A Magnificent Focal Sopra 3 Speaker Installation

Yesterday we installed a beautiful pair of Focal Sopra 3 speakers for a great customer and friend Bill Galloway.

Bill and I have been working together on his listening system over the past 15 years or so. Each year we have performed at least one component upgrade. Bill obviously loves his music and it has been both fun and interesting hearing these upgrades and getting his feedback.

We are using our Aesthetix Mimas for the preamp and amplifier, our Clear Audio turntable and a Meridian Audio music library running currently with their Sooloos software. Nordost interconnects, cabling and line conditioning tie this beautiful system together. The Sopra 3’s along with our JL Audio F112 subwoofer fill this room with a spacious, realistic music presence that anyone could appreciate and enjoy.

Bill recently retired so he now has plenty of time to enjoy his listening room and share it with friends and family.

Thanks again Bill for everything and allowing us to share this post.

Local Magazine Features Nuts About Hi-Fi

West Sound Home & Garden magazine just did a wonderful feature story on us and the state-of-the-art, entire home, audio / video installation we’ve been designing and installing for the past couple of years. We’re providing a few snippets from the article, but you should read the whole thing. You’ll get the full picture of what we can do to make your audio/video dreams come true. Here’s a link to the article:

Serious About Home Entertainment

A few samples from the article:

The audio/video components also include hard drives large enough to store literally thousands of movies and music in their full, uncompressed, original formats.

The heart of their home would center around music and home entertainment to bring friends and family together for fun and memory-making. They wanted entertainment of all kinds: a billiard table, golf-simulation games, music and movies both indoors and out. To make that particular part of the dream come true, they hired Jim Lee and his crew at Nuts About Hi-Fi.

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From start to finish, this project took two years. Lee, Krawoski and Huson spent around 20 hours talking, demonstrating and designing with their clients. The project fills three closets with equipment racks to manage the seven-zone, surround-sound system and screens. No room in the home was left out of the plan, including the garage. The zones can operate as a whole-house system or as individual rooms.

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Once the system is installed, the equipment is balanced to the acoustics of each room. The Nuts About HiFi team live for the moment when they finally crank up the sound system for their clients. These two broke into wonderous smiles and danced to the music.

Cozy fire pit enhanced with custom-designed barrel speakers. The subwoofer satellite-speaker system provides a very warm, full-range music presentation even when played at a low volume.

Barrel Speakers Have Arrived!

Here are a few photos of our new line of Barrel Speakers we just installed yesterday.
These “Basso” subwoofers and “Festa” outdoor monitors were custom finished in “Rustic Walnut” to match the surrounding wood work. Barrel Speakers are a brilliant idea and look gorgeous, they have definitely arrived!

Double Feature

What do you do when you have a Media Room downstairs, but you like to entertain on the main floor of your house? Logically, you remodel your Living Room to turn it into a secondary Media Room. The major problem with living rooms and projection systems is ambient light. That’s where Screen Innovations comes in with their vast screen materials and mounting options. Black Diamond material is the perfect solution for rooms with a lot of light and still having a vibrant image. And the Zero Edge Pro with RGB lighting gives a clean elegant finish.

Because this room will have high traffic, we wanted the speakers and equipment to be out of the way. The Middle Atlantic Essex audio rack housing all of the electronics and networking for the house is hidden in the hallway closet. For speakers, there are three Focal 300LCR6’s for the fronts, four Focal 300IW6 for the surrounds, four Focal 300ICW8 for Atoms, and four JL Audio Dominion 10’s for subwoofers. The front stereo speakers and stereo subwoofers are powered from Marantz’s PM8006 stereo integrated. The rest of the surround sound is powered by Marantz’s SR8012 flagship Audio Video Receiver. Araknis Networking is making sure everything and everyone is connected. Total Control 2.0 from Universal Remote Control Inc. is making everything easy to control from anywhere in the house.

The second part of this system design was what to do for a projector. We already had a good projector downstairs and needed a new one upstairs. So we moved the existing JVC RS57 projector upstairs and installed a new JVC RS3000 8K projector downstairs. The picture improvement on the new projector is amazing. And with 8K e-shift, all of your media is crystal clear.