These are the questions that come up on Todt Hill and rarely anywhere else: stone walls, very large rooms, houses that step down a slope, and apartments in the middle of a rebuild. Short questions about booking and payment are in the FAQ further down, and the Staten Island soundbar page covers hi-ranch block walls, stone-veneer fireplaces and townhouse party walls across the borough.
Stone, rubble and fabric-backed plaster
Our TV wall is Flagg-style stone with concrete poured behind it — what does the drill actually go into, and which anchor holds?
A wall built by Flagg’s mosaic-rubble method is three materials in one: hard, flat stone faces on the room side, mortar pointing between them, and a concrete backing that fills every gap behind the stones. Where the inside face has been plastered over, there is a fourth layer that is decoration only. Within the width of a typical soundbar bracket, the four or six holes may land in any of those, and each behaves differently. Serpentine and similar hard stone drill slowly and cleanly; pointing is softer and can crumble around a fast bit; the concrete backing is consistent and is usually the best material to anchor into.
So we map before we drill. The bracket is held up level, the hole positions are marked, and each mark is judged: stone, joint or concrete. Where we can move the bracket a few centimetres to put every hole in stone or concrete, we do. Where a hole has to fall in a joint, we go deeper so the anchor engages the concrete behind, and we use an anchor that doesn’t rely on expanding against crumbly mortar. The bit is new, sharp and kept cool, the hammer action is used gently, and dust is caught at the hole.
A soundbar is light compared with a TV, so the load is not the worry; the worry is a chipped stone face that you will see for the next fifty years. That is why the stone add on the price list (+$65) is there, and why, if a stone face looks fragile, we will suggest the TV-attached bracket so that the bar hangs from the TV mount and the wall is drilled only once.
A partition in our older house rang hollow when we tapped it, and the stud finder found nothing — could it be plaster on a fabric screen, and what holds a bracket then?
It could. The LPC records that Flagg’s published method for interior partitions used plaster on a jute or burlap screen instead of wooden lath, though it doesn’t say every house followed it, and other houses of that age used metal lath or early gypsum board. All three can fool an electronic stud finder. What they share is that the plaster is thin and the space behind it may have no wood where you’d expect a stud.
We find out with a small test hole behind where the bracket will sit, so the hole is hidden afterwards. If there is framing, we fix into it. If the partition is fabric- or mesh-backed with framing too far apart, a hollow-wall toggle won’t grip reliably and we don’t pretend it will. The answer is a plywood backer board ($85) screwed across the nearest framing members and painted to match, with the bar bracket fixed to that, or the TV-attached bracket, or console placement if the TV is on its stand.
Either way, you hear which one before we drill a second hole, and the price you agree is made of the published lines: $129 for the mount, $45 for plaster, $85 for a backer board if one is needed.
Very large rooms
Our great room has a conversation area near the TV and a second sofa across the room by the kitchen — can one bar serve both groups?
It can serve one of them properly and the other acceptably, and it is worth deciding in advance which is which. A soundbar’s room calibration measures from one place, usually where you hold the phone or the bar’s microphone picks up its test tones, and it tunes the bar for that seat. Sit twice as far away and you hear the same bar with more of the room mixed in: voices get softer relative to the music and effects, and bass from a subwoofer placed for the near seats may boom or vanish at the far ones.
Our usual approach is to calibrate for the main seating group, then walk to the second group and adjust the dialogue or voice setting until speech is clear there without being harsh up close. Many bars let you raise the centre channel or voice band independently of the overall volume, and that single control does more for a far sofa than turning everything up. Where the second group is used for watching as often as the first, a second pair of rear speakers is not an option on most bars, so the real fix is a speaker near that group — an in-ceiling or in-wall pair fed from a receiver — and that is a design job for our AV team rather than a soundbar job.
Tell us how the room is actually used. If the far sofa is for reading while the game is on, one bar tuned for the near seats is right. If it’s the family’s main seat on movie night, we plan around it instead.
One side of our great room is floor-to-ceiling glass and the other is a stone fireplace wall — will the bar sound lopsided?
It can, a little, and it is one of the more common complaints in big modern rooms. Glass and stone are both hard, but they sit at different distances from the bar and reflect differently, and an open kitchen on one side swallows sound that a solid wall on the other side throws back. The result is a sound image that leans: voices seem to come from slightly left or right of the screen, and effects that should travel across the room bunch up on one side.
Most of the cure is in setup rather than equipment. The bar should sit centred on the screen, not on the wall, and the main seat centred on the bar where the furniture allows. Room calibration from that seat corrects much of the imbalance, because the bar measures what actually reaches you. If the bar has rear speakers, we place them symmetrically about the seat rather than about the room, and set their levels separately. Soft furnishings help more than people expect: a large rug between the bar and the sofa and curtains that can close over part of the glass take the edge off the reflections.
What we can’t do is make a room with one glass wall sound like a room without it. If the imbalance still bothers you after calibration, the next step is acoustic treatment or a speaker layout designed for the room, which our AV team can quote separately.
We’re buying a large flagship bar to hang from the TV mount — is there a weight limit we should know about?
Yes, two of them. The TV-attached soundbar bracket has its own rated load, printed on its box and in its manual, and flagship bars with up-firing drivers and several woofers weigh noticeably more than compact ones. The second limit is the TV mount: whatever hangs from the TV is added to the TV’s weight, and on an articulating arm it also adds leverage, because the bar sits further from the wall when the arm is extended.
Before we book we check the bar’s weight against the bracket’s rating, and the TV plus bar against the mount’s rating. If either is close, we fix the bar to the wall on its own bracket instead, which takes it off the TV mount altogether. On a full-motion arm we also check that the bar clears the wall and furniture through the whole range of movement and that its cables have enough slack to follow.
The Sanus bracket we supply is $84.99. If you’ve bought another TV-attached bracket, we’ll use it if it’s rated for your bar and fits your TV’s mounting pattern; if it isn’t, we’ll tell you before the bar goes on it.
All our boxes live in a closet more than 25 feet from the TV — what happens beyond the 25-foot line on your price list?
The published cable-run line is $99 for up to 25 feet, and that is all the price list covers. Beyond 25 feet two things change. The route usually needs more work — through a basement ceiling, along a different floor, around a stair — and an ordinary passive HDMI cable may not carry a 4K signal reliably that far. Longer runs normally need an active or fibre-optic HDMI cable, which is designed for distance and has a direction marked on it.
Because none of that is on the published list, we don’t guess a price on the phone. We ask for photos of both ends and a description of the route, and send you in writing either a plan that uses the published lines (for example two runs to an intermediate cabinet) or a statement that this part of the job needs a site visit. Nothing is charged that you haven’t seen in writing first.
Often there is a simpler answer: move only the streaming box to the TV wall and leave the rest in the closet. The bar needs one HDMI connection, to the TV’s eARC or ARC port; everything else can feed the TV wherever it sits.
We have TVs in six rooms — which of them actually need a soundbar, and which are fine on their own speakers?
Most houses don’t need six bars. A useful test is how the room is watched. Rooms where people sit for films, sport or long evenings — the family room, the lower-level den, often the primary bedroom — repay a good bar, because thin TV speakers are what makes dialogue hard to follow. Rooms where the TV is background — a kitchen, a gym, a guest room used a few nights a year — often do fine with the TV’s own speakers, or with a compact bar on the console for $79 if speech is hard to hear there.
Two further questions decide it. Does anyone in the household have trouble following speech? Then the rooms that person uses come first, and a bar with a good voice-enhancement mode is worth more than one with the biggest bass. And does the household want music in several rooms at once? Then it may be better to choose bars from one maker’s system so they can be grouped, and to plan the rooms together rather than one at a time.
We price each room on its own line, so you can do the important rooms now and the others later without paying for a plan you won’t use.
Houses that step down the slope
Our walk-out lower level is underground on the uphill side and opens to the garden on the downhill side — which wall should carry the TV and bar?
Usually the uphill wall, but for reasons of light as much as sound. The downhill side is where the windows and doors are, and a TV facing them will reflect the garden all afternoon; a TV on that side faces the dark end of the room and the viewers face the glare. The uphill wall is solid, faces the light, and puts the seating with its back to the view, which most families accept for a TV room.
The catch is what the uphill wall is made of. On a slope like this it is often poured concrete or block, holding back the hill, sometimes with a framed and drywalled finish wall a few inches in front of it. If there is a finish wall, the bracket goes into its framing and we stay clear of the concrete. If the TV wall is bare or painted masonry, we anchor into it (+$75) and run the cables on the surface in a paintable cord cover ($59), because there is no cavity to hide them in. We don’t drill deep into a wall holding back earth just to bury a cable.
For sound, the uphill wall is also the better choice: hard concrete behind the bar gives a solid, even base, and the open garden side of the room behind the seats lets the sound out rather than bouncing it back.
Our subwoofer seems to boom in the upstairs bedrooms through the heating ducts — is that possible, and what can be done?
It is possible. Forced-air ducts are long sheet-metal tubes that connect rooms on different floors, and low bass travels along them with little loss. A subwoofer placed close to a floor or wall register, or in a lower-level room whose return duct runs straight up to the bedrooms, can make the bedrooms hear more bass than the rooms in between.
The first step is placement. We move the subwoofer away from any register or return grille and try two or three spots, listening upstairs as well as in the room. The second step is level: subwoofers are very often set too high after unboxing, and turning the sub down a few steps relative to the bar, together with the bar’s night mode in the evening, solves most cases. The third step, if you want it, is a heating contractor’s job — flexible duct sections or duct liners can reduce sound travelling through the system — and we’ll tell you if we think it’s worth asking about.
What we don’t recommend is blocking a register with the subwoofer or with furniture to stop the sound. That stops the heating and cooling too.
The lower-level TV hangs on the end wall of the games room, past the pool table — will the bar get knocked by cues, and will anyone at the sofa hear it?
Both are fair worries. A pool cue on the backswing reaches well beyond the end of the table, and a bar mounted at ordinary height under a TV on the end wall can sit right in its path. We measure from the cushion to the wall before deciding the height. Where the gap is tight, the bar goes higher, tight under the TV on its own bracket, or on a TV-attached bracket so it sits within the TV’s footprint; the screen itself usually needs to go up anyway so players can see over the table.
Raising the bar helps the cue problem and hurts the sound a little, because the drivers point over the heads of seated viewers. Most bars cope with a modest height if the calibration is run from the sofa, and a bar with a good voice mode keeps speech clear. If the seating is at the far end of the room, past the table, we can place the subwoofer and any rear speakers near the sofa so the sound doesn’t have to cross the table at all.
The price is the ordinary mount ($129) plus whatever the wall is — lower-level end walls on the hill are often concrete (+$75) — and the high-mount line ($75) only if the bar ends up above about 8 feet.
Networks in large houses
Our mesh Wi-Fi has a node in the TV cabinet — can it sit right next to the soundbar and subwoofer, or will they fight each other?
They can share the cabinet, but placement inside it matters. Many soundbars link to their subwoofer and wireless rear speakers by their own radio connection, and mesh nodes are busy radios too. Packed tightly behind a cabinet door, with a cable box and a games console adding heat and their own electronics, the links can drop out when everything is busy.
We keep the node at the front or top of the cabinet with its antennas clear, at least a hand’s width from the bar’s wireless hub if it has one, and we leave the cabinet ventilated. If the house has wired network points, the bar and the node can both use them; a wired connection to the bar takes its streaming off the wireless network entirely and leaves more room for the sub and rears. Where the node can sit on a shelf outside the cabinet, that is better still.
If your network itself is the weak point — dead spots at the far end of a long house, a lower level the signal never reaches — our Staten Island network installers can run cable to the TV wall or add access points, and the soundbar visit can follow.
Apartments at the foot of the hill
We’ve just moved back into our modernised Todt Hill Houses apartment — how do we choose the TV wall now that the outlets and layout have changed?
Start with the outlets, not the furniture. NYCHA’s presentation to Todt Hill residents recorded requests for more outlets and lights in the apartments, and the modernisation includes full electrical upgrades, so the outlets in a renovated apartment may not be where they were. A TV and soundbar want one outlet close behind or below the screen; a wall without one means a long cord across the floor, and moving an outlet is an electrician’s job, not ours.
Next, light. The renovation includes new windows, and a TV facing a window will show reflections all afternoon. The best TV wall in most of these living rooms is the one the window faces, with the outlet nearest to it. Then ask management whether wall mounting is allowed on the new finishes before anything is drilled; we don’t drill a NYCHA wall without the resident confirming that. If the answer is no, or not yet, the bar goes on the TV stand for $79 and works exactly the same.
If the wall is allowed and turns out to be masonry, the mount is $129 plus $75, with the cable in a $59 cord cover so nothing is cut into the new walls. Keep the bar’s box and bracket from before the move; a missing bracket is the most common snag after a relocation.
