These are the questions Bay Ridge homes raise that a generic installation guide does not: curved Art Moderne walls, elevator shafts, inlaid parquet, a tenant downstairs, a bay window, a shop under the living room and a bar crowded by liquor shelves. Each answer comes first, then the detail.
Inside the Shore Road and Ridge Boulevard buildings
French doors from the foyer swing open across our living-room TV wall — will they hit a wall-mounted soundbar?
They can, so we check before the bracket goes up. Many Shore Road and Ridge Boulevard apartments of the 1930s and 1940s open into the living room through glazed French doors, and when the TV wall is the one beside the doorway, an open leaf can sweep across exactly the spot where the bar would sit. A bar on its bracket stands a few inches proud of the plaster, with the TV just above it, and that is enough to catch a lever handle or the edge of a glass panel.
We open each leaf fully, mark its arc on the wall with painter's tape and keep the TV and bar clear of it. Where the arc covers the natural center of the wall, the choices are a narrower bar moved along the wall with the TV, a TV-attached bracket on an arm that folds flat when the doors are open, or a floor-mounted door stop so the leaf halts short of the bar. We mark where a stop should go.
How long does the drilling last, and how much will the neighbors across the hall hear?
Less than most people expect. On a typical Bay Ridge wall the noisy part is a handful of holes for the bracket and perhaps two or three for a cable channel, each drilled in seconds. On concrete or block in a postwar building the hammer drill is louder, but the total drilling time is still counted in minutes rather than hours.
Hammer-drill noise does travel through a concrete slab and a corridor wall, so in a co-op we keep it inside the contractor hours your building sets and, where we can, gather all the drilling into one short spell in the middle of the visit rather than spreading it out. A note to the neighbors beside you and across the hall the day before, saying roughly when, goes a long way in a building where everyone shares the same elevator — we can suggest wording.
Can a subwoofer sit on our original inlaid parquet without marking it?
It can, as long as it never touches the wood directly. Most subwoofers ship with either hard plastic feet or small spikes, and both are bad news for old parquet: the feet slide when the sub moves air and scuff the finish, and spikes dent soft oak and the strips of the border inlay. A thirty-pound box that vibrates for a few hours every evening will polish or press a mark into the finish within a few months.
We set the sub on a dense isolation pad or a small platform with a felt or rubber base sized to its footprint, which protects the floor and, more usefully, keeps the sub from driving the parquet and the slab underneath it. Where the building's rug rule applies, a rug under the sub is already part of the picture, but a rug alone is not enough: the sub still needs a firm pad on top so it does not rock on the pile. If the parquet has a loose strip where you want the sub, we move the sub, because a loose strip rattles at certain notes.
Our co-op makes us keep rugs over most of the floor — does that count toward keeping the subwoofer quiet downstairs?
Only partly. The house rule that Habitat Magazine describes, rugs over at least 80 percent of each room's floor, was written for footsteps: impact noise from heels, chairs and children landing on the floor. Rugs are good at that. Subwoofer bass is a different problem. Low notes travel as vibration through whatever the sub touches and as pressure through the air of the room, and in a postwar building with concrete slabs that vibration spreads very efficiently. A rug under the sub softens the first part a little and does almost nothing for the second.
What actually keeps the floor below quiet is placement, isolation and level. We move the sub away from the corners where walls meet the floor, because corners reinforce bass; set it on an isolation pad so it does not drive the slab; and set its level well below the factory default, matched to the bar by ear from the sofa rather than by the meter. Then we show you the sub-level control and the night mode so you can turn the low end down on the evenings it matters.
Two-family houses and limestone rows
We live upstairs in our two-family — can you take a sound reading in the tenant's apartment before we decide on a subwoofer?
Yes, with your tenant's agreement and someone from the household present. It is one of the most useful ten minutes an owner-landlord can spend. We play a short passage with steady low bass through the system upstairs, at the level you would actually watch at, and listen and measure in the tenant's living room and bedroom below. The difference between the sub off and the sub on, and between the sub in one corner and another, is usually obvious without any equipment at all.
The result decides the purchase or the setup. Sometimes the answer is that a bar with good built-in bass and no separate sub is right for that floor; sometimes the sub is fine in one spot and plainly audible in another; sometimes a lower level and night mode on weekday evenings is enough. A meter reading is a guide, not a verdict; a neighbor who can hear it is the real test.
Our front parlor's bay window takes up most of the street wall — should the TV and soundbar go in the bay or on the wall opposite?
Almost always on a solid wall, not in the bay. A TV standing in a bay window fights the daylight behind it all afternoon, and a soundbar in a bay has glass on three sides, which reflects its sound back at odd angles and blurs dialogue. The bay also tends to be where the radiator, the deepest window trim and the room's best light are, all of which a TV and its cables spoil.
In the tapestry-brick and limestone houses the usual good choice is the wall that faces the bay or the long side wall toward the dining room, whichever puts the screen at the shortest comfortable distance from the sofa. If the bay must stay the focal point, a TV and bar on a low console beside it, angled toward the seating, works better than anything mounted inside it. Where the best wall is the shared one, we use fixings that stay well short of the brick's far face.
Our TV wall is the narrow pier between two tall windows, and the curtains brush the ends of the bar — will the drapes muffle it?
They can, and on modern bars it matters more than people expect. Many soundbars put side-firing or angled drivers at the very ends of the cabinet to widen the sound, and a heavy curtain hanging an inch away from those drivers soaks up exactly the part of the sound that is supposed to bounce off the side walls. The result is a narrower, duller picture of the room's sound and, sometimes, dialogue that seems to come from a point instead of the screen.
The fixes are simple. A bar a little narrower than the pier, centered with at least a few inches of clear air at each end, solves most cases; curtain rods with returns or tie-backs that hold the fabric clear of the bar solve the rest. If the pier is too narrow for the bar you want, clipping the bar to the TV mount and bringing both slightly forward of the wall usually buys the clearance without moving anything else.
Apartments over the avenue shops
We live above a store that closes at night — does that change how loud the subwoofer can run?
It helps in the evening and it changes nothing about the walls beside you. If the business under your living room closes at 8 or 9 PM, there is nobody below to disturb at night, and a sub that would trouble a downstairs bedroom may be perfectly acceptable. But mixed-use buildings on Fifth and Third Avenues are usually narrow and attached on both sides, so bass also travels sideways into the apartments next door and up into any apartment above you. The store downstairs being empty does not make those neighbors any less awake.
There is a daytime side too. A shop with customers, a salon with clients or a restaurant with a lunch service is a neighbor during business hours, and a commercial tenant who hears your movie through the ceiling will complain to the same landlord you do. We place the sub away from the party walls, isolate it from the floor and set a moderate level, then show you how to switch between a daytime and a late-evening setting.
The only outlet near our TV is fed through old metal channel on the wall surface — can the soundbar cables run inside it?
No. That surface channel is an electrical raceway carrying power conductors, and the electrical code requires Class 2 low-voltage wiring such as HDMI, network and speaker cable to be kept separate from power wiring rather than pulled in alongside it. Apart from the code, an HDMI cable sharing a raceway with power conductors picks up interference, and opening an old raceway risks disturbing wiring that may not have been touched in decades.
The answer is a separate route. We run a slim paintable channel of our own beside or below the existing one, painted to the wall, or route the cables along the baseboard to the console. Where the old raceway also means the outlet itself is tired, loose or ungrounded, we will point it out; any change to the outlet or the circuit is for a licensed electrician, and we are glad to come back once that work is done.
Businesses on Third and Fifth
Behind our Third Avenue bar, the only free wall is between the liquor shelves — where can a soundbar go?
Usually above the shelving rather than between it. Back-bar walls are crowded for good reasons: bottles need to be reached, shelves need to be wiped, and anything mounted at shoulder height gets knocked by elbows and bottle necks all night. A bar squeezed into a gap between shelves also loses half its sound to the bottles and wood on either side. The better placement is a TV mounted high over the back bar with the bar tight under it, above the reach line, angled slightly down toward the stools.
Where the back bar runs to the ceiling, the screen and bar usually go on a side wall or a column with a clear sightline from the room, with one modest bar per screen so each can run quietly. Exposed brick behind a bar takes masonry anchors in the brick face rather than the mortar, and cables go up a painted channel or along the top of the shelving. Mounts above about eight feet use the high-mount line on our price list. With apartments above most Third Avenue bars, we leave the subwoofer out, set a volume ceiling where the bar allows it and label each remote by screen.
Can the waiting-room soundbar in our Fifth Avenue practice help keep front-desk conversations from being overheard?
A little, if it is set up for that job, but it is not a privacy system. Steady background sound at a comfortable level makes a nearby conversation harder to follow, and a bar under the waiting-room TV playing at a constant low level does some of that. Where it helps most is in placement: a bar on the wall between the seating and the reception desk, with the TV facing the chairs, puts its sound where patients sit and away from the desk.
What it cannot do is replace a door, a closed window at reception or a sound-masking system designed for the purpose. We set the bar to a fixed level that staff cannot easily push up, switch on dialogue enhancement so captions and speech are clear at that low level, and keep it off any wall shared with a treatment room. Genuine speech privacy is a separate design job, and we will say so rather than oversell a soundbar.
Detached houses toward the water
Our detached house has no neighbor through the wall — does that mean we should go bigger on the subwoofer?
Not automatically. A freestanding house removes the party-wall problem, but the people who hear a subwoofer most are usually the ones in your own house: someone asleep in the bedroom over the living room, or a parent living in a basement apartment below the living room. Big rooms also do not need as much sub as people expect; bass builds up in any enclosed space, and a large living room with a solid floor often sounds fuller with a well-placed modest sub than with a large one in a corner.
The better question is what the room needs. A long living room with the sofa far from the screen benefits more from a wider bar with a strong center channel, so dialogue reaches the back of the room, and from rear speakers placed behind the seating, than from extra bass. Where a large sub does make sense, we place it using the room rather than the furniture, and then set it so the house can still sleep.
