We are redoing a bunch of stuff in our house, I’m going to be changing my living room setup around a bit and am going to take the time to do some work with my AV components.
I was going to wall mount the TV, install some in-wall speakers, and run the things like speaker wire and component cables in the wall to a remote location. I’m thinking its just going to be easier to pop out a couple of feet of my perfectly good drywall and replace it all as opposed to trying to fish shit through the walls and patch holes.
Everything is already being repainted. Anyone have any thoughts on this approach? Just seems it’ll be easier than dicking with drilling studs behind the drywall, dealing with patches etc. I could pull up like a 2 foot section from the floor or something as opposed to taking down the whole wall to make it a bit easier.
When I did my wall mount running the cables in wall was really easy. I got lucky and didn’t hit any horizontal 2x4’s though.
If you take your time with a sharp utility knife and cut the drywall on the stud you could cut out a large panel and have minimal patching to do when you put it back.
Yeah, I couldn’t find a good way to handle this behind the TV though. I would have liked enough slack to be able to set the TV down on the entertainment center with the HDMI’s plugged in but with that much it was impossible to hide the cables with my super slim mount. Ended up needing 3 people to hang it. Two to hold the TV and one to plug the cables with very little slack into it before locking it into the mount. Initially I tried leaving the slack then just pulling it back into the wall from below after the TV was mounted but cables got caught in the mount. I could have gone with a higher profile mount for more room but they look shitty compared to the low profile mounts.
On many HT setups only one HDMI cable is needed from the receiver (usually a surround sound receiver) to the TV. The receiver is used to do all video and audio switching rather than running multiple wires to the TV. This makes wall mounting a snap. Also using nose plates instead of something like shown above makes hanging a TV much easier because it will allow you to push the extra wire inside the wall rather than having to fight with short wire putting The tv up.
Used these for all wall mounts in my house, they work great. I was able to fish the wires/cables behind the drywall pretty easily…no need to remove a section of drywall unless you have some structural horizontal 2x4’s.
if you have horosontal 2X4’s you buy a 5 foot drill bit from home depot. you can drill the horozontal and use a glow rod or a magnapull to get a chain to tape your wires onto and pull them right through.
I went with one of these for my HDMI cables behind the TV:
The problem was once the TV was hooked on the mount the slack in the HDMI cable kept getting caught when I tried to pull it back into the wall.
I ran multiple HDMI instead of doing HDMI switching because I use different settings on the TV for my Xbox vs TV and HTPC. My TV is smart enough to remember different settings for each input so I don’t have to mess with brightness and “game mode” and several other settings when going between TV and gaming.
Again, I created all these problems for myself by going with the super low profile mount, but it was worth it because it looks awesome.
Fuck that. Drywall sucks to do well. Sand, mud, sand, mud, sand, mud, repeat forever and you can still see the patch in the sunlight.
I put everything in the basement and just left an IR repeater receiver on the mantle for the remote. Ran the surround speaker wires through the wall to the receiver in the basement.
I peeled back the carpet, drilled a tiny hole at the edge of the wall and stuck a flag through to get my bearings in the basement, and then went downstairs and drilled a nice big hole up into the wall so it was easy to get the fish tape from one hole to the other. Easy peasy.
Everything looks real clean, even if you don’t like my TV being 15’ off the ground.
