Grassroots Home Theater

I came home from work for lunch today and found a shipment of electrostatic speakers waiting for me!

Oh boy am I excited! The panels on the right are the front channel speakers, the shorter ones on the left are the rear surrounds, and on the floor is the center channel panel.

Below is a pic of one of the main panels from the side. They are very thin and lightweight.

Now starts the 200 hour break-in period. Magnepans famously sound craptastic when they are brand new. At the 100 hour mark they sound great, at the 200 hour mark they sound stellar. I don't know this personally, as these are my first new Magnepans ever.

What model are those?

Super MMG for the mains, MMGW for the rear, MMGC for the center.

Little update here, just to keep my momentum. I finished the risers. The carpet, both vertical and horizontal, are done. I installed simple edge trim instead of trying to wrap the carpet around the edge of the 3/4 plywood.

Had a set of maggies for a long time. Burn them in, they do sound like crap for a while. The spacial on them is not really that great for theater as they have smaller sweet spot. Its weird I shifted to the Martin Logan prodigies after the Maggie's and they had much much better sound but an even smaller sweet spot.

Have always heard/read about the Magnepans but never heard them in real life. You guys have some primo gear. Project is looking great so far!

On the ceiling, I'll be going black in our media room. My wife's cousin did it in several rooms in her house for no other reason than ambiance. Really worked well, sold me on it.

wearymicrobe wrote: Had a set of maggies for a long time. Burn them in, they do sound like crap for a while. The spacial on them is not really that great for theater as they have smaller sweet spot. Its weird I shifted to the Martin Logan prodigies after the Maggie's and they had much much better sound but an even smaller sweet spot.

I was/am a little concerned about the imaging and sweet spot for HT use, but Magnepan says the MMG line is intended for HT, so we'll see.
I think I mentioned this in this thread, the MMGWs and MMGC are only my second set of new speakers, first new Maggnepans. When I hooked up the MMGWs for burn-in I was shocked at how bad they sounded haha. But, they were 0-hour and not even close to set up properly, just leaning on a wall. After about 20-30 hours I moved them out of my way and just happened to set them up closer to the way they are supposed to be. Suddenly, they had mid-bass and sounded good!
I don't think I have more than 60 hours on them now and I noticed last night that the highs sound pretty stinkin' amazing!

VWguyBruce wrote: Have always heard/read about the Magnepans but never heard them in real life. You guys have some primo gear. Project is looking great so far! On the ceiling, I'll be going black in our media room. My wife's cousin did it in several rooms in her house for no other reason than ambiance. Really worked well, sold me on it.

Thanks Bruce! I wanted to paint the ceiling black, but my wife convinced me to go white. The good thing, I think it'd be easier for me to switch from white to black, then from black to white if I decide to change later.

Before starting on the chair upholstery project, I wanted to set them up to make sure my spacing and such is correct. Spot on! I can fully stretch my legs out and not touch the row in front of me, very comfy.
View from the doorway. The closet door is on the right side of the frame, the walkway to the 2nd and 3rd row is on the left.

Same view, the other corner of the room.

I'll try to do a rundown of the $$ involved at the end, but the risers, carpet, trim, fabric for the seats, and the seats came to a bit over $200 I'm pretty sure.
All that stacked wood is the wood for the subwoofers. That's the next thing!!

I would consider some duct board, wrapped in fabric with the foil face glued to the duct. That way any sound has a less of a chance to be transferred to other spaces. You'll only lose 1/2" or 1" of head space, whatever the thickness of the duct board.

Duct board? I'm not even familiar with that. I like that idea though. That's one reason I haven't done anything with the ducts yet, I don't want to just paint them.
Thanks!

Either that or the insulation that goes on the inside of duct work. Basically it's a rigid fiberglass insulation. Wrap it with some material and it looks and roughly acts as an acoustic panel.

For the ducts, you could frame them on the sides with 2x2 lumber, and just use 1/2 or even thinner plywood to attach the side frames across the bottom of the ducts. Then drywall with thin drywall and lose less than 1" of height. I'm not familiar with the duct panels referenced, by my framing approach might work with those as well if you need a frame.

Don't treat the duct until after you get your subs up and running. Then do some measurements at the ducts around the house!

RossD wrote: Either that or the insulation that goes on the inside of duct work. Basically it's a rigid fiberglass insulation. Wrap it with some material and it looks and roughly acts as an acoustic panel.

Do you have a link to this stuff? I look on home depot's site and couldn't find anything.

Something like this: https://www.grainger.com/category/insulation-boards/insulation/plumbing/ecatalog/N-r69/Ntt-Insulation?searchSortKey=priceAsc&gclid=CLn7hty1icwCFdNahgode7oKuw&sst=subset&s_kwcid=AL!2966!3!89499846419!e!!g!!armaflex+insulation&ts_optout=true

or this: http://www.amazon.com/Acoustic-Insulation-OWENS-CORNING-INCH/dp/B00BJMX5P0/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&qid=1460490321&sr=8-7&keywords=rigid+fiberglass+1%22

Look for stuff called 'rigid fiberglass insulation'.

The first thing I saw in the above post is that the Amazon link has B00B in it.

Thanks RossD.

I haven’t done an update in a while because there wasn’t much that was exciting happening. I installed and painted some trim, painted the doors and finalized the location of the seats. Now I have a little bit more to talk about, so I’ll do that now. As far as the seat location, the seats come with two different brackets that hold the seat backs on. This gives me two different seat-widths. I decided on narrow seats in the front row, wide in the middle, and a combination of wide and a few narrow brackets in the rear. These widths and a slight staggering of the rows keeps the head from the person in front of you being in the way.
The picture below is the seats set up with no stagger, and the same brackets used.
You’ll see the stagger effect in a later picture.
The next challenge was how to mount the rear channel speakers. They are intended to be mounted vertically. The problem is, the rear row is right at the rear wall. That, coupled with the fact that the speakers are 38 inches tall means the speakers can’t go on the rear wall, or the side wall since the poor sap in the right-rear chair will have a speaker in his face! I decided to mount them horizontally. For those that know about Magnepans, they have a pretty focused beam of sound that is a more-or-less vertical column. Since this is for rear-fill, I figure rotating the speakers will rotate that column of sound, helping to really cover the seats in sound from the rear channels since that vertical column will be horizontal, and washing the seats with sound. But, the MMGWs need to be about 30 degrees from the wall to allow the frequency response to reach 100 Hz. The mounts that come with the speakers are simple L brackets that allow the speaker to pivot on the wall, I needed a way to mount them horizontally, and hold that angle off the wall.
I bought some square tubing with a I.D. to match the speakers thickness. I then cut one wall off, welded a washer to it, and attached it to the wall via a cable. That square C channel is not attached to the speaker mechanically. It can be lifted off so the speaker can lay flat against the wall in case we’re moving something large past the speaker.
Here’s a picture with both speakers hung that I think will show the off-set rows and how I aligned them.

The next step was to get those ugly green seats recovered. A friend of ours came over, and she and my wife cut and sewed the fabric for the seats. Sometimes you gotta take a step back to move forward, right? So I pulled the lower cushions out, and remove the seat backs in preparation for the new upholstery.
Here’s one seat done. Normally I would NEVER have chosen a purple fabric, but I was trying to work with the free carpet I got. I think it actually looks good.

Very cool! Going to do anything with the duct work to try to keep it from spreading the sound around the house?

Thanks. I'm going to do something with the duct, just not sure yet. There are simple panels you can put inside of the duct to stop some of the waves from traveling down the duct. My bigger concern is how to dampen the duct to stop it from ringing. There are certain frequencies where it rings if I'm in the room and talk just a bit louder than normal. I can't imagine how it'll be with that much energy being pumped into the room.

It's been a slow go lately with work, family, and life responsibilities. But I'm plugging away at it. I finally have all the seats (10) reupholstered and.....INSTALLED! Here's the basic layout of the seats with the ugly green covers:

Now, about the color I chose for the seat fabric. I got some carpet for free, so I had to try to play off the colors in the carpet. The green that was on the seats actually matched some green in the carpet perfectly, but I didn't like the green, and they were just a little worse-for-wear. So, my wife and I went to the upholstery shop with a hunk of carpet and decided on a purple (!) that went with the carpet very well. After seeing the seats upholstered in the new fabric, and the seats next to the carpet and contrasted with the grey seats, I'm really liking the purple fabric we (she) chose.
Here's a close-up of one of the seats. I think I posted this already, but here's a second look:

And the finished product:

I'll be in Colorado for the next week, so work will be slow.

Looking good!

This has been really cool to follow along with. I'm currently looking to buy a house and now I'm thinking that if there were a space available for something like this I might be interested.

Petrolburner wrote: This has been really cool to follow along with. I'm currently looking to buy a house and now I'm thinking that if there were a space available for something like this I might be interested.

Thanks. It's very doable. The hardest part is trying to do it grassroots, depending on your expectations. I don't expect perfection, but I want to be satisfied when I'm done. When I research different things (sound proofing, sound diffusion, various materials) I find my way to different A/V forums. Well, these folks don't understand Grassroots. My 12X16 room is what some would consider the equipment room, or maybe a listening room....for two!
I haven't done all the math yet, but I suspect most of these guys have more into roughing in the room than I'll have in everything, electronics and all!
I have one more hurdle to overcome, then I'm done. I'm trying to figure out a way to keep my HVAC ducts from ringing without spending $18 per square foot, or boxing them in.