Massive Changes

Gentle reader,

A short while back, I had an idea and expressed it to Nancy. Her reply, "I love it! Let's do it!"

The idea was to move the HD TV home theater setup to the living room and move the stereo to the den. Thus creating two things: Better seating and more seating capacity for TV/movie watching and a dedicated listening room. We have succeeded in both.

First let me show you what the den looked like before:

You can see the Ikea chairs and ottomans. I wanted a red one. The TV stand matches the rest of the wood, but is from a specialty audio/video furniture company. Also note the two steering wheels/pedal assemblies I made.
The one on the right was the first one I made. It's aluminum square tubing as well as wooden platforms and is collapsible. The one on the left was collapsible, but since I used thinner materials, I had to add a brace from side to side to stiffen it. Now, here is the room set up in "race" mode:
Now, take a look at the couch we have in the living room. We bought it, matching love seat and three tables right after leaving closing when we bought the house. They both are recliners. The couch's center back also folds down and has cup-holders, a speaker phone and the couch also vibrates for massage. Here it is open and ready for use:
Next is the home theater setup in the living room. For visual subtlety, I have returned to the Infinity small silver speakers we started out with. They sound great and are all factory matched sonically.
Here is a wider view with the red chair in situ as well. The chair is darker red than it appears in the photo and is a closer match to the couch:
Now, here's what the den converted to listening room looks like:
I have since these photos were made, moved the big DCM speakers in there with the wonderful BOSE 301s on top of them. I moved the little ones (Lyric/Eosone) back in here tilted back with the spikes. The now empty (again) Optimus Pro boxes may be cut up and made into stands for the BOSE speakers.
I have moved the sub-woofer, a nice 12" unit up from the family room and wired the BOSE speakers through the subwoofer. It reinforces the bottom end of the spectrum that the BOSE units can't quite reach.

I disassembled the family room home theater and am selling off everything we are not currently using. Having two home theaters and a high-end stereo was nice, but silly.

Below you will see the two YAMAHA receivers. The larger one, was used in the den and weighs almost 50 pounds! It is more powerful, 7.1 verses 5.1 and newer than the smaller one that was in the family room driving the BOSE 301s.

So, why have I gone smaller/less powerful? For some reason the big one will not play in stereo, only surround. And unless the source is encoded in some surround mode, it only plays through the center, sub and rears. No front main speakers!

The smaller one, an RX-V493, has something the larger, RX-V2092 does not: Six separate inputs for SACD discs. It also processes six channel (5.1) through those six inputs. The larger one relied on digital coaxial or optical input for surround mode.

Here are images of the two. Note the size and input/output differences:
As I type, there are two center channel, two pairs of surround speakers and a turntable plus the large beast above set to start auctions on eBay this Sunday evening.

Here's an additional photo now with the DCM KX-12 speakers and the BOSE 301 speakers now mounted on the wall. Both sets having been laser aligned with the listening chair so that the tweeters point directly at the listeners ears:

Lastly, if you look at the living room images again, you'll see the "umbilical cord" (Nancy's description) speaker wires have been replaced up the wall by Monster brand. I needed the twisted pair ones to wire in the subwoofer in the listening room.

Also, I placed the HD Radio tuner attached to the receiver so that I can still listen to it and other music in here. The best of both worlds and we are ridding ourselves of a lot of audio equipment.

Thanks for looking!

Scott