Mounting and cabling an LCD

eirebhoy

I'm getting a 37" LCD in the next few days and need some advice. My living room isn't built very well for a TV and my current tv is a 28" situated under the stairs as you can see in the attachment. The plug sockets are in there beside it and there's also a DVD recorder and Sky Digibox.

I've labled where the LCD is going to go. What I'm wondering is where I should put the DVD player and Sky box? The only place I can think of is over the door in the corner on a horizontal TV mount. I can't put them under the LCD as there's simply no room to be walking by. If I didn't have to be pointing a remote control at them I could just stick them in the closet.

After that I have to find the best way of getting the cable to and from the boxes. I think I can get an electrician to put sockets close to the TV and remove the current ones. I'll probably need the electrician to do a lot more? The closet there with the brown handles can be used for any cable if needed. btw, the light switches will be moved too so the TV can fit in.

Any help appreciated. Cheers.

Idleater

Why don't you leave all the other boxes where they are under the stairs and just have the LCD on the wall.

It would require:
Power
RF Cable
HDMI/DVI
Component

Buy a upconverting amp, and use it to do the video switching and use the speakers from that as your audio.

I am planning on putting all the AV stuff in a cabinet and getting some sort of IR Blaster to relay the IR signals from my universal remote to them all.

L.

Sparky

I assume that wall is solid, yes?

What's the floor like? Is it tiled or floorboards?

There will be a good bit of work involved. Most will be clearing of routes and wall chasing.

I agree with leaving all the equipment under the stairs as it will save a load of cable fishing to move the equipment elsewhere.
If your sparks can even fish cable up through the stairs and into the ceiling and then down to the TV, it would look the part.

eirebhoy

Thanks for replies.

The wall is plasterboard. Solid wooden floors.

The equipment is currently under the current TV on a basic stand that came with the TV. That's all going to be cleared out and a seat put in there. The coaxial cable from the satellite is just running along the skirting. I have a cable coming from the attic which gives the basic NTL channels (although, not subscribed to NTL. Get it free and always have). That's all there really is cable wise other than the basic plugs and scarts.

As you've probably noticed I'm a bit of a novice with this type of thing to say the least.

pH

I suppose it depends on the quality of finish you're looking for.

If you don't mind cables showing and hanging down all over the place then it's simple.

The next step up is using wall mounted trunking which will hide the cables and can be painted (but still looks awful in a sitting room IMHO)

Then you have the 'perfect solution', my plasma sits on a wall without a cable or box in sight. If you're going for this then, you'll have to decorate the room again once finished, but if you're prepared to do that then it's all very doable.

eirebhoy

My first idea was to have the DVD and digobox over the door. The easy part is putting the equipment up but it's the cabling that I'm wondering about. I've attached another pic to explain what I want. Cable from the TV through the wall and out of the wall at the other equipment. Then from the equipment through the wall into the closet where I can put plug sockets.

Is this a job that the sparks could do? I assume my decent quality 1.5m scart won't be of any use? I had a few more questions but I'll leave it at that for the minute.

Cheers.

pH

One common thing to do is to put a switched single plug socket in an area which will be hidden by the TV. Also you could wall mount an NTL coax outlet here (again in a position hidden behind the wall mounted TV).

Now the TV has power and an analog signal.

The wires going from the equipment rack in the top corner to the TV could be a problem. Behind that wall there are vertical studs, you'd need to smash away large chunks of the plasterboard, drill the studs then pull the cables through, patch the plasterboard and get a plasterer in to plaster. Also most SCART sockets are soldered and the scart head is huge, you need big holes to pull this through or be able to resolder the scart back together at the other end.

Depending on what the floors (are the floorboards liftable?) are like above you may be able to go up into the floor space then across and down. However the downward part of the route will most likely encounter horizontal cross braces in the wall and will need to be drilled.

I've seen some hack jobs when running thin cables just cut away the plasterboard over the stud, run the cable and then polyfil (or similar) over the cables - needless to say this a crap solution and you don't want anything like it!

Another common option for a horizontal run is to try and get down to the skirting and run the cable behind them. When the skirting goes back on much mess and rubbish can be concealed!