Yesterday Michael and Eli installed this beautiful home theater system for one of our favorite customers in Snohomish County. This was actually a retrofit installation upgrading a system that was originally installed, using contractor grade speakers, when the home was built.

The original system design presented an immediate challenge as unfortunately the center speaker had been located several feet above where it should have been. To solve this problem we eliminated the center speaker all together and installed an amazing pair of Focal Utopia 1000 series in-wall speakers. The originally installed center speaker will be removed and patched as our customer has been planing to repaint the room. When this is done, the new speaker grills will also be removed and painted to match.

There are several unique aspects to Focal’s Utopia in-wall speakers. They come complete with acoustically tuned enclosures, magnetic removable, paintable grills and use their finest speaker components, which of course incorporates their exclusive beryllium inverted dome tweeter. These babies sing! We often use them even for precise audiophile level 2 channel stereo installations when floor standing speakers are not an option.

We replaced the original in wall subwoofer with the 1000 IWSUB Utopia and in-ceiling surround speakers with the matching Focal 1000 series speakers. The speakers had been wired to a closet area in another part of the home and the components were to placed on wire racks, which are subject to extreme unwanted vibrations. We modified these racks using high density fiber board and several Nordost Sort Kones to dissipate any vibrations both external and internal from the components themselves.

Over the past few years, Marantz has been hard at work elevating their already excellent home theater components to a whole new level with their top-of-the-line A/V processor and multi-channel amplifier. These units are hand-built and tested at their factory in Japan and have quickly become a go-to choice for high-end home theater enthusiasts looking for something that stands out from the typical mass-produced options.

The amplifier is designed to power up to 10 channels, or 10 individual speaker connections. However, you can combine two channels into one, which effectively doubles the power output for those connections. Since we only needed this amplifier to drive five speakers, including the subwoofer, we took advantage of this feature and “bridged” all 10 channels down to five. This doubled the power and gave us excellent headroom, delivering effortless control over the stunning Focal speakers with exceptionally low distortion. To further enhance performance, we used five Nordost balanced XLR cables, which helped lower the overall noise floor even more.

Now because the components live in a separate area of the home, Eli programed an RF Universal Remote Control to easily access every function of the system including calibration of all video and audio functions.

I spoke with my customer over the phone and he tells me he could not be happier and wanted me to give big Kudos to our team.

Thanks so much!