If I listen to my wife and get all the other things done around the house first, then I will probably be old and deaf before I get around to building my AV Sound Room. So F&#! it, I am starting it now so I can get some enjoyment out of it.
I have carved out a small section of my basement that will be mine. I have about 17' x 15' with 8.5' ceilings. I have been working in my mind on how to get it done for quite some time and slowly slipping in a piece of equipment here and there hopefully under the radar.. (but she clearly knows about the speakers).
in my past house, I had a large 60" RPTV and located the AV receiver overtop of it. Sound wise it was ok but the level of speakers that I was using clearly were no where near what I have today. In order to minimize the backlash, I have learnt from that experience that all cables and connectors need to be hidden or else SWMBO gets very loud. The flip side to this is that once inside the walls it's very hard to change/upgrade to the next prevailing standard. That might not be a big thing if nothing ever broke or became so obsolete to be impractical to still use.
(Remembering back to the days of SVHS replaced by component made totally obsolete by HDMI 1.0 -- now we are at 2.0 and who knows if we will suddenly switch over to DisplayPort for 8k TV's)So one of my design criteria was to make this setup upgradable to the new standards that I see myself buying into. To facilitate this, I thought it best to run some form of conduit around the outside of the room to pull wires through. The most cost effective one was pvc central vac tubing. Low cost and easy to get parts for.
In the corner of the room there is my electrical panel that will need to be boxed off. I thought it would be also a great place to terminate all my networking cabled as well and just get everything into a single panel area.
Now after thinking about it some more, trying to run all my speaker cables though there as well as the HDMI, toslink, and a pair of RCA there is not going to be any room left in side the conduit. Right now I don't have a replacement TV for this room. My initial thought was to bring back my big RPTV that is on loan to my parents (more that it's a bugger to move and it never made it from my new house).
For speakers, I have the LFR1100, so there are essentially 6 pairs of wire for them, + 2 pairs center. Now would you run an extra 4 pairs to cover the 11.x spec to add in optional Height and Wide front speakers??
For the rears, I have some QS8 for the two side walls and some small directional energy CS mini speakers (4) that I had for surround sound in the last house. My current receiver has support for 7.1 so I will probably hook them up. But do I run spare cable runs to the back to cover optional high + ear level rear surrounds and a couple more for a center rear channel? Running wire now it very cheep compared to trying to fish it after the walls have gone up.
Then there is the side of cable lengths. if you believe the snake oil side of speaker wires (BTW I am pulling 12 gauge) you should have all the speaker pairs with equal lenghts of wire. So if it takes 15' of wire to get to the left front speaker from your amp, then the right front speaker should also have 15' of wire even if the run only needs 8'. This gets compoundly difficult when pulling spare sets and with speakers like the LFR's that have 2 pairs each and could take bi-wiring if you wanted to.
Then I put the question of would the speaker wires really need to be in a conduit at all as if I pull a spare set of wires, then you have some fault tolerance or ability for speaker upgrades if new tech requires more lines.
I know that my AV room is never going to get to the level that most of the posters here seem to build to. I simply don't have the cashflow to fund that level.. but good idea's are always welcome.
