Home Ent Ctr - heat and speaker help (1 Viewer)

[Don.P]

I want to setup all my HT components in a Home Entertainment center. After looking at several at the local furniture stores I've decided to have one custom built. The Audio/Video store I'm buying my components from offers custom built cabinets.

I have some concerns. I plan to have doors in front of the components. Will heat be a problem? Should I have fans installed. Is fan noise a problem?

I would like to house the left, right and center speakers in the cabinet behind doors with cloth inserts. Is this a bad idea? Are there speakers available that are made specifically for this type of installation?

I don't want to spend all this money on components and wind up with a heat problem or lousy sound.

Thanks for reading. Any help will be appreciated.

My components:
Pioneer Elite 50" plasma
Yamaha RX-V2600 receiver
Denon DVD-2910 DVD player
HDTV cable box
Cable DVDR (Tivo)
Monster HTS-3600 Stage 3 Clean Power
Universal Remote MX850 w/MRF-300 base station

Don

 

[Dick Knisely]

Yes, there are and I've seen them but I personally would never use them. Putting a speaker in another enclosure is IMHO just asking for trouble and don't even think about it for the sub unless the base of the cabinet is a concrete slab
I looked into what you're planning to do but I found the custom cabinet work to be prohibitively expensive. If you haven't already got it make sure you get a not-to-exceed price quote up front preferably with a big chunk of the price paid only on your acceptance.

Good luck!

 

[ChrisWiggles]

Heat is a problem in enclose cabinets. Make sure the back is open enough if you have a lot of gear in there, especially with hot stuff like a lot of amps. Fans have been employed in these situations by crafty folks to great effects in the past.

Putting speakers in cabinets or bookshelves is never a good idea sound-wise, depending on how picky you are, it may not be a big deal though. If you're mainly into movies, I think you'll be ok, but if you listen to a lot of music and care about imaging putting speakers into a cabinet or shelf or something like that is the worst possible thing you can do.

 

[Lew Crippen]

At the least make sure that your speakers are not rear-ported. Front ports or no ports should be OK, if not ideal.

 

[Don.P]

Dick, Chris and Lew,

I appreciate you taking the time and for you thoughtful responses. I have decided not to house the speakers in the cabinet. I have a Polk CC and pair of LS-70s I will use for the time being. I'm going to have a cabinet made and will have louvered doors and cutouts to address the heat problem as you suggested.

Thanks again

Don

 

[joseph westcott]

Great decision!

The biggest mistake I see on most home theater installations is placing speakers to close to the floor, to close to the walls, or worse, inside the wall or an entertainment center.

All of these issues can lead to muddy and boomy bass. There are some speakers made for this particular purpose but your choices are very limited. They usually have a switch to change the bass output for in wall installations.

Think of speakers as putting out sound in a spherical pattern around the speaker. In an ideal world, speakers would be 13 of the way into the room and 13 the distance from each side wall. This obviously is not going to work in most rooms but it gives you an idea how much affect room interaction has with speakers. Do not let someone mislead you into thinking a frontrear ported speaker makes a difference.