Surrounded, Priceline Patrick

So my Yamaha speakers showed up yesterday.  I wasted no time getting busy in getting them hooked up.  The first order of business was pulling down the Bose cube speakers which was easy.  I was worried that the mounting holes that were already in place would not line up with the new universal speaker brackets I bought, luckily they did.  The only thing I had to do was carve out a little drywall to allow the speaker wire to sit underneath the new brackets.

Installing the new speakers wasn’t hard, it just took some time.  I had to drill two new holes for one of the surround speakers as the old ones were pulling loose.

So now I had the speakers in place I had to work on getting the wires attached to the new receiver.  I had bought a digital optical audio cable to connect the receiver to the tv.  I was pissed when I discovered that my tv uses the older, coax digital audio connection, meaning another trip back to the store.

The Bose utilized a single coax style connector that incorporates both the positive and negative speaker wires.  To connect the wires to the Yamaha I had to cut the end, split/strip the wires and connect them to the + and – connections for each speaker.  Again, not hard, just a bit tedious.

  So I finally had everything hooked up.  I held my breath and hit the power button, hoping I would hear something out of the speakers.  At first, I didn’t.  I had the radio tuned to a station with poor reception.  Evidently once signal level drops below a certain level, the receiver just mutes it.  I flipped to another station and the system sprung to life, filling the space with sound.

I spent the next half hour playing with the system, trying different audio sources.  The system sounded great.  I loved being able to control everything from my phone.

I have a lot of tweaking to do yet but it can’t begin until I get the correct digital audio cable to connect the tv to the Yamaha.  My end goal is to program my Harmony remote to seamlessly incorporate flipping on the surround sound system whenever the tv is turned on.

If you want to see all of the pictures from the install go here.

While I was in the middle of the AV install I got a call from my younger brother Patrick.  He had been loosely talking about coming down to run the half marathon with me on Sunday but because of his work schedule he was unsure if he could make it happen.  I sort of assumed he wouldn’t.

Well yesterday he emailed me saying that he thought he would indeed be able to come.  He snagged a last minute flight on Priceline and will be flying in at noon today and then right back out Sunday afternoon, a few hours after the race.  It will be a brief but busy visit since I am timing a 5K tomorrow.

The deck painting has once again been rescheduled, this time for Monday.  They are behind because of the rainy weather.

My goal for the half marathon is very simple, improve.