Speakers installation in the rear of the house

Wow - what an effort, a Sunday and Monday well spent.

The plan was to install the bathroom, kitchen and patio speakers.

First I drilled down from the roof in to the study and fed up four runs of Monoprice wire from my roll (300ft 12AWG Enhanced Loud Oxygen-Free Copper Speaker Wire Cable - $85). In the picture below you can see the built in robe in the Study and the my internet connection (Bigpond Cable).

Future data cabinet location in the Study.

Next week I am having an electrician install a power point in the built-in robe and I will use the highlighted shelf as my "data cabinet" for my router, Sonos amplifiers and Drobo-FS NAS. Eventually I will have a white conduit covering the cables coming down into the walk in robe.

The wire in the roof I ran from beam to beam by attaching a staple to each beam and then attaching the wires to the beams using a cable tie. This seemed to be the best method recommended by the Polk DIY Speaker installation guide. This guide is very helpful and I would highly recommend it to anyone preparing to install ceiling or wall speakers.

The speakers I was planning to install were not in the main roof, rather in the back of the house, a lean-to which consists of the bathroom, kitchen and the back wall of the house. From the main roof we ran the four speaker wires through a conduit cable (bought in a roll of 10m from Bunnings). Four cables were the limit for the thickness and we used string to pull the wires through one at a time.

As seen below, the roof on the lean-to is very thin and is not accessible from below so we had to remove the roofing sheets.

Removing the sheets was quite easy but replacing them probably the hardest part of the job and required extra hands as it was very difficult to replace them as it was hard to push them back in above the beam under the housing sheet (which eventually had to come out) as well as cutting a hole in the sheet for the conduit. Replacing the sheets turned the one day job into a two day affair.

For the kitchen and bathroom speakers I chose to use Polk Audio RC60i In-Ceiling / In-Wall Speakers (Pair, White) based on positive reviews on the Sonos forums and a friend whom had previously had Polk equipment which sounded fantastic.

The kitchen speaker was quite easy to install from above. Roughly where I wanted the speaker I traced the outline from the template sheet and then drilled a hole in one side and cut out the hole from the ceiling with a jig saw. I then had the speaker pushed up from underneath while they were screwed in from below. 

Ceiling speaker from above

Ceiling speaker in the ceiling.

The crack occurred later when I accidentally mistepped replacing the roofing sheets. A repair job for another day. 

The bathroom speaker was a bit harder as it was under a fake ceiling. The original ceiling made of small slats, plaster, horse hair and god knows what had to be broken through to get to the top of the fake ceiling. 

We then drilled a hole down from the roof and cut up from the bathroom into the fake ceiling using a small drywall/gyp-rock saw using the template supplied with the speaker.

Hole  into bathroom under the original ceiling.

Speaker installed from below and connected. 

Speaker without the grill attached from in the bathroom.

The sound from the Polk RC60i speakers is very good and I am glad I did not go with the RC80i (8 inch) speakers for these rooms as it would have been overkill. I have a pair of RC80i speakers which I am planning to put in the bedroom in the upcoming weeks and compare the sound then.

At the moment I have them connected as left and right channels to the Sonos Connect:AMP. I am searching for a solution to have them produce mono noise instead of stereo to these rooms.

For the backyard patio speakers I chose a pair of the Definitive Technology AW 6500 Outdoor Speaker (Single, White) based on very positive reviews. I managed to get a good deal for a pair, and they where much larger than I expected when I received them.

Using the backing plate which can be detached from the speakers I marked and drilled two into the rear wall of the house. I then installed two dynabolts (12mm/70mm). The dynabolts were overkill as they can hold up to 280 kilograms each but seemed to be a good thickness to bolt the bracket to the wall.

Right speaker

Left speaker

The sound from AW6500's is amazing. There are overkill for my medium sized backyard and the smaller AW5500s would have most likely sufficed. The front part of the V shape is aimed to where there will be people and the rear side woofer bounced bass of the walls.

Mission complete! And apart from the accidental crack in the ceiling I am very happy with the result. I'll provide another update when the bedroom speakers go in comparing the sound between the 6" inch and 8" inch speakers.