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[maxxzaxx]

I am building my house and I want to set up multi room sound system. I am dedicating a small room for my setup so that I will run all audio cables from here to the rooms. Initially I was thinking of running wires for 7.1 channel in my living room and 2 channel in other rooms, but after using JRiver and playing all my hi-res Multi-channel tracks in multiple rooms with PC, I had a second thought…why not multi room multi-channel from a single PC? Now I am wondering if jriver will support multiple sound cards (pcie based or usb) in the same PC? Then I can run as many wires as I want for such a setup so that I place all the equipment at one place and only the speakers will be in the respective rooms. If possible this will enable me to hookup easily and cheaply! Any thoughts on this topic will be appreciated. Thanks

[RD James]

Yes, you can use many different sound devices at the same time in the one PC.
Easily configured via Zones, and if you use non-exclusive outputs you can even split the channels, so one 7.1 (8 channel) sound card can feed stereo audio to 8 zones, or 5.1 + 2.0 etc.

[nwboater]

You didn't mention if you plan to have the amplifiers for each room by the PC and send speaker level signals through the wiring or if you intend to send low level signals to each room and have a separate amplifier in each room. With the former approach controlling volume in each room might be a problem - and I would certainly want that ability. With the latter approach you are sending low level signals over fairly long distances, which is not usually a good approach. In either case it's going to be a heck of a lot of wiring!

Please consider a different system architecture. No separate signals, DACS, or amps at the PC. Set the PC as a Media Center Server. In each room put an inexpensive JRiver IdPi (Fully Baked for about $100). This is a very compact Linux Computer with Media Center installed. It can get the music from the server using WiFi, or better, Ethernet.

It comes with two channel  low level audio output that is surprisingly decent. For better fidelity and multi channel I believe there are some inexpensive DAC's that work with the RaspberryPi. They would then feed an amp/receiver.

To control this use your smart phone or a cheap tablet with JRemote or EOS remote control software.

This approach will allow each room to have separate music, and the selection of any music that is on the server PC that is independent of what other rooms are playing. And I think it will be cheaper than running all that wiring!

The only downside is if rooms are close you may hear the music from other rooms. You could also do some kind of combination of both approaches.

A caution if using multiple DACS. I don't believe that most reasonably priced DAC's can be synced with each other. From what I have read here you may have an issue with the sound from one DAC (soundcard) being slightly out of sync with one that feeds an adjoining room.

Good luck with this - it sounds like a fun project.

Cheers,
Rod

[mojave]

Most multi room sound systems have speaker cable run to all speaker locations and a single location for the sources and amps.

I would recommend a pro audio multi-channel DAC for output. The MOTU products have a multi-client ASIO driver which allows JRiver to use Zones and any of the outputs all simultaneously. You do need to use one single sample frequency for all output. You can aggregate two MOTU AVB devices together with a network cable for higher channels counts. A single MOTU 24ao will give you 24 channels of output.

Amplifiers:  You can buy multi-channel amps from many sources.

Control:  Anyone with a phone or table can control all the Zones with JRemote. You can also have a dedicated tablet in each room for control.

Channels in each room:  In most houses, nobody is standing or sitting directly between ceiling or wall speakers so you really shouldn't use stereo. It is best to use JRiver to send a mono signal to each speaker and have the speakers far enough apart so they don't cause comb filtering. You can have multiple multi-channel or stereo locations if wanted. For example, a single JRiver PC with a MOTO can control the theater, living room, deck, etc.

[RD James]

I would recommend a pro audio multi-channel DAC for output. The MOTU products have a multi-client ASIO driver which allows JRiver to use Zones and any of the outputs all simultaneously. You do need to use one single sample frequency for all output. You can aggregate two MOTU AVB devices together with a network cable for higher channels counts. A single MOTU 24ao will give you 24 channels of output.

Not the best option if you're looking to do it on the cheap though.
You could get 24 channels by adding 2x 7.1 or 3x 5.1 sound cards to a system with 7.1 onboard audio for ~$80-100, vs $1000+ for the Motu.
Having a single 24 channel device would work likely better if you need synchronized audio.

Channels in each room:  In most houses, nobody is standing or sitting directly between ceiling or wall speakers so you really shouldn't use stereo. It is best to use JRiver to send a mono signal to each speaker and have the speakers far enough apart so they don't cause comb filtering. You can have multiple multi-channel or stereo locations if wanted. For example, a single JRiver PC with a MOTO can control the theater, living room, deck, etc.

It depends what your goal is, if it's just to have music playing in all rooms, or if you want multiple multichannel audio setups.
The nice thing about Media Center is that you can set up multiple zones, so that you can have a "mono to all speakers" zone, separate zones for 7.1 audio in each room etc.
Ideally there would be some way to seamlessly transition from playing mono to all channels to another speaker setup; things like muting a room or playing different audio in another, but I'm not sure that there would be a way to do it without stopping all playback first.