MK - Lyngdorf Build

AmanM

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So I have a basement that has not really been used much since moving into our house in 2016. As part of a home refurbishment, I decided to turn this into a TV room (so not a full black out cinema room, it will have daytime use as well). The rest of the house only has one small(ish) 43" TV and is something of a screen-free house, so I felt there had to be some karmic offset somewhere in the house and this was the place. I should also point out that at time of writing, I'm around 2 weeks from completing and having the system setup and, as someone that has *never* had even a basic 5.1 surround system before, this is quite the jump and - quite frankly - I can't wait to watch a film in here. Bit short of time right now, but wanted to start this thread as a forcing function for me to add some photos and post how progress has been to date (and show the soon-ish finished outcome).
 
So first things first, this is how the room looked when we bought the house:

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The room has some nice things going for it, but the space is ruined by there being a basement bedroom behind the mirror. This is because the house used to have a basement flat and we wanted to reintegrate this space back into the main house i.e. no bedrooms down here. Here's the floorplan so you can see the space for the TV room:

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We decided it would be a good idea to remove the wall where the bedroom is and make it a more open space so that we could have a larger "squarer" TV room. A mate of mine who is an architect / interior designer put together a sketch - this is his first drawing, which is pretty comic-book cool:

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However, my wife had one requirement. If we were going to put in a TV room then a) we should get a very big TV [shrugs, sure] and b) she wanted the speakers to be as discrete as possible. This posed a problem as I had been learning all about Atmos etc and wanted to go all-guns-blazing on the audio system. We therefore settled on in-wall speakers where possible.

The TV itself sits on a party wall and as we wanted to protect the neighbours from some of the noise, we decided to put some sound proofing on this wall (the concrete ceiling above should also be helpful for noise damping, I think). As a result, it became clear we could not put in-wall speakers on the TV wall (to retain the integrity of the soundproofing) and so in-wall would be for surrounds and then on-wall for the TV wall.

Basically the layout morphed into this (I've marked up in red where the speakers will go) - also this is the same guy who did the original sketch:

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Coming into this project, my only historic experience of anything AV had been using a pair of trust B&W 601 s2 for stereo sound on my tv and had loved these. I had originally been thinking I would stick to a B&W system with some floorstanders at the front of the room and then some of their wall-mounted speakers for surrounds.

However, it was after spending some time researching AV that I stumbled across Rich @Seriously Ltd and decided to go have a listen to his system. To call it a mind-blowing experience was something of an understatement! Anyway, after ripping up my AV budget and starting again, I decided I had to go for an M&K speaker system. Also they had really good in-wall speakers so it ticked every box (other than cost!). The speakers I originally settled on was:

MK MP150 x3 - front LCR
MK IW 950 x 4 - rear and side surrounds
MK IC95 x 2 pairs - atmos speakers
MK V12 x 2 - subs

However, while flicking through the MK brochure I noticed a new product for the side speakers - in-wall tripoles! So hurriedly I changed the order and replaced the side surrounds with a pair of IW150T tripoles. Unfortunately there isn't sufficient space to use these for the rear surrounds also. I think due to the luck of timing, I might have one of the first TV rooms that have a pair of these.

Anyway, with that covered, lets move onto some of the construction pics!
 
You will have the the first pair of IW150T’s installed in the U.K. other than our showroom pair that will be installed tomorrow.

The second pair gets installed next Friday in a cinema build that we are undertaking in Colchester.
 
Early on the builders ripped out the flooring etc started preparing the room for more serious construction:

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Unfortunately due to COVID, while the builders continued working (construction was permitted throughout lockdown), I didn't visit the site again for ages. So the next time I popped back home, I returned to find the wall had been removed:

(reverse angle)

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And a little while later, the outlines of the new rear wall had appeared:

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Unfortunately I didn't take pics again until June, by which point there had been more progress and some cutouts appearing for speakers. FYI - any time you see purple cable, that's the speaker cable - there's a fair amount of it!

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And after a load of plaster went in, it looked like this:

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(by the way, well done to anyone that was able to get hold of plaster this summer post-COIVD, sheesh)

Also, you can see that one side of the TV room has loads of windows, this was likely to be an issue for the acoustics in some form:

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And here's a first shot of the TV wall

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I lost about 20cm of the room as we added in some acoustic protection - this is a party wall, admittedly in a basement and with the neighbours not using that space for anything other than storage, but I thought I should make an effort just in case.

Also the other thing to note at this point - loads of cabling and ducting running between back of the TV and below the TV where the sources / amp will go. I ran a long (15m) HDMI across the ceiling should I wish to add a projector later, along with power in the likely projector place, however as this is a daytime use room, we are going with a TV for the main viewing. The thick black cable dangling down is a duct we ran from the TV wall to the projector point, should we wish to run a better/different cable later on.
 
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It was shortly before the plastering (the point of no return) that we made the one big change that was likely to massively annoy the builders. With the boxes stacking up that were going to sit below the TV (and my wife not being a huge fan of this), we decided to redo the cabling (!) and have all the speaker cable run back to the storage room behind the rear wall of the TV room (so the space behind the speaker cutouts). As we had a long HDMI and duct in the ceiling already that ran from the TV to the rear of the room (where the rack would go), we already had a connection between the back of the TV and the storage room (as the projector point was at the top of the rear wall). Here's a look at that storage room with all the cabling running in:

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The decision to move everything bar the TV into another room had one major knock on effect, it meant we had to find a universal remote or some sort of relay to control the TV etc. We decided to go with a Control 4 remote, because I just wanted this to be as seamless as possible for the family to use.

As we were refurbing the whole house, I decided to stick a load of CAT6 everywhere. Every room in the house now has 1-2 sockets. For the TV room, I have also run loads - I have 4 sockets running into the storage room above, I also have two network sockets below the TV and one below the windows (where I will put my wifi transmitter, I use eero for home wifi). So basically overkill.

The ethernet all runs back to one cabinet on the ground floor, which looked like this:

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And that has now transformed into this (still not quite finished but you get the idea):

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I'm particularly happy with this (was actually suggested by my electrician), as we've run BT and virgin sockets into this cabinet. We've also run a duct from this cabinet out to the street, so if ever we get a full fiber upgrade on our road (probably in the next 5 years or so?) then we can run the fiber through the duct and straight into the cabinet, which is kinda cool.

While we have 7 runs of ethernet going down to the various areas of the TV and storage room, we will put a separate switch in the rack that will host the AV equipment.
 
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Back to the TV room, the next steps were to get the carpentry bits (bookshelf on the rear wall and doors/skirtings/architraves) all sorted:

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The walls and storage room have now been painted. We decided on a white ceiling as it's a daytime use room too, so not a pure cinema black / dark room. Hopefully this doesn't impair the film watching mood too much...

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As you can see in the above picture, the atmos speakers (MK IC95) are now in.

And finally the storage/server room now looking a little bit neater:

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As for the rest of the hardware at this point:

We are having wood flooring (eventually will buy a rug in fairness), but also have windows on one side and a large opening on the opposite side. So I had been thinking room correction software of some sort would be needed (trying to change the physical appearance of the room would be difficult to agree with my wife).

Originally I had been looking at the Anthem ARC options (AVM60/MRX1120) but as I doubt I'll change the amp for a looong time, I decided to push the boat out in a major way and go for the Lyngdorf MP60. I had been weighing up the MP40 but a) I already had 4 sources (Apple TV, blu-ray player, Zidoo media streamer, Sky Q) which was one more than the MP40 allowed, plus who know what I might add in future years; and b) the MP60 I believe has the option to be upgraded to HDMI 2.1 down the road to add some future proofing, though not sure when I'll really need this tbh.

I've partnered the MP60 with a Yamaha MX A5200 11 channel power amp, which I practically put my back out carrying down the stairs - talk about heavy kit!

Very excited to hear what RoomPerfect does to the sound in our room. And while I appreciate there are other high quality room correction options, I just wanted something that was relatively idiot-proof for me and my family (no interest in tweaking by me or the rest of the household) and was likely to get the best out of the MK setup. Has left me super excited in anticipation!
 
Oh I forgot about the TV! After a decent amount of back and forth (and massive amount of learning for me) in a discussion with @Dodgexander in the TV forums, I decided on an LG OLED. Originally was thinking I would go for the "value" pick and get the 77 C9 but decided to opt for the 77 GX as thought a flush finish on the wall could look really sweet. I might still weigh up a projector down the road (the second HDMI-out is also a valuable feature of the MP60 for this reason) but I think realistically the AV money has been spent for quite some time!
 
Looking great 👍
 
What a cracking room. Great write up and some serious money spent, lovely big space as well. Look forward to any updates.
 
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So the TV bracket for the LG 77GX has gone up on the wall although the TV itself isn't yet sitting flush against the wall with no gap.

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To have the no-gap effect, we would normally have a large recessed box to hold the power etc, but as we have sound proofing in this wall, it wasn't really possible to do this without potentially impacting the integrity of the sound proofing. We do, however, have a small duct in this wall running vertically from below the TV up to the ceiling, and passing behind the centre of the TV. In this channel we have a 15m HDMI optical cable that runs to the storage room (where the AV rack will be) and also ethernet cable running in parallel (to facilitate Control4 but might be useful for other things).

Power for the TV was proving to be tricky as we didn't really have space for a plug! However my electrician came up with a really great solution. He fed the TV power cable into the duct and down to below the TV. He then removed the plug and connected the power to an isolater switch (which will sit along some spare CAT6 and power sockets below the TV), which can be used to turn TV mains power on and off.

Apparently removing the plug does not void the TV warranty when carried out by a qualified electrician, although I'm sure that's an argument I'm inevitably going to be having with Samsung/Richer Sounds in a few weeks time when i discover I've got a dud OLED panel! :)
 
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Letting Richard in your house... brave.

Kinda like the colours too.. one less red or battleship grey room is always a good thing. Did you say you decided against a projector? I've another room to do which I've been avoiding, but will be using a TV for that one and I'm dreading sifting thru all the TV forums.
 

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