About a year ago I finished my home theatre in the basement. When this happened, I left my wife stranded with an old bookshelf stereo and some ‘lame’ speakers in the kitchen for her to listen to. For her birthday I told her I would make sure she had good music back in the kitchen and living room and make it better than ever! What this meant was getting her good speakers, allow flexibility between rooms and also giving volume control in this added zone.
Years before I had run speakers to the kitchen, but they ran off of the master volume control, not convenient if you got a phone call, or needed to listen to something else.
Project Stats: Kitchen Speaker Run
Time: 3 hours, but I took my time.
Cost: Low (but I had most of the items already)
Difficulty: Hard
Value for cost: High
Tools Needed: Wire Snake, Utility Knife, Torpedo Level, Tape Measure, Volume Controller, Low Voltage Mounting Bracket, High Quality Speaker Wire, Cordless Drill, Stud Sensor
The first step is to understand how all of this works and understand how the signals travel. I’ve made a small flow chart to show how this works.
Click for full size.
As you can see this is just like setting up regular speakers, but there is an addition of the volume controller. Check out the gallery for details on how I installed everything!
By working with a wire snake and choosing your runs and drilling points properly you can acheive a professional quality job with little effort. To hire someone to do this would most likely cost you several hundred dollars. Out of pocket for this project was under $30, not counting speakers, or stereo equipment.
Now everything works and the ability to adjust the volume is great! I highly recommend a project like this to enhance your house. Continuing this throughout your entire house is an easy project that can raise the value a lot.
