“It’s very discreet now,” he says. “We can hide the equipment so you operate the remote control through walls. A lot of people have little kids, and they don’t want fingers in the equipment, so we have to give them bells and whistles without you seeing it.”
A secret door in the wall next to Joe Ganote’s screen opens to reveal a small room full of speakers and equipment. An overhead projector hangs over a couch in the middle of the room.
Ganote plans to upgrade soon to a $12,000 projector that works better with ambient light. He is what you might call an audio/video geek.
He and his wife built their home 14 years ago and had the audio/visual installed five years ago when they finished their basement.
In addition to the 106-inch screen, there is a 46-inch flat panel hanging on a wall nearby, a 70-inch Sony TV with its own surround sound system in a nearby room, a 48-inch plasma TV with a Sonos subwoofer and speakers in the living room on the first floor and a 46-inch LED flat screen in a sitting room on the second floor.
“My wife says I went overboard,” he says, smiling sheepishly. “But I knew what I wanted.”
He allowed his sons to stay home from high school the day that Independence Audio “tricked out” his basement. It took three installers with three large vans full of equipment two days to wire the house and set up the screens, projectors, consoles and speakers, he says. The cost: $60,000 for the basement theater. He figures he has another $10,000 invested in wiring and equipment for the rest of the house.
Everything can be controlled remotely by an iPad. And a DVR on every TV can record different shows at the same time then play each of those shows on any screen in the home. The same goes for music.
“I can download any song in the world and play it in any room in the house,” he says. “Or I can have John Mayer playing on the TV up here and a classic rock concert going in the basement.”
Ganote and his sons Jake, 25, and Josh, 23, all play instruments and love music.
He has a lot of fond memories of them all watching concerts and music shows on TV together over the years: Santana, John Mayer, the Country Music Awards.
“We also watch a lot of movies. You can get them now within a couple of months after they’re in theaters,” he says. “It beats going to the movies. We can have our own popcorn and go to the bathroom. The sound of helicopters will come from one speaker and bullets from another. It sounds like they’re flying past your ears. At night when it’s all dark and the TVs are on and it’s rumbling, it’s awesome.”
©2014 The Kansas City Star (Kansas City, Mo.)
Distributed by MCT Information Services
