New house, finally getting my dream setup!

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jec6613

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New house, finally getting my dream setup!

#1

Post by jec6613 » Sun Aug 06, 2017 10:13 pm

Well, after moving in January, I'm finally getting my whole house WMC setup situated. As you can imagine, a new home means lots of work, so once I got basic TV working, the rest of it took a back seat. No photos yet, but expect them in the next few weeks. Feel free to comment/critique. :)

Initially when I moved in, I concentrated on the backhaul network, and my HTPC got stuffed into my server rack in the basement. I managed it via RDP, and used an Xbox 360E extender as my sole TV watching until just this past week, when I finally got other projects under control and tackled the family room - hurray for Game of Thrones tonight! 2700 square foot mid century modern rambling ranch, with full unfinished basement (e.g. cabling DREAM!) Without further delays, here's the basic setup:

Network/back-end:
- 25U 4 post and 45U 2 post racks
- Optimum Business static IP 350/50 internet (I need the static IP for work)
- Netgear SRX5308 router
- Three major VLANs: home, guest, and service/network devices
- Netgear M5300-28GF3 fiber switch (1G with 10G uplinks) with L3 routing as a core switch
- Netgear GS728TPP PoE+ switch for PoE devices (4 Gbps link to core)
- Four Cisco WAP371 access points, RADIUS authentication to primary network.
- Netgear GS724Tv4 switch for client devices (2 Gbps link to core)
- Netgear M4100 24 port GigE switch (4 Gbps link to core) sitting top of sever rack
- Netgear GS716Tv3 switch (1 Gbps link to core) for LOM interfaces and cluster heartbeat
- Two Lenovo RD540 servers with 4 cores and 64 GB of RAM each running Hyper-V in a cluster, each with 2 Gbps to the top of rack switch
- Lenovo SA120 direct attached SAS storage connected to the Hyper-V cluster with 15K SAS drives
- Intel board based storage server with 4 core Xeon E3, 16 GB RAM, 3Ware RAID controller, two 10K SAS disks (OS) and 6x4 TB WD RD SAS drives in RAID 6 with ReFS, with 4 Gbps to top of rack switch. Provides full house media archive storage (including DVDs, Blu-Rays, photos, and music) and is backed up to the cloud. Don't ask how long the initial backup took.

Main Media Center (Family Room):
- Intel DZ68BC with Core i7-2600 and 16 GB RAM, passive CPU heatsink
- 120 GB Intel SSD, 1 TB recording HDD in shock isolated mount (due to subwoofer and noise)
- EVGA Geforce GTX 950 SSC with ACX2 silent cooling (spins down to zero fan under normal load)
- Silverstone GD09B chassis with two 120mm and two 80mm fans (spun down to zero under normal WMC or Blu-Ray load)
- Windows 8.1 with WMC and MyMovies for WMC - other streaming via other apps and browser based
- Logitech K830 wireless touch keyboard, and Logitech Harmony One remote control (soon to be upgraded with a more modern Harmony)
- Denon AVR-2807 connected to WMC via HDMI, passes signal through to TV
- Audio input and output from/to Niles Auriel (anything played here can be heard throughout the house)
- Pioneer Elite Kuro 60", wall mounted
- Vienna Acoustics Mozart Grand fronts, Maestro Grand center, Waltz Grand rears, with MartinLogan Dynamo subwoofer

Living Room:
- Samsung 55" slim mounted, fed via HD-Base-T
- SpeakerCraft AIM LCR3 Five four speaker surround sound (L/R are close aboard and wall limitations mean no center), Definitive ProSub 800
- Denon AVR-X1300 and Xbox 360E in basement on 2 post rack
- Niles Auriel remote control and full Auriel integration (anything played here can be heard throughout the house)

Office:
- LG 40" TV on full motion mount, fed via HD-Base-T
- Definitive ProCinema 600 system
- Denon AVR-1611 and Xbox 360E in basement on 2 post rack
- Audio input from Niles Auriel
- Logitech Harmony 900

Other Rooms:
- Niles Auriel MRC-6430, slowly wiring up other rooms to it as I install speakers - mostly going to be more Speakercraft and Definitive (I have some extra DefTech ProMonitors).

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Crash2009

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Joined: Thu May 17, 2012 12:38 am
Location: Ann Arbor, Michigan

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#2

Post by Crash2009 » Fri Aug 11, 2017 4:41 am

Sounds great, can hardly wait for the pictures.

jec6613

Posts: 72
Joined: Thu Oct 30, 2014 8:45 pm
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#3

Post by jec6613 » Sat Aug 12, 2017 6:54 pm

Overview of main media center location. The sound imaging covers both of the chairs shown quite well in the current configuration - moving one chair to the center provides excellent imaging for stereo content (e.g. high res music), but the room's major sonic drawbacks are the large windows everywhere - totally worth it though. The TV is a 60", but the wide angle lens makes it look tiny. The seats are spread apart a bit because there's a dog bed in the middle - the sound was too realistic and the Labrador can't tell its' a speaker system (he can with the rest of the house) so he needs to be close to us while we're using the room for anything with human voices, or he gets anxious and keeps checking on us whenever a new voice appears on screen - the random issues of getting into Hi-Fi setups that you don't think about. :)
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Closer view of center stack. Some cabling still needs to be run in the walls for the front, as well as another circuit brought up so remove the voltage dip when playing things loud, but I'm waiting until I have the speaker position exactly dialed in. That will also put the TV/Media Center and the amplifiers on separate phases to cut down on interference - important given this room's massive peak power draw of over 1 kw. Top to bottom: Center Channel, Media Center PC with remote control receiver on top of it, Denon AVR-2807 with keyboard on top of it, Panamax power center for amplifier and subwoofer, APC UPS for media center and TV. Cables run in-wall to the TV via a PowerBridge so that the TV can be on the equipment stack's power conditioning.
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Rear speakers installation location. They're not only timbre matched but have nearly as much power as the fronts with the same midwoofer sizes.
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Main distribution frame - aqua is OM4 fiber, yellow is SM fiber, orange carries PoE+ and black carries non-PoE. Lower on the two post is where the other receivers and Niles system is (not yet pictured, cabling is currently a mess).
Image

Main server stack - years ago this used to be much less, but thanks to virtualization, I can get quite a lot into only a little bit of rack space. Dedicated storage server is on the bottom, the top is the VM cluster.
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