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For about a year we’ve been wanting to move the living room stereo into a wall cabinet. It was a big project, because I also wanted to replace every component. The speakers were huge, old, and always sounded too mid-rangey for my tastes. The integrated amp has lost two input channels, and lacks a remote control. And the cables were junk.

But even the decision to proceed took me a while. Rooms that have stereos ought to look like proper listening environments: speakers at one end, facing the length of the room; couch halfway down the room facing the speakers; remote control conveniently placed; beverage-table nearby. (The best image of this configuration is suggested by the famous old Maxell advertisement, created in the 1980s and still adorning the company’s audio tape products.)

In this case, though, the listening-room approach made little sense. We use the living-room stereo daily, but usually we’re cooking or cleaning or exercising, not sitting still with our hair blown back by high-SPL progressive rock music. With no regrets I compromised my audiophile tendencies to better utilize the space.

Shopping for home-theater equipment generally takes me a long time. First, I pursued auditions of exotic speakers. Months passed. The audition was definitive: the exotic round speakers sounded terrible. The promise was so great, and the reality was so disappointing… I was lost. I thought I was waiting to arrange a second audition, but in fact I was doing a whole lot of nothing.

A few months passed. My wife, ever logical, and more importantly eager to put a loveseat where the old stereo still sat, proposed a means of dislodging me from my, err, lodging? She suggested that I put the speakers from my office stereo up on top of the living-room cabinet just as an experiment: would box speakers look ridiculous up there? How would they sound?

We spent a Sunday evening hefting my desktop speakers (Polk Audio RT25i) onto stands on top of the cabinet, and ran cables to the amp. I spun up my audition discs, the remastered Moving Pictures and Simon Phillips’ Protocol, and … grimaced. The speakers, which work so well in my office, sounded awful: boxy, thin, un-real.

Placement is everything, though. I climbed back up the ladder and turned the speaker cabinets slightly so they’d not be parallel to the rear walls. The sonic improvement was drastic and immediate. The speakers sounded great. In fact, these little 2-way Polks, mounted nine feet in the air and haphazardly aimed, sounded better than the big 50-lb, 3-way Yamahas in perfect “listening room” position.

Decision in hand, I ordered a pair of Polk Audio RTi38, the newer and larger sibling to the RT25i. Next I ordered speaker cables: Clearview Golden Helix from Mapleshade. (As I wrote once before, I could hear the improvement when I installed these cables on my office stereo.)

Finding appropriate speaker stands was more complicated. I had decided to mount the speakers from the wall, and although there are only a few wall-mount bracket manufacturers, identifying a specific model took three calls to the manufacturer and one returned shipment. I ended up with a pair of OmniMount’s 20.5 ST-MP brackets.

OmniMount makes a quality product, but their website is frustratingly out of date. For example, the 20.5 series is not listed on the site, but only in the Specifications document (a 900k PDF file made of over-compressed JPEGged scans of the original documents?!)

Worse, the documentation shipped with the product is outdated and incorrect: I received instructions for the older “50” model, which is rated for 15 lbs., not 20. Even more confusing, step 10 of the instructions notes that when mounted to the rear of the speaker cabinet, rather than the top or bottom, the capacity of the bracket falls to 7.5 lbs. Remember, this part is supposed to carry 20 lbs. A support guy at OmniMount told me that the documentation is incorrect, but honestly I didn’t know what to believe. Could they really have tripled the capacity of this bracket, from 7.5 lbs to 20, when they renamed it?

Anyway, I’d finally received all the parts. The next step should be easy: installation.