I'm still working on a photo of the front of the rack. In the interim, here's a picture of the back side of the rack. This was actually taken some time ago, so there's a whole lot more spaghetti than what you see here. The rack allows access on three sides, so it's a lot easier to configure things (and things change frequently). All wires from the dishes and rooftop antennae end here. All audio and video lines that feed various places in the house originate here. Besides the theater (which is on the other side of the wall), the kitchen is an example of this shared design. It has large in-wall speakers mounted in the soffit, an audio selection control, and a volume control. The integrated receiver is in the rack downstairs and (if I ever get around to it) can be controlled using the remote control and an IR-to-UHF repeater.

With all this gear in one place there are occasionally interference issues. These are dealt with as they arise. The benefits of collecting the gear into one place far outweigh the disadvantages. The list of benefits includes: simplification of the sharing of devices by multiple rooms, freeing living space, reduction of power requirements at the point of use, and reduction of clutter.

When I finished the room where the rack resides (leaving no room in the house unfinished), I redid the wiring to the MannyVision head-end rack. I pulled a 30 amp circuit over so that all the gear could be run from one breaker. This helped to eliminate the dreaded ground loop buzz that I had when certain components were on two separate 20 amp circuits. There were other contributing factors and prior to the combined circuit I moved devices between circuits to eliminate the buzz.

At one point I had planned to add inline power conditioning or UPS for the whole circuit, but those were pretty expensive (at 30 amps) and, well, we're moving anyway.

The Gear List