The Most DIFFICULT Project I have EVER Done!

so in my recent gaming room setup video that I released a little over a month ago I mentioned that I still needed to get a nice set of white desktop speakers and asked if anyone had recommendations I was blown away at how many responses I got and after looking online and doing a little research on every single one that was suggested I ended up going with the pair that I thought in my opinion not only looked the best but also had glowing reviews in this video I'll show you which ones I ended up going with as well as walking through how I built some custom acrylic Edge lit speaker stands that might actually be the most tedious project I've ever done now to get things started the first thing I did was order a couple 12 by 12 inch acrylic squares with a thickness of a half an inch or approximately 13 millimeters and speakers can end up being pretty heavy so getting it in this size thickness should for sure provide a strong enough base for me to use next I had to decide what type of LED lights to go with and in the end I landed on these sk60 at 12 strips from BTF lighting that have 144 LEDs per meter these are individually addressable plus provide a separate LED just for whites which is a nice option to have and furthermore what's great about these is that they're exactly half an inch wide so it's going to line up perfectly with the edge of our acrylic when it comes time to get everything put together so in order for Edge lighting to work the surface of what you're trying to illuminate has to be frosted there are different ways you can go about to accomplish this but perhaps the easiest is to just use a sander I'm using 220 grit paper which seemed to work just fine now ideally you could just buy it frosted or what some call milky or cloudy but I wasn't able to find it like this and the thickness I was looking for I went ahead and sanded both sides of the acrylic as well as three of the four edges foreign now since the 12 by 12 inch size is a little too big for the speakers I ended up going with I borrowed my brother-in-law's table saw to cut these down to the size I want I am just using the standard blade that this came with and going nice and slow but the cuts did end up coming out perfect next up I need to create something to put the LED strips in this is where having a 3D printer would be very helpful but since I don't have one I'll start things off by cutting four small quarter inch slices from a one inch square doll here I'll be going back to the table saw and using that same piece of wood I'll be cutting a Groove out down the middle that's a half an inch thick now once the groove is complete I'm going to cut this into two shorter sections that will be the same length as our acrylic and then eventually I'll use the end caps that we sliced off earlier to enclose things foreign I also went out and got this half inch wide and very thin piece of aluminum I'm going to put this on the bottom of the channel to help with heat disbursement from the LEDs plus the adhesive on the back of the lights will stick much better to this compared to just the wood at this point I'm going to take the router table out and make a very small incision on one side of our wooden pieces this will create a large enough Gap when the end caps are attached that I should be able to run the wires from the LED strip through so moving on I spent some time online and nothing really jumped out in terms of an actual stand and due to the limited space I have on the desk I figured I'd have to come up with something myself I went to my local hardware store and picked up a lot of different angles and attachments from their metal piping section to see if this might be an option after playing around with things for a little bit I came up with a design I thought might work you can get these in different sizes but I went with a three-quarter inch option which I'm hoping will still give me enough room to feed cables through so that in the end no wires will be visible now before moving on I want to thank the sponsor of today's video Aura so this is me signing up for their free 14-day trial and during the setup process one of the many things they do is scan the internet for data Brokers that have your personal information these data Brokers then make a fortune selling your information to spammers scammers and other entities that want to know more about you now Aura was able to find 30 such instances of my personal information being in the hands of these companies then with one click Aura sends out a notice to have my information removed from their systems which they are legally required to do when asked they're all in one platform offers anti-virus protection credit monitoring credit lock fine financial transaction alerts secure VPN identity protection parental controls 24 7 us-based customer service and much much more I'll leave a link in the description for you to start your own free 14-day trial so please make sure to check them out thank you all so much and now back to the video next I'm going to remove the key light and mic arm from the setup and take the base piece of the stand that we just put together and trace a spot on the table where I want things anchored I'll first drill some small pilot holes before switching to a larger quarter inch bit foreign as far as being able to feed the wires through the table I'll use this three-quarter inch hole saw attachment to make the larger cut out in the middle and then after unplugging and moving the PC back I'll be doing the exact same thing on the right side all right so we also have to get our acrylic piece connected to the top part of the stand I'll first Trace out the holes and then I'll use a half inch forstner bit to go a little less than halfway through the plastic which will allow our screw to sit below surface and then use the same quarter inch bit from the previous step to go the rest of the way through here I'll switch back to the forstner bit but this time a three-quarter inch one for the center cutout now to keep in line with my mostly white themed setup I'll be spray painting both the wooden channels and the stands using this paint plus primer Ultra matte from Rust-Oleum foreign after letting things dry for a couple hours it's definitely looking pretty good I'll probably go back and do a few touch-ups here and there by hand but overall I like how everything's coming together so let's switch gears and go over how we're going to get the LEDs set up I could just cut off the first led but for the sake of not wasting anything I'm going to take this strip and cut back the heat shrink at the beginning to expose the wires I'll then use my hot soldering iron to remove all the pre-soldered connections since I want to attach my own 18 gauge silicone wires instead now I won't spend too much time on this process since everything I'm doing here I do go over in extreme detail with close-up footage in a how-to solder video I made recently that I highly recommend checking out if interested once this is complete I'm going to attach the aluminum piece to the wood with some super glue then I'll figure out exactly how much of the strip I need make the cut and then attach it to the bottom of the channel using a 3M sticky tape backing and this is where the little Notch that we cut out earlier using the router table comes into play the wires will hopefully fit in the Gap allowing us to put the end caps on for a more clean and seamless look which I'll again be using some more Super Glue to attach foreign now that we have our LEDs put together we can move our attention back to the acrylic pieces here I'll take some quarter inch screws that I believe are one inch long and slide them into the countersink holes that we made previously and then secure on the other side to the top of the stand that we just spray painted so here I've just slid on the LED piece to see how things are coming together and so far so good next I needed to come up with something to slightly raise the speakers off the acrylic because I need a little space to run the wires underneath and through the piping as well as providing some buffer to reduce any vibrations I ended up finding this 10 millimeter thick foam roll that should work perfect I'll be cutting it down to a much smaller size in the base of the speakers in hopes of creating somewhat of a floating effect similar to the design of what you'd see on a floating bed and don't worry about making this look too perfect because it's not something that's going to be very visible once everything's set up moving on it's now time to attach the base to the desk for this I'll just be using some quarter inch thick screws that are one and a half inches long that will go through the table and secured with the washer followed by a nut underneath then I'll be adding the middle section to the base unit which you can just twist until you have it at the desired angle and finally I'll be screwing on our acrylic section that's attached to the top bracket foreign once the left side is done I'll rinse and repeat everything I just did but this time for the right side at this point it's about time for me to start feeding the wires through I'll start by sliding the three 18 gauge silicone wires through the pipes that are attached to the LED strips in our wooden pieces then I'll move on to feeding the larger banana plug speaker wires to the same spot foreign and just like before I'll have to do the exact same thing for the right side now I knew going with a three quarter inch diameter piping wouldn't allow me to Simply feed the entire power strip through so in order for me to make this work I cut the cable closer to the power outlet side I'll eventually reconnect everything back together using some wiggle connectors which I'll get into later but this should now allow me to run the power through the desk ensuring there'll be no visible cables all right and if you hadn't already figured it out by the thumbnail I ended up going with the Cano tuck speakers when doing my research on all the options I just kept going back to this one and I know it's personal preference but to me they absolutely nailed the design element and created something that really stands out from the crowd in terms of the way they look and after reading about all the tech that these featured seeing all the positive reviews online and not to mention everyone that suggested in my gaming room setup video that I should get these I was very confident in my decision now in terms of a high level overview these are rocking and impressive AMT Tweeter five and a quarter inch aluminum woofer and all this is wrapped in a modern clean design with virtually no visible seams on the casing except for the back panel and you can get these in either white or black on the front you also have your headphone jack as well as the volume control that also doubles as a power on and off as well as cycling through the different input options on the back is where you'll find the many different types of connections you can choose from you have your USB input that will automatically sync to whatever computer you're using there's a dedicated RCA line in a dedicated RCA phono an optical for easy hookup for let's say a TV if that's something that you wanted to do and another great feature these can also be expanded with the subwoofer with support for automatic crossover where everything under 80 which is your typical sub frequencies will get pushed over to the sub automatically furthermore if you want to go the Wireless Route it also supports Bluetooth 4.2 I do want to say thank you to everyone who took the time to give me some recommendations for what speakers to get these are absolutely incredible and I couldn't be happy with how they sound and look so it's finally time to get everything set up I'll start with my active speaker which will be the one on the right side that will be receiving the main power then the left side will be my passive speaker that gets connected using the included speaker wires that we've already fed through the desk and pipes previously in the video once this is done I'll go ahead and move the PC back in place now since I did have to cut the power cord to the speakers to be able to feed it through the desk I'll quickly go over what I did to get them reconnected I first found this white electrical box on Amazon that'll be perfect for the job I'm going to drill a couple holes on either side of the box thank you then I'll feed both ends of the cut power cord through the holes which I've already stripped back the smaller cables inside from here it's just reconnecting the same colored wires together using wiggle Clips closing the Box up and mounting it underneath so that it's not hanging down I did go ahead and clean up the wires in the back a little bit using some mesh sleeves that do a good enough job of covering up the different colored wires to give everything an overall cleaner look and the last thing I'll be doing is applying some white matte paint by hand to cover up the silver screws that I used to secure everything together now as I'm finishing up you may be wondering how I'm going to get power plus control the LED strips that's going to be lighting up the acrylic I'll Simply Be connecting them to the power unit that's already underneath the desk and using a separate pin on one of my four esp32 devices that I have loaded with W LED and mounted underneath and I won't go over this process of getting things hooked up since you can just watch the complete DIY video I made of getting the desk set up which goes over all this in detail so that about does it for this project I'll leave you with some final pictures and videos of everything set up thank you all so much for watching and as always I hope you have a blessed day oh foreign

Channel: Chris Maher

Views: 21,900

Keywords: small room setup, gaming battlestation, ultimate gaming setup, room tour, gaming setup, gaming room, setup tour, ultimate setup, desk setup, best gaming setup, ultimate setup tour, ultimate gaming room, gaming room setup, gaming room tour, room setup, small gaming setup, my 2023 gaming setup, gaming setup 2023, 2023 gaming setup, 2023 room tour, dream gaming setup, dream setup, best battlestation, techsource, setup wars, gaming, dream gaming room setup, xbox, ps5, pc setup

Id: 2lKaAhS2L1U

Length: 16min 9sec (969 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 13 2023