Advice About Wall Plates or Holes

Tomorrow I'm going to mount my speakers to the wall.

I purchased wall plates with binding posts for all the speakers, because I thought in theory it would give everything a clean look and would also provide easier access to change speakers down the road (plug and play)

My conundrum now is that not only does the wife want the equipment mounted, she wants it to be eye appealing. When I showed her the option of a wall plate on one side and then the speaker wall mount to the other, she wasn't keen on it.

She asked why we couldn't just poke a hole in the wall and run the wire and have it close to the speaker mount. Since we have old plaster walls, I told her it'd be easier to fish the wire if I could cut out a hole for a single gang box, drop the wire, then slap a box in, batta bing batta boom and be finished.

Since this will be going into our living room I understand what she's saying, but I thought the wall plates would provide a dual function of clean looks and ease of use.

What other options are out there for me to look at that I haven't touched upon?

btw, I'm not to worried about the wall plates if ya'll suggest ditching them, because they were relatively cheap and can be used for another project if need be.

Don't know if it'll help at all or not, but the speakers are the Mirage MX5.1 set, so the satellites don't hide much and she wants them super high on the wall. Which gives everything more visibility on the wall and no telling how much the sound is going to suffer being about 7-8' high off the floor.

I appreciate all the responses. I never did think about grommets so that is a definite possibility to show the misses.

Wallpaper is out. Having to remove it enough times, we look at it as a pox on humanity.

The bushings look like a great idea also.

I guess my only worry, is fishing these behind the plaster walls with a small hole. From what I've seen so far, there's no chicken wire (thank the lawd), just slats, and plaster. Since I'll be dealing with 3 outside walls, I have no idea what I'll be in store for. I ran a 2 new 20 amp outlets for the HT equipment and for the LCD on the wall and found a barrier of plaster to break through about 3.5' from the floor. But since I had a single gang box sized hole to deal with, I was able to break through it (with stiff weather stripping lol).

That's the only downside I see from the suggestions is lack of maneuvering space in case I run into a snag.

So for aesthetically pleasing and still able to sell the house down the road (waaaaay down the road) without hitting any kind of code violations, grommits and bushings are pretty much my only alternatives?

Lots of great advice.

I'll post pictures tomorrow when done.

Hopefully I'll make the right choice.

I apologize for the lack of updates, so here's what I posted on our blog:

o, I had a grand idea of running speaker wire in the walls and mounting the rear surround speakers to the walls. Little did we know what we had in store for ourselves.

The job started yesterday and didn’t get finished till this evening. Every time we thought we were making headway, 2-3 hours would fly by trying to figure out what was wrong. First problem for example occurred when I cut a hole in the wall the size of a single gang box. Soon as I busted through the plaster wall a plethora of what I thought was walnut shavings come pouring out of the wall. Imagine a waterfall of foam pellets falling out of the wall nonstop and you’ll have an idea of what it looked like. After filling up 4 trash bags worth (52 gallons) we put a ton of paper up in the hole to stop the flow of “insulation” from leaving out house.

The second problem happened when we wanted to run wire for the rear left surround. Being that the wall was an outside wall normally wouldn’t be a problem, but how they built the house was the problem. We have an old HVAC unit and the way one air return was done, they nailed sheet metal to two floor joists which form a canal and then trunk it off from there. For us to run our wire down the wall and into the basement we’d have to remove a portion of the sheet metal, drill a hole up, and then fish the wire. Well, ended up being that the edge of the wall in the basement wasn’t the outside wall, but the inside wall. Seems that the outside walls of the house are 2×6 and not 2×4, since we were already battling sheet metal and our HVAC unit we declared defeat and routed on the back inside wall.

Third problem crept up while installing the right rear surround speaker. Turned out to be a cross beam that was placed about 3 inches above the baseboards and was blocking our path to run the wire. So, we decided to break out some plaster and route the speaker wire around the board. This worked out very well since plaster is so thick and all we have to do now is put a blank wall plate over it (spackling comes later).

Now mind you, these are plaster walls that we’re talking about. So no matter how careful you are with your cutting, it’s going to chip in chunks whether you want it too or not. Plus since drywall is a joy compared to plaster, installing an electrical box becomes a challenge (due to slats and plaster).

So we have everything installed and now we want to do our faux stucco more than ever, because of how ****** the area’s look around the outlets.

Oh well, pics to come later and we’re well on our way to getting familiar with all areas of this house. Hell, I’m just happy 2 walnuts came out of the wall this time instead of the 6 gallons worth.

There was one victim among us during this whole story and that was the ole pups. Poor fella, didn’t get all the lovin’s that he usually gets for the day.

(I will get pics posted here)

And guess what I learned, a regular RCA cable is not something to use for a subwoofer cable. Tons of hum. So, I have an order already in at Monoprice for some shielded cable. Live and learn.