Joe and his wife Marjory live near Portland, Oregon. For 20 years they lived in same house and were always disappointed with the entertainment center in their family room. One day they decided to do something about it.
"We wanted any new setup to have a mixture of high tech and retro flair," Joe says. "To understand our entertainment-center woes, you must understand where we started."
This was their original system. The issues were many, Joe says. It wasn't aesthetically appealing. It took up a lot of space. There were wires going everywhere that were visible from all angles. And lastly, it was almost impossible to work on because everything was hard to get to.
They decided to design a custom cabinet and have it built into the wall. They wanted one that would be aesthetically appealing, take up minimal space and allowing easy access to all the components. The idea was to provide a modern (hidden) wiring solution.
"I'm no carpenter or designer," Joe says, "so I used the closest thing I had to design software (Corel Draw) and hacked together a rudimentary design."
He wanted to add something into the design to obfuscate most of the components while still highlighting those he wanted to be a focal point. This led to the incorporation of screened doors.
Lastly, since this design was going to be built into the wall, he needed to decide how to handle the back side of the cabinet, which protruded through into the adjacent room. He decided shelves would be in order for the back.
They found a couple local contractors to work on the project. One was a cabinet guy who was confident he could turn Joe's design into a workable cabinet. The other was a carpenter who was responsible for creating the hole in the wall and various other remodeling tasks.
Joe was very pleased with the final product. It contains all the components while only protruding 6 inches into the family room.
With the bronze-colored drivers on the Klipsch speakers, removing the grilles produces an even more eye-catching look. Here's a list of all the equipment inside the cabinet:
75-inch Samsung H7150 Series (UN75H7150AF) 2014 LED TV
Klipsch RP-280F floor-standing speakers (pair)
Klipsch R-100SW subwoofer (pair)
Klipsch RP-450C center channel speaker
Klipsch RP-250S surround speakers (2 pair)
Xbox 360
Samsung BD-P1600 3D Blu-ray player
Cable box
Marantz SR7011 receiver
Logitech Harmony Elite remote control with hub & IR blasters
Amcrest UltraHD Shield 2K dual-band Wi-Fi video security IP camera
The television is a 75-inch LED with 1080p resolution.
"We haven't made the jump to 4K, but we have set ourselves up for it," Joe says. "All the components support it. The issue for us is, we like to occasionally watch 3D movies and it is not supported on new TVs, so we'll probably ride this one out for a couple more years before we transition."
The speaker setup is 9.2. However, Joe's ultimate goal is to go full Atmos. The system supports it -- it just requires adding 4 new speakers.
The left side of the cabinet houses the floor-standing speaker (recessed into the wall) as well as various components hidden by the screened door (here shown open).
Joe says they've almost completely cut the cord for television, but where they live they can't get receive a TV signal over the air, which means they still need a cable box for local channels. The components hidden behind the door on the left include this cable box and a Samsung Blu-ray player.
The lower compartment contains an Xbox 360 "for when we get in the mood for some retro gaming," Joe says. In front of the Xbox is an IR blaster for the components on this side of the cabinet.
An upper compartment stores the networking brains of the system. Along with a a NAS drive that streams all their music and videos, there's a cable modem. They've run Ethernet to all their components rather than going wireless.
The white device is a WeMo Maker that adds smart-home functionality to the room.
Joe says they've set up this entire home entertainment system -- and even the fireplace -- to be controlled remotely via smartphone or Alexa.
Joe connected the WeMo Maker in the previous picture to his fireplace on/off switch. Now all Joe has to say is, "Alexa, turn on fireplace" and she fires up the flames, as well as the fireplace fan and an overhead family room fan. Previously, the WeMo was mounted on the wall. Now it's hidden, tucked away inside the cabinet.
"We're PC gamers," Joe says. "In our previous setup, we had a PC in the entertainment center that was big and had a lot of wires that added to the clutter. It's been moved to another room, and we now use the much more compact and sleeker Steam Link to connect to it (or any of three other PCs in the house) for gaming."
In the bottom section there's a container for stowing all their gaming peripherals and ancillary remotes that have been replaced by the Harmony remote.
Let's pull out for a look at the surround setup. The room is pretty large, so getting all the surround speakers in a single picture was a challenge, Joe says. The middle surrounds have their grilles on in this shot.
Joe says: "The sound quality between these surround speakers and the Marantz that drives them leads to a high level of immersion when viewing movies with Dolby or DTS 9.2, while losing no quality when listening to music."
Now let's go into the room behind the entertainment center. As Joe said earlier, this cabinet is built through the wall, so it has a back side to it. As shown in the diagram, this is the bookshelf on the back side.
They now have power wired directly into the cabinet and a 48-inch power strip plugged in to provide all the outlets. This is all hidden behind a backing plane, so it cannot be seen from the front.
The receiver is a hub that almost everything comes into or goes out of. Previously this was a jumbled mess. Now it is cleanly tied back and run along the edges of the cabinet to keep it hidden.
Since all the components are wired to gain maximum throughput, the other major hub on this system is the router. Again, cleanly wired now and hidden from sight.
