Hi all,

I will be purchasing a 950/7100 combo in the next 2 weeeks!!!

I want to mount a plasma tv above my A/V component rack, but want to run the wires through the wall. anyone have any advice on how to do this, or a link to a site with instructions?

P.S. I love this message board, really informative, I plan on asking a ton of noobe questions once I start setting everything up.

I'm guessing you don't want to see any wires hanging down

So.. make a hole behiend where the TV will go, and make a hole down by the floor where your components are... if you've got everything absolutely in line and are on an INTERIOR wall there should be a direct free path from the top hole to the bottom and you can just feed your cables through...

If you want to have the component rack off to one side you'll need to drill through the studs in your wall.. for that part I'm a little shaky about, So, here's some speculation one way to do that would be to do about the same thing as above.. except with 3 holes... one by the rack, one right above the equip. rack hole but at the same height as the TV hole and another hole where the tv will go... then use a long flexible drill bit (available at Home Depot - by long I mean 6 feet or longer) and drill across, starting at the hole above the equp. hole and going to the hole for the TV.... you'll create an extra hole you'll need to patch and then paint with this aproach though....

I'm tossing out the drilling across the studs idea just as speculation I've never actually done that..

Going down between studs on an interior wall would be the easiest (I did something similar recently when dropping surround speaker wires down from the attic to behind the entertainment center) and should be feasible with the rack beneath the TV. You might want to look into a slide-in junction box (probably a quad box or larger to give you room to pull stuff through) to help keep the wiring clean at both points where you enter the wall - that way you could cut the appropriate size hole out and simply slip the box in, rather than trying to cut away a large area and mount the box to a stud. If you did have to cross studs inside the wall, it would probably require cutting away some sheetrock and patching. Unferth's approach of a really long bit could also work, but you'll need some serious patience and perhaps a bit of luck to thread your cabling through the holes if there isn't a hole in the sheet rock right next to them (a hole at each stud would take care of this, but will entail some wall patching of course).

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gonk -- 950 Review | LFM-1 Review | Pre/Pro Comparison Chart | Saloon Links

yeah, mount the plasma on studs. :-)

you can cut out the entire area behind the plasma to give you access to the studs that you may need to drill through as well.

plus this will, err could, give you a flusher mount.


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thanks for all the replies!

The plasma tv will be in line with the A/V rack, so it seems like 2 holes in the sheetrock should do the trick.

I have been looking some type of box or cover for the holes, but havent had any luck.

thanks again, more questions to follow!

Running the wires straight down is actually really easy. Once you get over the scary part of putting holes in your walls. I'd use a stud finder between the two studs all the way down just to make sure there isn't any horizontal blocking between them. If there is, its the kind of thing you want to know ahead of time so you can plan for it rather than be surprised.
Make the hole behind the plasma big enough to work in (get your hand all the way into) not some teeny little one that forces you to bend the wires a lot to make the turn downwards. It'll all be hidden anyway right?
It can be helpful when you do finally get around to sending the wires south, to tape them together so they just drop clean. Once one wire is there it will make any others more difficult to move easily. Best to drop all at one time IMHO.

Another thing that makes sense to me with these kind of installations is don't scrimp on the connection lengths. Make sure you use enough so you can move the A/V equip and/or get the plasma down if you need to without disconnecting everything.

There are many available covers for the wires coming out-o-the-wall. Simple hole covers like the ones used in desktops for computer wires to get through (I used these for speaker wire coming out of the wall in my home office) I think I bought them at my local Ace hardware store. Or using actual electric boxes, as Gonk says, that you can attach a face plate to. Radio Shack's "snap in" line of plates while not exactly for this application would still work and finish the wall nicely. If this is the choice it's easiest to cut the hole with one side right alongside the stud so you can just screw the box to it (from inside the box).

I found a box on the Home Depot web site called the "Raco Plastic Double Gang Old Work Box Electrical Box" (link is insanely long, but it's under Products | Electrical | Boxes, Covers, and Fittings | Boxes - PVC) that can be slipped into a hole cut in sheetrock and then held in place by a couple clamps. You may need to cut some larger holes in it than the included punch-outs offer, but that can be done (a college roommate and I actually used a cheap soldering iron once to cut a plastic junction box pretty easily). This would also allow you to screw on a standard cover plate (even if you just had component video or power cables snaking through the openings).

If you are running power cords and video cables through the same box, you should probably plan to insure some separation between the two - might even drop them to separate boxes at opposite edges of the stud space behind the AV rack to make sure the power and video cables don't end up too close together inside the wall cavity.

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gonk -- 950 Review | LFM-1 Review | Pre/Pro Comparison Chart | Saloon Links

Excellent!!!!

Now I got it, 2 double gang(sp?) boxes, Old work. drill 2 large holes 1 for a/v other for power. this should give me 1 to 1.5 in seperation between cables. cover the boxes with solid face plates with notches cut for cables to come out.

I just refinished my kitchen and I had a couple single gang boxes, but they are too small, doubles are the answer!!!!

I never would have thought of it, thanks a ton!!!!

At the Fleet Center in Boston, we've installed 6 plasma screens. Depending on the manufacturer of the plasma screen I would wait and see how the bracket to support the tv is made. The Sony bracket has a nice hole in the middle where you are able to pull your low voltage wires out and keep them hidden. On our installations we also mounted a receptacle in the wall at he corner of the screen where the power cord connects. I would recommend a clock outlet for this. A clock outlet is recessed into the wall giving you a little more room to plug in.

To center the plasma bracket we removed the sheet rock correspondig to where the mounting holes of the bracket were. we replaced the plaster with plywood allowing us to center the screen in the room. It is possible the plymood will getin the way of wher you are running the cables. You can mount your power and low voltage brackets to the plywood.

Good luck and feel free to ask any questions. Jim