision in spite of what may be ideal for you. You can "pre-think" all you want, but you really wont know what to do until you get into the pre-existing house.

If you are building it yourself then you can do anything you want. In that case dont make the mistake of "pre-wiring" the house. You want to "pre-conduit" the house with minimum 1 inch (or 1.25 inch even better) plastic conduit to each room and 1.5 inch (or even 2 inch) for runs that you know will have to carry more wire, then install all your wires after you move in. I home-ran a conduit trunk line to a box near the floor in each room, then inside each room I ran .75 inch or 1 inch conduit to each phone jack or wall controller, and even ceiling speakers. As for the central connection room, I used the space under the stairway leading to the basement. In there I used plain 19 inch relay racks (with no box cage or cabinet behind them) available from network suppliers. The panels are all std 19 inch and punched out for multimedia jacks, some panels are dedicated cat6. I like these free- standing racks because you have full walk around access front and back and the 19 inch standard offers many shelf and cable management options. I stay clear of the made-for-home structured wiring setups like Leviton, etc only because you are stuck forever using their gear in them and they get drywalled over and they only allow a few pipes in, and are just too tight. My under stair media closet has all the conduit terminating directly over the center line of the racks which are lined up in the center of the area which is about 6 feet wide by

12 feet deep, this gives me almost 3 feet of walk around space on both sides of the rack row. With all wires dropping in from the ceiling, I can repull new wires any time I want from any room I want. In fact some of my rooms are not even wired up yet because we have not needed a tv there yet.

In our area electrical code requires conduit, my electrician installed all his conduit and no wires until the drywall was fully installed. I got the idea from him to do it this way and its the best decision I made. As it always seemed silly to me the way HA consultants tell you to "pre-wire", then the day you need to get new wire in the wall you're screwed because you didn't use conduit.

Just my .02 cents from a do it yourselfer.

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