DIYer Spends 4 Years Perfecting Theater
By Rachel Cericola
Seth Valencia spent $75K choosing the right equipment for his theater.

We all have our favorites. Some have a favorite comfy chair. Some love their homemade racks and screens. Seth Valencia has a favorite as well. You could say that his favorite is a MartinLogan—well, everything.

Unfortunately, there’s no MartinLogan HDTV and no MartinLogan throw pillows. (Although, the company should really consider sending Seth a few, just to commemorate his loyalty.) His seven MartinLogan products are his babies, as well as the cornerstone of his living room theater.



“It’s one of the very first things that grabs you when you walk in,” Seth says of his two 6-foot-tall reQuest speakers. “They’re very striking!” Seth is very proud of each of his five MartinLogan speakers and two subwoofers, which he says sound amazing.

Apparently, it was love at first listen. Back in 1996, Seth got to sample a pair of MartinLogan Monolith III speakers. “I was awestruck! Never before had I heard such detail and finesse in a speaker as I did with those,” he says. “From that point, I knew that someday I would own MartinLogans.”

They would soon come. However, he didn’t start his dream room with dream speakers. A year before he got a glimpse of the Monoliths, he had a JVC 55-inch widescreen rear-projection TV, a 5.1-channel Paradigm speaker setup, his laserdisc player and S-VHS deck. At the time, it was very state of the art.

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