Brand new house. Wiring and home theater advice? (1 Viewer)

This is for a 2200 square foot, two story new construction house in Massachusetts. Foundation is laid and the frame is up. I am doing a walk-through to review everything before any walls go up inside.

My initial goal was to future-proof the electronics as much as possible. I expected that the best option would be to have conduit run through the walls, connecting from room to room and floor to floor. That way I could snake cables relatively easily as standards change. Not sure if it's worth it to run dedicated Coax, Cat6, and/or HDMI on it's own, or just stick with the conduits.

I'm unsure about whether I should put speakers directly into the walls / ceilings or not. It seems like a decent idea in the Living Room, which will have couch and big TV. I'm also unsure about where all the components should go in the Living Room. We could build a small closet or something into the wall to hide components, and mount the TV on the wall. Seems like a good idea, barring any extra construction costs. Advice on those thoughts?

Basement will be unfinished so I can come back around to doing that later. For the first year or so we will be doing home theater in the ground floor living room.

I'm planning to cut the cord and skip cable/sat TV. Plan to mount an antenna in the attic and stream the rest of my content. I already get most of my content online.

I'm thinking about mounting TVs in most rooms to connect to media centers and use as digital picture frames. I do this today on a single 22 inch TV. It works fine so far using Raspberry PI and Plex media sharing.

Any advice people have is greatly appreciated.

I recommend against built ins unless you absolutely have no other choice. Free standing speakers are almost always going to be more flexible and sound better.

I'm planning to cut the cord and skip cable/sat TV. Plan to mount an antenna in the attic and stream the rest of my content. I already get most of my content online.

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There are some ATSC tuners for PCs where the software will act as a DVR. You can then stream the programs out to your media players at each TV.

Another tip.

If you decide to run conduit, it's pretty damn flexible and often times long runs can be made without 90's. If you must make the bends, use 45's vs. 90's or least "sweep" 90's (or 2 x 45's) to achieve the same results.

When I built this house here I bought a spool of 50m 12ga. wire and ran it inside flat pvc conduit under the floor tiles as there are no carpet or basements here.


I knew where the sound stage would probably be and started from there for surrounds, rears and subs.

I ran additional lines up the cutout in the concrete walls to the perimeter soffit overhead for future needs.


I'm pretty much covered no matter what I decide and if I don't use some of the lines, so be it.


My thoughts were it's better to over wire during the build than pull the wires thru the conduit in the future.


Good luck in your endeavor.


Ahhh, to have the luxury of basements, attics or even framed walls to deal with.