My saga about getting my audio system installed continues. First, the installer I was going to use was in Florida doing hurricane repair work. Next he called a co-worker who was supposed to call me. A week later, I still hadn’t heard from the co-worker. Next, I called Dr. Electric and they pointed me to a company called Audio Impact. I called them and got a fax machine; they never returned my email. Next, I called Mastercraft where I bought all the equipment and one of their installers was going to help me out at night/weekends. He never called me back. The my original installer called back to apologize for his co-worker. He might be able to do the work in a week or two; OK, he’s a backup. Next I called Missions Hills TV & Radio Repair. They’re backlogged for about 2 weeks. However, they sound most promising. So next week I’ll call around and see if I can find someone. This project is just turning into a nightmare.

I managed to run some more cable today; the runs were to outdoor speakers and quite straightforward, but time consuming. I need to remember to carefully label the wires at both ends. I ended up having to use an Ohm meter twice to get the correct labels on the wires. I felt real stupid as I already did this once before in my wiring project. I’m trying to find a professional to a bit more of the wiring as many of the remaining 17 runs are a bit complicated and a little more than I can handle.

I made a little more progress today; I pulled 3 more runs. The first being the Cat 6 for my office; that was easy as I was just replacing some Cat 5. The next 2 proved very challenging as I had to spend time in the sweltering hot attic. After a few tries attempting to fish the wires down the wall in the attic, I remembered I had a 3 ft drill bit my dad let me borrow. That did the trick to get the wires where I needed. In this particular room, I decided to use a low voltage add on box that clips to a regular box. Getting it in was a little tricky, but doable. The volume control had to be nudged into the box as the add on box must have been designed for low voltage outlets or something else with lots of wiggle room. However, when I went to put the cover plate on, I realized that the original box was a bit wider than normal boxes, so the cover plate didn’t fit. A little work with a drill on another switch to move the mounting holes yielded a perfect fit. Despite the extra work involved, I really like the look of the light switch and volume control in one cover plate. I’m not sure if I’m going to do this for the other 3 that I have like this.

I couldn’t sleep last night and finally realized why. In all my planning for the audio system, I seem to have left out connectors for half the speakers. I planned for one wire for left and one wire for right. Obviously there are two wires for right and two for left. That means I need to order more connectors from DeepSurplus and goto Home Depot to get some more low voltage boxes. I feel like such an idiot; this project probably would get done much faster and correct the first time if I hired a professional, but then I wouldn’t get the joy of knowing I did most of the work myself.

Since I had some spare time this weekend and still don’t have anyone to pull my cable, I went ahead and started tackling the project. First off, I installed a light switch (not really part of the audio system, but part of moving our family room) which only took 3 hours; it shouldn’t have taken that long, but getting the old single gang box out took far longer than it should have and getting all the wires back in was a royal pain. Next up, I decided to run a few runs of cable. This turned out to be an interesting task. I knew there was some access to our walls from the garage and had been told by the previous owner that the owner before him had a darkroom in the back of a storage area; this got drywalled in some time ago. I chopped out some drywall and discovered the “hidden” room. Running the wires was relatively easy, but extremely time consuming. 2 runs down, 26 more to go.

Putting in the first speaker control turned out to be challenging. I cut in the low voltage box, wired up the Cat 5 and tried to put the control in the low voltage box. Unfortunately the company that makes the low voltage box (Carlson) must never have talked to the company that made the control box (Russound) as the low voltage box was a few millimeters too small! The volume control box is huge because it contains an amplifier (it’s an A-BUS control); after a little modification of the low voltage box, I managed to get it installed.

More pictures are in the gallery. Hopefully this week I’ll be able to run some more cable.