Installations

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 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.

We received this message from one of our great customers:

Following expert project management and expert installation of two Episode landscape speakers, and one Episode below ground subwoofer, one very satisfied client in support of my fire pit project.

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!

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.

Recently, one of our great customers decided it was time to upgrade his projector in the Media Room. After considering all the options he decided to go with the JVC DLA-RS4500 Native 4K Laser Light D-ILA Projector. With 20,000 hours of illumination at high power, replacing bulbs are a thing of the past. The output of 3,000 Lumens helps make the images pop off the Screen Innovation Slate Motorized Screen, even with ambient room lighting. And as always, JVC has the best native contrast ratios, giving the best possible black levels. And because this projector uses a laser, its dynamic contrast ratio is infinity : 1! The overall image quality delivered is purely spectacular.

We recently wrapped up an extensive audio/video system for one of our best customer’s newly remodeled home. Making all of the equipment hidden was an important requirement for this house. This is achieved by hiding all of electronics in the downstairs Media Room cabinets. Including the Marantz receivers, Kaleidescape Movie Server, Roku Ultras, Sooloos, and Pakedge networking. All of the speakers are in-wall mounted, including the JL Audio subwoofer in the living room.

The video for the living room and master bedroom are done with Samsung’s The Frame TVs with custom dark wood matching bezels, allowing the TVs to look like art pieces when not in use.

URC’s Total Control keypads and remotes are installed throughout, but you can always control the system with your phone or tablet.

Focal 300 Series in-wall speakers are throughout the whole house adding to the fun factor.

For the Media Room, a pairing of JVC and Screen Innovations bring the movie off the wall. The full Dolby Atmos system is running through a Marantz AV8805, AnthemAV A Series amplifiers, Focal IW1002BE speakers, and two JL Audio Fathom F113 subwoofers. Let’s just say, this room rocks! We are really happy with how this house came together, hope you are too.

This has definitely been one of my all time favorite projects. Good friends and clients decided to add to their beautiful home some outdoor entertainment. It was a bit of a challenge as we didn’t want the screen and speaker system to distract from their beautiful view or their custom built fireplace.

So we brainstormed and came up with the idea to install a motorized swing hinge for a 65″ Samsung flat screen TV. We also installed 5 of the new Focal in-ceiling 300ICW8 speakers. For the Bass, we used an Episode outdoor subwoofer which was hidden inside the firebox.

All the other electronics are housed in the adjacent living room entertainment cabinet. The new Marantz’s New SR 7013  was used along with Kaleidescape’s Strato ULTRA HD movie and concert digital library system. To automate the system we installed URC’s new MX-990 universal remote.

This system sounds so good and certainly has that “James Bond” affect when you see the TV magically come out of the ceiling.

Thanks to you two again for allowing us to work with you all these years. It just keeps getting better.

Jim Lee

Here are a few pictures of a recently installed billiards room entertainment system we did for one of our customers.

I thought the faux finished walls really set off the Focal Sopra 2 speakers. We installed an Anthem AVM 60 for the preamp/processor and an Aesthetix Atlas stereo amplifier. For the video we wall mounted the top of the line Samsung 65 inch screen. All the cabling and interconnects are from our friends at Nordost. We are sourcing the music from our Meridian/ Sooloos library system which also provides music throughout their home. To make life easy we tied all the control functions together using a customized URC RF remote control system. Sure makes for a great place to relax and shoot a few games of pool.

It sounds wonderful by the way but can’t say it improves my game.

Yesterday Matt and I installed the best garage system we have ever done. This customer has worked with us on building some truly spectacular sound systems for the past 27 years. We have installed systems for him now in 5 homes. He has an uncompromising approach to everything he does and obviously loves his music. When he recently built this garage we had originally planned to do a much more “basic” system, but as usual we found ourselves getting carried away.

We have another client in Texas that has similar tastes and is constantly on the path of upgrading. He decided to trade-in his Krell amps and preamps which he purchased from us several years ago. I approached my client on buying these and he said “why not?”. So now he has a system about 150 feet away from his main house with no neighbors in ear shot. This gives him a place to go and enjoy listening to his music and movies at any volume levels he wishes.

We are using a Meridian/Sooloos system for the music library. This is also tied to several rooms in his main house. For the movie processor we use the Anthem AVM 60. This ties in to a Anthem p5 amp and drives the the Focal Sopra center channel and surround speakers. So we are taking the main left and right channels out of the AVM 60 and sourcing them to the Krell dual mono preamps, which in turn source the big Krell amps and drive the main left and right stereo speakers. The Sooloos now provides an independent music source on a secondary input source to the Krell preamps. For the speaker system we are using a pair of Focal Sopra 3s, Sopra Center and surround speakers. For the subwoofer we employed one of our favorite bass buddies, a JL Audio F113 series 2.

The acoustics in the garage are very interesting to me. To look at the concrete floor and plywood walls you would not expect it to work that well. However when we fired it up for the first time, we all three couldn’t quit grinning. I got a text this morning from my customer and he spent almost 3 hours playing some of his favorite tracks and confirms it is amazing. We have now decided to take it to the next level.

Stay tuned.

Over the years we have had the pleasure of transforming a basic surround sound room into the ultimate home theater room. Our customer recently remodeled his entire room to optimize the listening experience.

With the risers and theater chairs, every seat is perfect. For the viewing experience, we are using a Reference JVC projector and a Screen Innovations 152″ wall mounted screen.

The audio/video processor is the top of the line Marantz 13.2 channel AV8805. To make sure that the speakers have all the needed power, two Anthem amplifiers are being used to provide the juice.

For the main speakers, what else would we use, but two Focal Sopra 3’s with a Sopra center channel in Imperial Red? The surround speakers are PSB’s that were installed in the past. For Dolby Atmos enabled in-ceiling speakers, four Focal 300ICW8’s handle all of the immersive sound. To tie all of it together, a pair of JL Audio Fathom F113 subwoofers.

It has been fun to see the transformation of this room over the years and the friendships that have been formed. Can’t wait to see the next steps.