If you think the "custom" in custom installation is just a way to make the job sound more important than it is, think again. Once it's hooked up, a relatively sophisticated whole-house system can take a week or more to program — not because the installer is learning on the job at your expense, or the gear is tweaky or wrong for the situation, but because everything is being adapted to your house and your needs. If the installer is doing his job, he's giving you a setup that can work in that environment and nowhere else. When you get a new computer, you personalize it by teaching it your likes, dislikes, needs, and little idiosyncrasies. It's no different with a first-rate installation.
Jim Young and Wayne Tomblin of Audio Video Environments in Shelton, Connecticut, have been doing high-end installations for a decade now, and every one of the hundreds of systems they've installed has presented its own challenges. When Michael and Geri Smeriglio asked them to do a whole-house A/V system for their new 8,500-square-foot home in decidedly upscale Riverside, Connecticut, Jim and Wayne's greatest challenge, believe it or not, was finding enough space for the gear. While the rooms are all plenty big enough, there were a lot of components — and switches and controllers and wires — to cram into the available storage areas.
Wayne and Jim had to divide the whole-house electronics between two spaces. Most of the A/V-related gear is in a narrow closet in the family room, while most of the electronics associated with the home network, phone system, and cable- and satellite-TV systems are in a distribution panel off the basement game room. But wouldn't it have made more sense to keep everything in one place?
"The problem is the cable runs," explains Jim. "If we put the entertainment components in the basement, you'd have to run wires more than 150 feet to get to the rooms on the second floor. That would cause signal degradation and all kinds of other problems." Also, since the family room serves as the entertainment hub on the first floor, with a 50-inch NEC plasma HDTV recessed into the stone fireplace chimney and a surround sound configuration of Elan MM650C ceiling speakers, it seemed like a natural place for the gear stack.
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"Since the system is so complicated, we relied on Jim and Wayne to assess our needs and plan accordingly," says Michael Smeriglio. "What they came up with incorporates our TVs, DVDs, satellite-TV music channels, iPods, and security cameras. They recommended the best equipment we could afford, and we're very excited by the results."
Although they do their causal viewing in the family room, Michael, Geri, and the kids — Christina, 17, Maria, 16, and Mickey, 13 — head down to the basement when they want to get caught up in a home theater experience. The theater is a modest 16½ x 24 feet, but a number of features make it both impressive and inviting — beginning outside the room with two pro-grade Bass Industries Black Starlite poster displays ($1,809 each) with flashing marquee lights.
Step through the large double doors, and the first thing you notice is the custom ruby-red Model Hollywood chairs from United Leather (prices begin at $2,500 a chair and vary greatly, depending on the options selected). The floor (including the low, semicircular stage beneath the screen) is covered with "burgundy dusk" carpet by Kane Carpet, while both the ceiling and the columns bracketing the screen are finished in Venetian plaster — an unusual touch that livens up what would otherwise be a monotonous black ceiling. (Though they left the ceiling work to professional plasterers, "I did the pillars myself," brags Wayne.) Similarly, the dark-red-and-gray textured fabric lining the walls, from Guilford of Maine, is subdued enough to not be distracting when the room is darkened but gives the space color and interest when the lights are up.
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HOME THEATER GEAR
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| Yamaha DPX-1300 DLP projector ($12,495) •Screen Innovations 108-inch screen ($1,500) •5 Sonance Cinema Ultra II in-wall speakers ($950 each) •Sonance The Sub 12-inch subwoofer ($825) •Yamaha DVD-S2500 universal DVD player ($750) •DirecTV HD satellite receiver/DVR •Sony SLV-N900 VCR ($125) •Yamaha RX-V2500 receiver ($1,100) •Furman M-8 power conditioner ($60) •Elan Via! Valet touchscreen controller ($1,999) •Middle Atlantic equipment rack ($950) |
The theater has been a huge hit with the whole family. "The kids love it," marvels Geri. "Someone's in there every night, and it's a great reason to have the kids' friends gathering at our house. We really need to post a schedule just to make sure Mike and I get some time to use it." Even though they can see satellite TV on the family-room system, everyone gets a kick out of watching shows on the theater's bigger screen. "We're already hosting Laguna Beach and O.C. nights for the girls," says Michael. "But we had to draw the line at letting Mickey hook up the Xbox to the big screen."
Altogether, there are surround sound setups in the home theater, family room, and a second-floor sitting room. Elan MM650W in-wall ($399) and MM650C ceiling speakers are used throughout the house, and four Elan OM650W speakers ($550 each) are mounted under the eaves to provide music out back. The kids have simple Elan LSWP wall-plate jacks ($125) in their rooms for plugging in their iPods for playback over the ceiling speakers. All of the audio is handled by the massive Elan System 12 controller in the family room.
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FAMILY-ROOM GEAR
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| •NEC 50-inch plasma HDTV ($5,495) •5 Elan MM650C ceiling speakers ($350 each) In the Middle Atlantic rack ($950) •2 Teac T-R670 AM/FM tuners ($299 each) •Sony SLV-N900 VCR ($125) •Elan System 12 multiroom A/V controller ($5,650) •5 Elan Z-661 six-channel power amps ($870 each) •Furman M-8 power conditioner ($60) On the closet shelf •Yamaha RX-V559 A/V receiver ($450) •Sherbourn TST 2/200 power amp ($999) •2 DirecTV high-def satellite receiver/DVRs •2 DirecTV standard-def satellite receivers |
Works in progress include adding an Elan Via! dvdj DVD controller ($2,650) to a DVD megachanger so the Smeriglios can access their disc collection from practically any room in the house, turning one of the basement rooms into an Xbox-based gaming area, and installing Sonance SoundHenge Redux rock speakers ($400 each) in the backyard. As with any family, their needs are constantly evolving — another reason why a system-in-a-box approach is rarely the best way to go.
It's also why your relationship with an installer rarely ends once the gear is up and running. If you develop a good rapport with an electrician or plumber who understands your house, you don't then go looking through the Yellow Pages for somebody different every time something needs to be fixed. It's the same with an installer. Go to a generic big-box store for your installation needs, and it's a crapshoot who you're going to get. But if you stick with the pros in the local custom installation shop, you're likely to find somebody who can understand both you and your system.
"Wayne and Jim keep us posted on the latest and greatest, in case we need to upgrade," confirms Michael. "Because it's so difficult to keep up in the world of electronics, we really do rely on them to keep us informed."
When I ask what the most important part of any installation is, Jim replies, "The interface. That's far more important than any of the gear. If the control panel or remote doesn't do what the client wants it to, and if it isn't easy to use, they're not going to use the system. When that happens, everybody loses."
That's one reason Jim and Wayne have stayed loyal to Elan Home Systems. A lot of people dealing with custom installation for the first time are surprised to find that most dealers offer only one or two control systems, but selling a number of systems just to be comprehensive is likely to lead to a compromised installation. Learning all the ins and outs of a sophisticated whole-house A/V system from a single manufacturer is tough enough; trying to master a slew of them borders on the absurd.
The control system is the true heart of your installation, and the more complicated it is, the more the installer has to rely not only on the gear itself, but also on the company's training and dealer support. "I've never seen any company train its installers as thoroughly as Elan does," says Jim. "They have a retreat every year where they teach you about the gear, show you how to improve your business, and give you a look at what's coming." And if an installer runs into trouble, the company has a hot line. "It's manned by an engineer who can replicate the problem using the same gear we've got at the job site," Wayne says.
Wayne and Jim also praise Elan for the way it thoroughly tests and evaluates products before releasing them. "A client recently gave us an IP-based control system to install," says Jim, "and it had a wireless touchpanel remote that just wasn't ready for prime time. He had so much trouble with it that he gave up and now uses a Harmony remote instead." By contrast, while customers and dealers have been clamoring for years for a wireless version of Elan's Via! Valet controller, the company refused to release one until it had worked all the bugs out. (The wireless Via!2 was introduced in March.)
An installer can have all the engineering genius of Nikola Tesla, but if he allies himself with the wrong manufacturer, he's going to waste most of that brainpower making repeated service calls to keep your enfeebled system up and running. Sticking with an installer who offers one of the handful of reputable control systems in the custom install market is always the way to go.
Audio Video Environments LLC, 490 Huntington Road, Stratford, CT 06614, avman@snet.net (203) 378-8629
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