The engine room

By popular demand (well, garyi to be specific) 

Here's a snap of the engine room that powers my music and av through the house.

A short back-story before I go in to details.

In 2007 my wife and I decided that we needed something to do (apart from both working full-time and bringing up two kids) so we decided to build a house. As you do.

It gave us both a great opportunity to do some things we've always wanted, and for me it was boys toys. The idea was to be able to have music and movies in all the bedrooms and living rooms.

The house if fully wired with CAT6, lots of cables running through the ceilings, and a dedicated mains spur. You've gotta get the infrastructure right.

So, to the engine room, or the M&E to be precise.

All of the CAT6 converges in the M&E and is connected in to the patch panel; the topmost unit it the photo.

Below that is a gigabit switch by D-Link, with all the rooms patched in. This has a couple of fibre ports should that ever replace copper in to the house.

The larger unit below that is an APC SmartUPS, which has saved my skin a few times in the last few years. The UPS powers and protects everything in the rack.

Under the UPS is a TP-Link gigabit router. My ISP is Virgin so they supply a SuperHub2 as a modem/router. I disabled the router part so that it only acts as a cable modem (because I previously had a SuperHub1 and it was utter rubbish). Used solely as a cable modem the SH2 is solid as a rock. The SH2 can't be seen in this photo, but delivers a very stable 100Mbps currently.

Finally, under the router is my trusty QNAP NAS, with 4 x 2TB WD Red drives, configured as RAID5. A stand-alone 3TB USB drive (not pictured) takes care of backup duties of the more precious content.

The NAS services my five Sonos zones as well as my main rig, as well as DVD and Blu-ray video and family photos to two smart Samsung tv's and a Sony blu-ray DLNA in the 'cinema' room. It also acts as a file server. It seems to take all of this in its stride and I've never suffered any lag or glitches serving content to several devices simultaneously.

For those that are interested, the boxes on the left hand side are, from top to bottom, a satellite distribution box, a terrestrial distribution box with FM and DAB feeds, and the little box at the bottom is for IP telephony.

It was a great challenge but getting it done was very satisfying. And living with it is a delight 

Cheers,

Steve