Bought a home with pre-wired basement - still too dumb to know how to hook everything up (1 Viewer)

[Magic_Turtle]

As the subject suggests, I felt blessed that I was able to move into a house with a prewired home theater system. I thought I would easily figure how to connect everything, but it turns out what I am missing is the basic intelligence necessary to figure out what I am missing!

What I need is *anyone's* insight into what wiring/connectors I still need to get the projector and four surround sound speakers working with the (also included) receiver.

For reference, what I can tell is that there are:

• Four speakers in each corner, all wired in-wall
• A projector, wired in-wall
• 2 wall plates, labeled
• 2 electric boxes
• A "loose" center speaker that is not fastened to the wall
• A receiver and subwoofer

I can see that four cables that are plugged into the projector, all labeled.

Those four above match the cables that are coming out of this Electrical box, but there is a 5th cable on this end whose plug looks foreign to me (like a female end to a coaxial cable)

This is the other Electric box that is centered at the bottom of the wall the projector screen would project. 2 additional plugs that look to me like the 5th cable above

These plate receptacles must be the in-wall wiring for the four corner speakers, but I don't know why there is a Center(CT) since the center speaker is not wired into the wall.

Aside of the two sets of wires connected to the wall plate, I have no additional wires to work with.

I feel like I need to invest in some 14gauage speaker wire and banana plugs, but I am honestly as a loss as to what goes where.

An embarrassed patron of high quality sound,

Jonathan

 

[John Dirk]

Welcome!

You really have been blessed as someone left you a pretty sweet setup behind. I also left a pre-wired room when I sold my previous home. After we completed the closing, I exchanged information with the new owner and came back to help him with a few things. If you have the option, I would highly suggest trying this approach with your seller.

What I can see from the pics...

• Your projector seems to be wired for both composite and component [RGB] video. HDMI would be preferable and the projector seems to support it, but I don't see a cable for that, which is unfortunate. It also appears to have a wireless dongle [or maybe firestick, etc.] connected in back and what appears to be an IR receiver for use with a remote. You said these cables were labeled. If so, what do the labels say?
• The coaxial cables are likely meant for TV tuners or DVR's, which may have connected to a HTPC [Home Theater PC] or Set Top Box that was not left behind. Hard to tell since the 3rd pic posted is not very clear.
• The in-wall speaker wiring may be useable but you should consider standalone speakers as in-wall quality is usually not very good. Looks like you have standard 5.1 [LF, RF, CT, RB, LB, SB] wiring. As you probably already know, LF and RF mean left front and right front respectively and CT means center. RB and LB should probably be used for surround right and surround left and SB means subwoofer. The center speaker may not be in-wall like the others but it still needs to be wired to the receiver.

Speaking of the receiver, a picture of its rear panel would help immensely in determining what is needed to get things up and running.