This post has been a long time in the making. My sound room, short of equipment placement and sound treatment, is now complete. I’d like to thank everyone here who, knowingly or not, helped me with various comments I’d read over the years about you all improving your own rooms.
Most especially I’d like to thank @Kingrex for his power distribution design for my room. But I’ll get to that in a moment.
For the last almost 40 years as an audiophile my listening space was always a compromise - usually a family room, often with poor acoustic possibilities. My last space in my old house, for example was a wonderfully sized 17’ x 24’ x 8’, but was a disaster otherwise. Wall mirror and fireplace on one side, half height wall leading into the kitchen on another, a ceiling drop header halfway between the listener and the speakers, one speaker back firing into a corner, the other into an open space. I’m honestly amazed that I was able to get any sort of impressive sound in an arrangement like this (not really, I’ve gotten reasonably good at this over the years!
).
With my retirement came a new home, with a 14’ x 16’ x 9’ space that I had selected for my new dedicated sound room. Some of you reading this may recall a year or so ago my discussion about the possibility of merging two other rooms, which would have given me a bigger 14’ x 23’ space, but I decided against that for several reasons. That approach would have yielded, once again, a non-ideal space IMO. One outside wall on one side, one inside wall on the other, and an asymmetrical wall behind the speakers. On top of all that, the AC compresser is right outside that part of the house, and the laundry room in the room behind the speaker wall. But the big decision maker for me was putting the first, interim, listening setup in this 14’ x 16’ room. With three exterior walls (left, right, speaker) and symmetry, it sounded - even on initial listening - absolutely wonderful. Beautifully even spatially, excellent frequency balance, very satisfying low end performance… it was enough for me to drive my decision.
Here in the first pic is the room in its “first year” interim listening form. Even my audio friends who came to listen liked what they heard (although I suspect the Pass gear and the VSA E SEs had a lot to do with that).
I contacted Rex and we worked out a solution for providing the room with six dedicated 20A circuits. It involved doing a run directly from my outside box to a new dedicated subpanel. We did not feed this from the house subpanel. I purchased most of the material myself after discussion and concurrence from Rex. NM-B 2 AWG copper with an 8 AWG solid copper ground was used from the outside box to the new subpanel, which is located in the hallway just outside my sound room. The box and its innards was supplied by Rex, along with the specially wound triple 10 AWG solid core THHN used for each circuit run. Each circuit was run in its own 1/2” “Smurf” tube. All outlet boxes are plastic - no additional ground points in metal outlet boxes. As the three exterior walls have very little room behind the drywall, those runs were fed into Wiremold raceways and into surface mount Wiremold boxes. All boxes are very large to deal with the hard to wrestle solid core 10 gauge. The wire goes directly into 6 CruzeFIRST Maestro outlets. I don’t want to get into an outlet fight , but in my own testing of Furutech, Oyiade, other outlets, and Maestros, I liked these the best for my system. I can get into how I made that decision, if asked. The next several pics show some of the electrical aspects.
As to the room, yes it will be treated, but I went with a wall to wall carpet, which is over an 8 pound pad, which itself is over a sound dampening underlayment. I discovered how useful this was during my year of temporary listening in this space. I originally had two 8x10 rugs covering most of the floor, but heard the improvement immediately when I pulled the equipment out and put underlayment under these rugs. So that was on the list even with the new carpet. The French doors are Jeld-wen ProCore solid core doors. No hollow core doors for this room! The last pics show the underlayment and the room in its finished form.
Oh. I kept the old electrical circuit from the main subpanel in place. It now gives me a completely independent circuit for the fan, lights, accessories, etc. I thought that was pretty clever of me.
So those are the highlights to the whole story. I was fortunate to have had a great electrical company do my work. The owner of the company and master electrician for my job were both very interested in this “not your every day” electrical job, but most importantly were willing to work with me collaboratively. It was a good partnership.
I know I don’t have the grandest of systems, or rooms, compared to some here on WBF (and believe me I’ve drooled over some of them!), but for me it checks all the boxes. I’m waiting for my Adona rack before it all goes together back into the new room. Special thanks to Rex for his expertise! Rex, I hand it over to you for anything you’d care to add.
Most especially I’d like to thank @Kingrex for his power distribution design for my room. But I’ll get to that in a moment.
For the last almost 40 years as an audiophile my listening space was always a compromise - usually a family room, often with poor acoustic possibilities. My last space in my old house, for example was a wonderfully sized 17’ x 24’ x 8’, but was a disaster otherwise. Wall mirror and fireplace on one side, half height wall leading into the kitchen on another, a ceiling drop header halfway between the listener and the speakers, one speaker back firing into a corner, the other into an open space. I’m honestly amazed that I was able to get any sort of impressive sound in an arrangement like this (not really, I’ve gotten reasonably good at this over the years!
).With my retirement came a new home, with a 14’ x 16’ x 9’ space that I had selected for my new dedicated sound room. Some of you reading this may recall a year or so ago my discussion about the possibility of merging two other rooms, which would have given me a bigger 14’ x 23’ space, but I decided against that for several reasons. That approach would have yielded, once again, a non-ideal space IMO. One outside wall on one side, one inside wall on the other, and an asymmetrical wall behind the speakers. On top of all that, the AC compresser is right outside that part of the house, and the laundry room in the room behind the speaker wall. But the big decision maker for me was putting the first, interim, listening setup in this 14’ x 16’ room. With three exterior walls (left, right, speaker) and symmetry, it sounded - even on initial listening - absolutely wonderful. Beautifully even spatially, excellent frequency balance, very satisfying low end performance… it was enough for me to drive my decision.
Here in the first pic is the room in its “first year” interim listening form. Even my audio friends who came to listen liked what they heard (although I suspect the Pass gear and the VSA E SEs had a lot to do with that
).I contacted Rex and we worked out a solution for providing the room with six dedicated 20A circuits. It involved doing a run directly from my outside box to a new dedicated subpanel. We did not feed this from the house subpanel. I purchased most of the material myself after discussion and concurrence from Rex. NM-B 2 AWG copper with an 8 AWG solid copper ground was used from the outside box to the new subpanel, which is located in the hallway just outside my sound room. The box and its innards was supplied by Rex, along with the specially wound triple 10 AWG solid core THHN used for each circuit run. Each circuit was run in its own 1/2” “Smurf” tube. All outlet boxes are plastic - no additional ground points in metal outlet boxes. As the three exterior walls have very little room behind the drywall, those runs were fed into Wiremold raceways and into surface mount Wiremold boxes. All boxes are very large to deal with the hard to wrestle solid core 10 gauge. The wire goes directly into 6 CruzeFIRST Maestro outlets. I don’t want to get into an outlet fight , but in my own testing of Furutech, Oyiade, other outlets, and Maestros, I liked these the best for my system. I can get into how I made that decision, if asked. The next several pics show some of the electrical aspects.
As to the room, yes it will be treated, but I went with a wall to wall carpet, which is over an 8 pound pad, which itself is over a sound dampening underlayment. I discovered how useful this was during my year of temporary listening in this space. I originally had two 8x10 rugs covering most of the floor, but heard the improvement immediately when I pulled the equipment out and put underlayment under these rugs. So that was on the list even with the new carpet. The French doors are Jeld-wen ProCore solid core doors. No hollow core doors for this room! The last pics show the underlayment and the room in its finished form.
Oh. I kept the old electrical circuit from the main subpanel in place. It now gives me a completely independent circuit for the fan, lights, accessories, etc. I thought that was pretty clever of me.
So those are the highlights to the whole story. I was fortunate to have had a great electrical company do my work. The owner of the company and master electrician for my job were both very interested in this “not your every day” electrical job, but most importantly were willing to work with me collaboratively. It was a good partnership.
I know I don’t have the grandest of systems, or rooms, compared to some here on WBF (and believe me I’ve drooled over some of them!), but for me it checks all the boxes. I’m waiting for my Adona rack before it all goes together back into the new room. Special thanks to Rex for his expertise! Rex, I hand it over to you for anything you’d care to add.
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