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Entertainment Center Cooling?
skubalon asks: "I have a decent bit of audio equipment for my home theatre. All of it is housed within a wooden entertainment center with a glass door. This doesn't do much for keeping my system cool. I have tested and found that the ambient temperature in the cabinet does not go higher than 100F (37.7C). I know that my receiver has a thermal shutoff, but is this safe? What have other readers done about cooling home audio equipment?"
...And the one with the least thermal ambient tolerance is the temperature you should have inside the cabinet, retard. If it's too high, get a fan, gee willikers, sugarbitch.
Ambient temperatures of 100F aren't hazardous to most consumer electronics. In terms of durability: Given exclusion from severe catastrophic failure syndrome catalysts such as lightning strikes and 2-year-old children, anything in your cabinet which doesn't rely on moving parts is very likely to outlive you and a number of your descendants.
That said, neither the bearings in your DVD player nor the VHS tapes you play are likely to be happy, long-term, with such elevated temperature.
Additionally, the properties of the individual components (caps, resistors, transistors) change with temperature, so well-designed analog electronics are engineered with a specific temperature range in mind. They'll certainly sound best when operated at whatever ambient temperature they were designed for, which is likely to be at or slightly above room temperature (72F).
The thermal switch in your amp is not likely to trip until the heatsink is justabout hot enough to boil water. It exists as a safety feature, like a fuse, to turn things off under abusive situations or in catastrophic modes of failure. It is not, in any way, a device intended to ensure proper fidelity.
My parents have a similar situation at their house. They've got a 36" Sony CRT, on top of a glass-doored Sony stand. Inside this stand resides all of the extra components associated with the TV - a DVD player, VCR, and DirecTV TiVo.
After adding an 80-gig, 7200RPM Maxtor to the TiVo, things would get hot enough inside of the cabinet that the TiVo would lock hard every couple of days.
They simply removed the glass doors, and everything has been rock-solid stable since.
I recommend you do the same.
Not only will your components be more accessible, you won't need to worry about things being too hot. It's also free.
In my own living room, I solve the heat problem differently. I've got the line-level (minimal BTW/hr) stereo components stacked neatly on a shelf, the TV on its own seperate stand along with the PSX and DVD player, and a fan-cooled power amp in its own rack back in the far corner of the room, hidden behind a plush chair.
By spreading things out and avoiding confining furniture, heat becomes a non-issue. And I also get to keep the more dangerous components (the ones with volume controls, capable of producing dangerously-loud, eviction-level radio static) up out of reach of my 2-year-old daughter.
If none of these solutions are appealing, simply install a largish, slow-moving fan near the top of whatever cavity houses your AV components, exhausting air out the back. Maybe something like this would do the trick. If such an arrangment turns out to be too loud, wire a rheostat in series with it to slow it down even more.
You could also use a low-voltage DC fan, but it'd take all of the fun out of it and require the use of a seperate power supply.
Whichever the case, the purpose here is not to actively cool the components, but to simply provide a mechanism for exchanging the stale, warm air inside of a cabinet with cooler air from outside, be it by convection (avoidance of enclosed cabinets and glass doors) or force (a fan to push things around).
It won't take much.
Kid-proof tablet..
I have a similar set up, and I have two small children which means that taking off the door is not a viable option. I tried installing a standard muffin fan, but it vibrated the wood and made a lot of noise so I removed it (though a slow fan might have worked better). I did leave the fan hole open, though, and found that this made a big difference in the ambient temperature inside the cabinet.
So I suggest that you use a hole saw to cut some large holes (the larger the better) in the back of the cabinet. Just don't remove so much wood that it causes structural damage. :-)
Two different setups I have gone to Radio Shack and purchased a pair of 6" fans. I also went to Home Depot to get little rubber grommets to use in mounting the fans to the entertainment center (prevents vibrations and rattling noises). Use a coping saw or large hole saw to open the vent, and use a small bit for the four holes that screw the fans to the cabinet.
I Place one fan blowing in, at the back of the center, right behind the major equipment. I place the other at the top of the cabinet blowing out. Both times I've been lucky enough to have a receiver/amp that has one of those piggy-back plugs in the back - you just plug the fans into that and you have controlled power, as well.
I find that these fans are just quiet enough for general use, but audiophiles may not agree.
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You're taking a gamble if you don't do anything to lower the temperatures of your components. Some quiet squirrel-cage style fans mounted appropriately can circulate enough air to lower temperatures considerably (20degF higher than ambient is likely attainable, of course depending upon the internal layout of the cabinet).
Use more, larger, slower-turning fans to keep things quiet. Baffles also help reduce the noise while only minimally impacting airflow.