I will ask the tile company before they pour the screed. Still need the old in and out of the tiles, (which I/they don’t like), unless a small channel is cut in the render so the in/out is from the wall. Above the skirting tiles.
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You mentioned that a door and its frame is yet to be installed. So could you channel out the wall around the door frame, which could be covered by the architrave of the door frame. In addition the remaining cable around the wall would then be behind the skirting board, and thus the whole cable is effectively covered with wood.
Do you want the cables to accessible? If not then it doesn’t matter if they run it under tiles. If you do want access then it will need to be in some form of conduit with plenty of room for cable getting caught and no extreme turns.
Dan,
I think gadgetman has an idea that could work. In a conduit under the door frame. I need to check the details with the company doing the work. I don’t really care about cables going along the walls, just not in front or in the doorway. We have that currently in our living room and it does not disturb to see them and they are completely accessible
You could possibly go for a wide architrave to help you here
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In the past I’ve run cables across the middle of the floor underneath a rug. I used a couple of layers of carpet underlay under the rug with a thin strip cut away to provide a channel for the cables. It worked fine, and the cables weren’t damaged.
Choice of cables will obviously be a consideration. Shotgun type cables like Naim’s won’t lay flat if you need to run them around corners so you will need something round that will bend in any orientation.
Do remember to consider if you are to run sealed conduits (of some sort), partly as @Dan_M has pointed out, you need to consider the end terminations when running the cables, as these are the most inflexible and largest part, and the easiest to damage — unless you have the ability to easily re-terminate them?
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I think ducting from corner to corner is not a bad idea. You also never know what you’ll do in the future, perhaps the room will be laid out differently or even used for a different purpose.
I wouldn’t have the holes next to the doorframe, but as mentioned, in the corners, every single corner. So two ducts along every wall.
As it’s in the corners it won’t be very visible, or at least easy to hide. And it will leave you with a very flexible space.
In your case you would run a cable from the equipment to the corner, through the duct to the corner on the other side of the doorway and out to the right speaker. The other cable could go either way around the room assuming the left speaker is close-ish to a corner as well.
I wonder if, now that you have the room as it is - bare, it’s worth doing some acoustic analysis? This would establish the room nodes and inform where to position your speakers.
This could be done with a basic system such as a Muso or an integrated amp with small speakers user something like the HouseCurve app, HAF, or get in the professions.
Hi @Camphuw
I’m very happy to hear such a suggestion.
In fact after moving from a breeze block surface to a scratch render surface, we have an acoustic mess now
Quite surprised because the surfaces are not much smoother and the problems appear to be in the low frequency in the human voice with quite long reverberation times. I did not expect this as we run some tests before the render went on.
I’m at work now but we can discuss a bit later hopefully
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If it was me, I would invest in longer cable runs and hide them in the door trim. You could probably even have your contractor route a groove on the backside of the trim if need be. Also, if you ever need to get them out, the door trim will be easier to remove than floor tiles, and even the best of planned conduits can become impassable esp if dealing with something like NACA5. I think you have to weigh the cost of the work vs the cost of longer cables.
At our old house I had to run cable over a set of French doors in the living room. No way could I do with NACA5 so found a used pair of 8m of Chord Rumor 2. It’s white, the door trim was white, and tacked around the side and top edge of the door trim one barely noticed it, and one of the cable side draped behind a painting in back of the speaker. Visually going around the door edges might not be as clean as you like, but best to think of resale value (future buyers might not want buried speaker cable to deal with) and the ease of install vs digging and burying.
Interesting results. I imagine that the lack of absorption surfaces accounts for the reverberation. Then again in a bare room sound waves bounce around a fair bit until they decay. The location of standing waves might indicate where to place seating / speakers.
For what it’s worth, which is not a lot, I put spare cables in wall when I renovated, expecting to buy more 135s. The existing cables were laid in the floor below the flag stones. When I bought a REL the cables went over the door then under a couple of rugs - not ideal. But the trip hazard is minimalised.
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