The Million Dollar room.

[PAF]

Here's a picture of the gear in the adjacent room. View attachment 10117

The company that did that equipment rack should be not be in the business.

Unfortunately, I see this all too frequently: Clients who have spent large sums who receive extraordinarily poor work. At least a couple of hundred thousand dollars was spent on that rack, if not much more.

The vendor should be ashamed.

 

[mep]

They look like standard off-the-shelf 19" racks.

 

[DaveyF]

PAF, I was thinking the same thing when I saw the rack. Plus, the way the gear fits isn't good either. Since the construction of the room alone was $1M, I'm sure this "custom" rack was like you say...a couple of Hundred Thousand dollars or more!
When I first heard the system, about four months ago, I wasn't impressed at all. Sounded like most other large HF system's that I have heard, basically all show and no go

 

[PAF]

Your instincts were dead on. Leaving aside the ill-fitting equipment in the front of the racks that's easiest to see, if you look carefully through the ugly spaces in the racks, you can see loose, unsecured, haphazardly done wiring. I assure you that if we turned those racks around and had a look at the rear, it would be a maze of wire and cable spaghetti.

This is God-awful. And between the Crestron devices that you can see (there's a Digital Media unit, for example, one of Crestron's most sophisticated components - and it requires other sophisticated equipment to operate), the Crestron code that had to be written, the high end Classe and ARC gear, other visible hardware, the labor to install the system and to populate and wire the rack, $200K or even much more could have been spent. Experience tells me that with this level of equipment in the rack, much, much more than $200K was spent - not including the in-theater speakers, screen, projector, etc.

You mentioned that the system doesn't sound very good despite the gear and I'm not surprised. I would bet given what I can see, that the Crestron portion doesn't work reliably either.

A job like this is rightly described by competent custom installation firms as an "abortion." The installer should be sued. Work like this is almost fraud, in my judgment. I feel bad for clients who get taken this way.

 

[DaveyF]

Hi PAF, unfortunately the poor owner passed away recently and I suspect that he never knew that he was ripped off! I met him briefly before his demise and he seemed pretty happy with the system.( I sure wasn't going to burst his bubble) BTW, there are several smaller systems installed throughout the house. I hate to think how much was spent overall with the "designer/installer". Safe to say that someone made a LOT of money.

 

[Bill Hart]

My big home theatre system (which I rarely use any more) is set up with large 19 racks, totally enclosed, fans on the bottom of the doors to bring in air, fans on top to exit the warm air (chimney effect). I was a bear to have these things (two, each the size of a kitchen refrigerator) installed and get the gear placed, fitted and wired. It runs from a 240 volt step down and is isolated from the entirely separate hi-fi in the same room. I do periodic clean-ups of the rack system occasionally, change or refresh the wiring, dust everything inside, etc.
But, for a serious audio system, I would think rack mounting would compromise things. Look at all the discussion we have about decoupling, mechanical and electrical isolation, etc. The racked stuff works fine for what I consider to be non-critical audio use, e.g. supporting sound for a projection video system. And it does a nice job of housing all the video-related gear- small video monitors, video switcher, scaler, video sources, and the audio processor and amps, including subwoofer controller, as well as some amateur recording equipment- mic preamps, compressor, etc.
I would never consider using it for my serious 'stereo.'