Posted by Mark Komanecky on Fri, Oct 16, 2009 @ 12:31 PM
This is the first in a series of articles about the control and audio/video systems we used on the D Residence. simpleHome has been associated with this project for 18 months and we have been involved from the early design of the control systems to final implementation. This article will focus on one of the sub-systems – the outdoor music system for the property.
One of the goals of the project was to create a space where large gatherings of people could comfortably come for events that span the entire property.
The property has four main features, as seen in the map below: The main house, a poolhouse, tennis court and an art gallery.
For events, people are expected to move between the pool area and the gallery using all of the space of the property. With regard to music in these events, we wanted to achieve the following:
- Be able to easily listen to great sounding music, no matter where you are on the property
- Have no place where the music is too loud or distracting
- Minimize the sound that “bleeds out” to adjacent properties and disturbs neighbors.
- Have a good selection of music and have fun with the system!
The Disney World Effect
This is a similar set of constraints that all large outdoor entertainment areas face. Because you want sound everywhere and have it loud nowhere, you can’t have one or two big speakers blasting into the property. This would make it too loud to be near the speakers and it would sound bad. Also, the neighbors would be calling the cops and you'd be busy discussing noise violations – this breaks the “fun” rule that we have.
To address this, we went with what we called – the Disney World effect – lots of smaller hidden speakers, all playing fairly low volume, all throughout the property – just like what you find at Disney. To cover this property we developed the following plan:
Each of the blue dots represents a twin tweeter outdoor speaker. The green dots are direct burial subwoofers. OK– Disney probably doesn’t have any subwoofers at the Magic Kingdom – but they should!
Buried Subwoofer In D Property and Gallery
The next thing we needed to do was decide where all of these speakers should be controlled, and start to bury the wire. Since the pool house had an equipment shed, we decided that would be a logical place to "home run" all of the wire. We set up the equipment racks in the shed and started digging.
In order to prevent gardeners from accidentily cutting any wires while digging, we decided to bury all of the wire in conduit. We designed the conduit with a few large branches with smaller ones going off to individual zones.
After several days of rain we got to work burying conduit and pulling speaker wire throughout the property. In the end we had just over 2 miles of wire buried in conduit. We were now ready to start installing the speakers.
Installing and hiding the speakers
We chose to use Bay Audio’s line of outdoor speakers for the in-ground subwoofers and the partially buried yard speakers. With all of the speakers in the yard – there was no way to try and create a typical stereo separation with right and left channels. So we wanted a speaker that carried both – a twin tweeter speaker. We also wanted a speaker that had a fairly wide angle of sound dispersement – in this case – the speakers are designed to send sound in a 120 degree arc. Bay Audio’s speakers are also marine rated – so we wouldn’t have to worry about the elements degrading the system over time.
Example speaker in mulch area
As part of the design, the owner wanted the speakers to be concealed in the landscape – but he did not want them to be disguised as something else. This ruled out rock speaker designs and planter speaker designs.
We then went a little custom on the speakers – we partially buried each of the speakers, and added some acoustically transparent camouflage material. The landscapers, who were working at the same time, also planted a special type of long grass around the speakers that would grow and droop over the speakers. This grass does not need to be cut, so the speakers are not going to be run over by a lawnmower any time soon. The final effect is shown in the picture below:
There are 5 speakers visible in this view – if you know where to look for them!
Stay tuned for our next entry on this exciting project!