Home Theater System Replacement
This is one of those projects that I partially did on the last rig. It also grew into one of those projects in this rig where one item determined the need for the next one and it grew into a full-blown replacement.
First, I have been watching the resurgence of vinyl records over the last several months and had been considering the format. However, until we got the 3950FB, there wasn't a good place to put a proper turntable. With our early build 3950, there is a lot of "counter" space in the area of the entertainment system, providing a nice platform for a turntable. When we are traveling, the turntable is unplugged and put in one of the recliners to ride safely.
While we were at the rally in Goshen, I found a really nice record store in downtown Goshen while Val was across the street shopping for yarn. I ended up walking out the door with an inexpensive turntable (#1) and a few records. A few days later, I was back and upgrading the turntable (
Audio Technica LP-120-USB) as well as picking up more albums. It all sounded decent through the Sony home theater system and cheap white plastic speakers on the ceiling.
While looking for replacement speakers on Amazon, I found the
outgoing version of the Bose Acoustimass 6 system on sale for almost half price ($360 instead of $699) so I ordered a set along with some generic ceiling mounts. I replaced the five ceiling speakers on the road on the way to Houston from the rally. Once we settled down in Houston, I went to tackle the main Bose module. Generally speaking, it has two sets of cables - one set connects the module to your amplifier and the other set of cables go to the speakers.
Rather than trying to pull the set up to the amplifier through the wall of the slide, I just did all the wiring in the bottom of the slide as shown in the pictures, below. The wires going from the amplifier to the speakers exits the slide back in the corner of the cabinet. Several inches of each wire pair is available to pull out a little bit and snip in half. I then just patched the Bose wiring into those wires at one point back in the corner. Not the prettiest solution, but it is hidden from view and it works.
With the Bose module, you have the option of not hooking up a dedicated subwoofer line to it. In that case, the unit will take the lower frequency audio from the other five channels and use it to drive its internal subwoofer. Since the cheap Sony home theater receiver supplied with the trailer had an amplified subwoofer output, this seemed to be an ideal solution. However, I quickly found that the receiver also filtered out the lower frequencies from the five main channels, thus rendering the Bose subwoofer ineffective.
From that discovery, I ended up shopping dedicated home theater receivers. The cabinet over the TV is, fortunately, deep enough for a standard receiver, but I already have a bunch of stuff up there, so height became an issue. It turns out that Marantz makes a line of low profile receivers, so I got the Marantz NR1403 (which is another outgoing model) on clearance at a nearby Best Buy and wired it up in place of the Heartland-supplied Sony unit.
Now the whole system sounds great. The only issue I've found so far is that the subwoofer feeds back through the turntable at higher volumes. This is just a mechanical issue of isolating the turntable a little better since it sits on top of the same cabinet under which the sub is located.
Also note the USB-powered fan on top of the receiver. We quickly found that all that equipment generates a bit of heat in the enclosed cabinet. I currently use a pencil to keep the door partially open about an inch at the bottom and have the fan blowing on top of the receiver. This seems to keep temperatures at bay pretty well. The fan is driven off an extra iPad charger block I had laying around.
