Saturday, February 28, 2009

Home Theater

Some people think I just hook up DVD players and TVs at my job. This is partly true. But for the next two months (if I am working here that long) I will be stuck in a rack room with one other installer working on hooking up a system. This is one of the biggest systems in the US and costs more than ten times what my home is worth.

The pictures below show the progress made in the last two weeks. It doesn't seem like much for 80 hours of work but we have to run one wire at a time and cut each to a custom length. If we didn't it would just end up as a rats nest of wiring and would be impossible to service in the future.

The top two pictures are of the amplifier rack for the distributed audio for the house. There are 18 16-channel amps. There are 200+ speakers in the house plus subwoofers so the system needs a lot of juice. Each channel gets a Left and Right RCA cable, a Left and Right Speaker cable and each amp is connected to the Network with a Cat 5 wire.
The bottom picture is a fully switchable 256 channel audio matrix switcher. There are only 3 of these systems in houses on earth. One is in the Ukraine (oil magnate), one is in the Middle East (oil magnate) and the one here in Big Sky (hotel magnate). This little baby costs 250K and is most commonly used in millitary applications like NORAD where you need to distribute audio and video to hundreds of TVs. Anyway, the switcher lets you send any source to any speaker independently of every other speaker. What this means is that in this house, every single audio zone can play a different source at the same time.
Geeky post but I thought you might like to see what installers really spend most of their time doing.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Troy,

What craftsmanship! I would love to follow you around for a day and see the work that you do...do you enjoy doing this???

-Tony H