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Low Voltage Home Pre-Wire Guide:

Audio System Design

The design for the whole house audio system and the media room ("home theater" to-be, perhaps) came mostly from SoundTrack's Custom Home consultant. SoundTrack is a chain of audio/video stores in Colorado. They have a "Custom Home" division in Denver whose purpose is to design and install custom audio systems for home theaters and whole-house audio. I paid about $300 for the consultant to design and draw up a nice set of wiring schematics for both the media room and the whole-house audio system (though he later said he would not do plans on such a scale for a mere $300 anymore). The $300 for design was later directly and completely credited against components purchased by me from SoundTrack (such as volume controls and speakers, or audio components such as amplifiers or A/V distribution systems). Thus, it is kind of an "enforced" way of ensuring that we come back to them to buy at least some equipment. Though other local shops (such as Listen Up) also provide consulting services without the "formal" up-front monetary commitment, I was very impressed with SoundTrack's formal CAD-generated schematics and wiring lists. I was provided with an overall schematic of the whole house, including all speakers, volume controls and A/B switches, and TVs. In addition, a separate schematic page was generated for each room showing each wire (with it's wire type designation) and the component for which the wire was destined. A very accurate estimate of total wire length needed for the project was listed, based on house plans I supplied, along with each wire type's description and cost.

Normally, SoundTrack installs their own wire according to their design. However, to save costs, I wanted to do the wiring ourselves with the help of friends and relatives. Since SoundTrack sometimes generates the schematics for remote sites where their installers do not normally go, they were willing to just provide the schematics for the $300. Their original rough estimate for the entire house was about $2600 (material and labor) for the pre-wire installation, about half of which would be installation (later he estimated about $800-$1000 for installation labor alone). He figured it would take two experienced installers 2 days to do the audio wiring. However, this original design was not the complete version we ended up installing (for example, it included only a single run of coax to each TV, where we actually installed two runs per TV), and did not cover phone/data wiring. The $300 I paid for the design included a considerable amount of consulting time (three in-person consultations on the design and many phone calls) and the consultant was available on-call during our actual installation. I thought it was well worth the price, especially since it was later applied toward equipment (but not wire, a low-profit item).