Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater HT Installation

Speakers will be coming soon (supposed to ship tomorrow, I'll be watching my email), any recommendations for hiring an installer? I don't see myself running wires through the walls or mounting the surrounds since I have no experience, although I suppose it would be doable, given that there's an open attic above.

Do Best Buy or Circuit City do a good job?

Should I play with the location of the surrounds to see what they sound like before hiring someone to mount them permanently?

Thanks for any and all ideas.

To your second question, yes, do play with the location before you mount them.

SK - I think the Best Buy and CC crews vary significantly from one location to another. My experience with BB's custom install shop was not impressive, but in my case it came down to poor customer service more than technical incompetence.

Long story short, I paid $100 for their in-home consultation. They came, did a big review (and the guy who came seemed competent, though he had a very limited selection of equipment from which he chose his recommendations -- i.e. things Best Buy sold lots of). Thereafter, I never heard from him again with his final recommendations and proposal. After 2 weeks, I went in and asked for my money back, and to their credit they apologized and gave it to me.

With that diatribe out of the way, if you don't feel comfortable doing the wire fishing and don't mind spending a few hundred dollars for someone to do the wiring, I'd at least recommend you find a Best Buy with a "Magnolia" custom installers department as I found the teams there a lot more competent than the normal in-store BB guys. I believe they had a package price for a 5 or 7 speaker wire and install at the time that was between $300 and $500.

If the holes hadn't been pre-drilled in my room, I would have hired it out as well as I'm pretty sure I could not have wired them cleanly myself.

Jason

Hey thanks Jason,

That's helpful as my town has the regular BB guys but the next town just across the lake has the Magnolia crew, it's close enough that they probably would make the journey. Mainly I just want them to run the wires for 4 surrounds and perhaps one sub--depending upon results of the subwoofer crawl, if I can even accomplish one with the 800.

Did you find the info from the initial consult helpful in terms of room setup ideas or was it just mainly a sales pitch?

Sounds good, is there some way to experiment with the height of the surrounds before install other than adjustable stands which I don't have?

A ladder. Seriously, just make sure the speakers fit on the steps.

SK - actually it was pretty helpful as it allowed me to bounce a lot of my ideas off of someone who knew more than I did about this stuff (and the guy who came did).

Plus, they were willing to take the $100 fee and apply it towards any purchase I made through BB (it had to be of a certain value to qualify, and I think it could be applied on hardware only. I can't remember if you can put it against services too).

I got the impression that most of the consultation was designed to help recommend equipment, but in my case I had a lot of questions about screen size and height, room orientation, (for awhile I was considering putting the screen on the other wall) and speaker location. The guy who came did help provide suggestions on all of these areas, so it wasn't a total loss. It was everything that followed that was disappointing.

It's probably worth giving them a call to see what the options are. The one reason BB did appeal to me is that at least there was a big company backing up the service... if they managed to screw something up, I knew there would at least be a company there to back up and correct the mistake.

Jason

That's what I read, so does that mean like 2 ladders, one for each rear surround? I probably need to get another ladder anyway now that we have these tall ceilings.

SatKartr - didn't you mention you had really high vaulted ceilings on which you were mounting the QS8s, or are there walls where you can install them as well? If you're looking to test at ceiling height, that might be a bit more challenging.

Jason

Well I think the walls are going to work for the surrounds with the exception of the right (?) surround. JC said they don't all need to be at the same height, as long as you adjust the volume in the setup to equalize the db levels.

The right surround will be installed on the ceiling of the "dining room", it is really just one big room, but that 1000 cu ft piece of to the right side has a 10 ft rather than a 12 foot ceiling so I was thinking about mounting that one on the ceiling and angling down (no testing there, just have to bank on the "forgiveness" of the QS8s), while putting the rear surrounds and left surround somewhat lower on the walls to conform more to an idealized Dolby setup, those are the ones I would experiment with speaker height.