THE MONARCHY 9.4.6In Progress
CHAPTER 8 — AND THEN CAME THE FRONT STAGE
Because apparently twelve JTRs weren't enough.
Sitting in Jeremy's theater are three brand-new, factory-wrapped, palletized:
JTR NOESIS 215RM REFERENCE MONITORS
Dual 15-inch woofers.
Massive wooden horn/coaxial compression-driver assemblies.
Three of them.
The front stage for Monarchy 2.0.
At that point, the project officially crossed the line from "upgrading a home theater" into something much more serious.
The goal was no longer simply to have great speakers.
The goal was to build an environment capable of letting those speakers disappear.
CHAPTER 9 — BUILDING THE ROOM AROUND THE SYSTEM
There is a lesson that became painfully obvious during this process:
A great speaker in a bad room is still a bad experience.
Once transducers capable of this level of output enter the room, the physical environment becomes part of the system.
So Monarchy 2.0 became a room project.
19 feet wide.
26 feet long.
9 feet high.
Dedicated.
Dark.
Structurally reinforced.
Acoustically controlled.
The original plan was supposed to be a relatively simple two-day installation of the JTR height speakers.
It became five days.
When the ceiling drywall was opened, standard mounting wasn't going to be enough.
Structural blocking was added between the joists.
Custom Baltic birch backing plates were fabricated, sanded, and painted matte black.
The 110SLs were secured with 10-24 threaded inserts and machine screws directly into structural reinforcement.
The objective was simple:
Zero deflection. Zero unnecessary vibration. Maximum mechanical security.
Then came the electrical infrastructure.
Four dedicated 20A circuits for the rack.
Two 20A circuits for the front sub wall.
Two 20A circuits for the rear wall.
One for the riser.
One for the projector.
Ten dedicated circuits in total.
The room will receive Rockwool insulation in the framing cavities.
GIK combination panels at primary reflection points.
Guilford of Maine acoustically transparent black fabric across the side and rear walls.
Wood Veneer Hub matte-black acoustic slats.
Arlington box extenders throughout the room to ensure the finished wall treatments would sit correctly.
Lighting was integrated into the architecture rather than simply mounted into the ceiling.
And then came the front wall.
CHAPTER 10 — THE BLACK HOLE
The front stage became a 3X Black Velvet Abyss faux wall.
The purpose wasn't decoration.
It was optical disappearance.
The goal was for projector spill to disappear.
For the screen to float.
For the massive speakers behind it to become invisible once the lights went down.
The 148" Seymour Excellence 1.90:1 Digital Imax screen will sit in front of the JTR front stage.
Lights off.
Projector on.
And the physical room begins to disappear.
That's the point.
CHAPTER 4 — THEN JTR ENTERED THE PICTURE
This hobby has a funny definition of the word "endgame."
It usually means:
Endgame until the next forum post.
Names kept appearing.
JTR.
Scott Newby.
Youthman.
Matt from Obsessed Garage.
The more JTR systems that were seen and heard, the more intriguing they became.
Then came the prices.
$1,500.
$2,000.
Sometimes more.
For a surround speaker.
That seemed completely insane.
Why spend that kind of money on a surround when the Klipsch system already sounded incredible?
The rationalization was easy:
"JTR is forum hype."
"The Klipsch system is already more than enough."
"There's no reason to spend that much on surrounds."
Those statements were repeated often enough that they almost became believable.
Almost.
CHAPTER 5 — THE DAY EVERYTHING CHANGED
February 2026.
The Georgia chapter of the Community AV group was joined, mostly out of curiosity.
A question was posted:
"Does anyone nearby have a JTR system I can hear in person?"
A local member, Kiet Lu, responded.
Come over.
Listen.
See what JTR is about.
So a trip was made to Lilburn.
The expectation was simple:
Maybe JTR would sound a little louder.
Maybe a little cleaner.
Maybe a little more dynamic.
The Klipsch system was already excellent, after all.
Then the demo started.
And within seconds, the entire definition of "good home theater sound" changed.
It wasn't loudness.
Loud is easy.
It was effortless authority.
A gunshot hit.
A structural collapse happened.
An orchestral swell exploded.
The system didn't sound like it was working.
There was no strain.
No obvious compression.
No harshness.
No sense that the speakers were approaching their limits.
They simply produced the event.
Then something even more important became apparent.
Spatiality.
Sounds weren't just coming from speakers.
They existed in space.
Voices hung in the room.
Atmospheric details occupied distinct locations.
Rain.
Gravel.
Echoes.
Background effects.
The system created a three-dimensional acoustic environment rather than simply reproducing channels.
That was the moment.
The Klipsch system hadn't suddenly become bad.
It had simply been surpassed by a new understanding of what was possible.
The drive home was silent.
No radio.
No music.
Just the realization that the system believed to be the endgame was no longer the endgame.
CHAPTER 6 — THE FIRST JTR
Once that door opened, there was no going back.
A Want-To-Buy post went up on AVS Forum.
Within minutes, a message arrived from Jeremy.
Jeremy had a pair of JTR 110HT point-source speakers available.
$2,000 shipped.
There was, understandably, a moment of hesitation.
Sending $2,000 to someone from a forum who had never been met?
A phone call changed that.
Jeremy turned out to be exactly the kind of enthusiast that makes this hobby special—knowledgeable, passionate, direct, and trustworthy.
The money was sent.
Two days later, the first two JTR 110HTs arrived.
And that was the beginning of Monarchy 2.0.
CHAPTER 7 — THE GREAT TRANSITION
What followed was roughly four months of controlled insanity.
The Klipsch system began getting liquidated.
Three KL-650s sold for $1,800.
Six CDT-5800 ceiling speakers sold for $900.
An enthusiast drove in from out of state with a trailer and purchased the core THX setup—two KA-1000 amplifiers, three KW-120 subs, and two KL-650s—for $3,900.
Two KL-525s followed for another $1,000.
The money didn't disappear.
It became JTR.
A second pair of 110HTs was purchased from Kiet for $2,150.
Those became surrounds.
Then Jeremy's own upgrade path created another opportunity.
Jeremy was moving to massive JTR 215RMs in his room.
He had four brand-new JTR 110SL slanted height speakers.
Then he installed a 200-inch screen and Christie projector.
The geometry changed.
The 110SLs interfered with the projector beam.
So four unopened, brand-new 110SLs became available.
$4,800.
That wasn't a difficult decision.
They came home.
Finally, a B-stock pair of 110HTs was acquired directly from Jeff Permanian at JTR.
And suddenly the impossible had happened.
The guy who once thought $1,500 for a surround speaker was insane now had:
Six JTR 110HTs
and
Four JTR 110SLs.
Ten matching JTR point-source speakers.
Six for the side/rear bed layer.
Four for the heights.
And the remarkable part?
Through selling, trading, and cycling the previous equipment, roughly 98% of the transition was funded through the existing system and gear.
Less than $2,000 net out of pocket.
That part of the story may be almost as satisfying as the speakers themselves.
CHAPTER 3 — THE KLIPSCH ERA
Around March 2025 came the first major transformation.
The system jumped to a full Klipsch Ultra2 THX setup.
KL-650s.
KL-525s.
Triple KW-120 subs.
KA-1000 amplification.
A full 7.3.6 layout.
For the first time, the room had real physical authority.
The speakers weren't hidden anymore. They were large, imposing cinema monitors with those unmistakable copper drivers and massive horns.
Then came the amplification adventure.
An Emotiva XMC-2 and a stack of amplifiers were purchased from a fellow enthusiast named Lee for $3,000.
The XMC-2 was kept.
The remaining amplifiers were flipped for roughly $3,500.
That launched what eventually became known as Capital Cycling.
The profits went straight back into the system.
XPA-DR3s.
XPA-DR2s.
More trading.
More flipping.
More reinvestment.
Eventually the rack contained nearly 2,000 watts of Emotiva Differential Reference amplification dedicated to the theater.
And for a long time, it was spectacular.
Interstellar.
Dune.
Reference scenes.
The first time the completed THX system was really opened up, the room came alive.
Rocket engines didn't simply come through the speakers.
They hit the body.
The horns had incredible immediacy.
The midbass had weight.
Friends would sit down and physically jump when a transient hit.
This was no placeholder system.
It was a legitimate, high-output, high-energy cinema.
For a while, the thought was:
This is it. Endgame.
CHAPTER 1 — BEFORE THE MONARCHY
Back around Thanksgiving 2024, the goal was simple:
Build a home theater.
A dark room. A big screen. A decent receiver. Some speakers hidden behind drywall.
Easy.
Except there was one problem.
There was absolutely no idea what was actually involved.
Room modes? Never heard of them.
REW? Nope.
Target curves? Impulse responses? Spatial alignment? Speaker dispersion?
None of it.
At the time, the entire understanding of home theater audio basically came down to two names:
JBL and Klipsch.
So twelve Klipsch in-wall speakers were purchased—six rectangular and six round—and holes were cut into the drywall.
Where did they go?
Where they looked right.
No Dolby diagrams. No ear-height measurements. No acoustic modeling.
If three looked good on one side, three went on the other.
Because, obviously, twelve speakers had to sound twice as good as six.
Right?
The room looked fantastic.
Clean. Flush. Minimal.
Then the system was turned on.
And…
It was fine.
That was the problem.
It wasn't terrible. It just didn't sound like a cinema.
There was no real physical scale. No chest-thumping midbass. No sense that an explosion was actually happening in the room.
Twelve holes had been cut into the house to create what was essentially a glorified living-room surround system.
That disappointment turned out to be the most important part of the entire journey.
Because the bug had officially bitten.
CHAPTER 2 — THE RABBIT HOLE
The next phase was obsession.
Late nights.
AVS Forum threads from years ago.
Technical papers.
YouTube theater tours.
Room measurements.
Amplifier specifications.
Speaker compression.
Dispersion.
Room gain.
Power requirements.
The realization slowly arrived that a serious theater wasn't simply a collection of expensive equipment.
It was an engineering problem.
Getting cinematic dynamics in a residential room meant managing:
Air movement Dynamic headroom Speaker sensitivity Dispersion Acoustic reflections Room modes Amplifier current Subwoofer placement Spatial alignment Structural vibration
The original in-walls weren't necessarily bad speakers.
They were simply the wrong tool for the desired result.
The goal wasn't merely loud.
The goal was effortless.