Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[rjacobus]

I am buying a new house (new to me - 100 years old!) and I am looking for advice on how to wire it for wholehouse audio - on a very tight budget.

In my current house I have a server in a closet runing MC9 with the audio out to a receiver/amplifier.  I ran speaker wire to four differnet rooms and hooked them all to a Radioshack speaker selecter box wired to the receiver.  I can control the server with either my laptop through Remote Desktop or with an x10 RF Remote.  It works great and since I used speakers I already had or very inexpensive speakers it didn't really cost much beyond the time to pull the speaker wire.

I would do the same thing again in the new house but I want to do a multi-zone configuration.  I want to integrate the music server into a HTPC.  I am planning to buy a new PC and hook it to a HDTV.  I don't need a lot of zones but I would like to be able to watch a DVD in the TV room while listening to music in the rest of the house.  I can also imagine some advantages to having upstairs and downstairs on different zones.  I see how MC is set up to handle multiple sound cards and it seems pretty simple to set up for this application - and like a better way to live!  What I am confused about is how people who are running with multiple sound cards are wiring things.  I don't want multiple receivers or Amplifiers at the head end.  

I can imagine buying powered speakers for the Kitchen for example and runing line out from the sound card to it but can the signal travel that far (it is not a very big house).   Would Optical be better?  Would that require a receiver of some kind in each room with the speakers?  Also if I run two rooms on the same sound card-zone, can I split the signal so that it goes to both without loosing it?  I am not particularly sensitive to sound quality issues but am worried about the cost of the wire and the speakers, etc for each room.  Any suggestions?  

[jleerigby]

Mastiff has done the multi-zone thing in a big way.  He has a web site all about it:
http://home.powertech.no/mastiff/multizone.htm

[loraan]

"Powered speakers in the room with line audio to the speakers" is a totally viable alternative to the traditional "multi-zone power amp in the closet with speaker wire to the rooms" solution. This solution might be right for you especially if you already have lots of A/V equipment and so can save the cost of buying an expensive multi-zone power amp by using your existing receivers and amps in the rooms. RG-6 coaxial cable is traditionally used for carrying line level audio over longer distances; it can easily handle the kind of distances you'd find in the average home without signal degradation. You can custom-make the coax with RCA connectors on the end or you can get F-connector-to-RCA adapters. One challenge will be that you'll need two runs of RG-6 for each stereo feed and RG-6 cable is a little thick and stiff. Using "bundled cable" (two or more runs in a single sheath) can address this. There are also some newer solutions that carry line level audio over Cat-5. This has the advantage of using cheap, ubiquitous, thin, flexible cable, but I believe that it requires expensive converters on either end to avoid signal degradation (as Cat-5 is not shielded like RG-6).

[rjacobus]

Thanks, that is exactly the kind of information I was hoping for.  Coax is a drag but I could probably make that work if it is the only reasonably affordable option.  

I have never looked at a multi-zone amp but I was imagining that they would have multiple outputs but only one input making the multi-zone features of MC useless?  Am I missing something.  

[loraan]

Multi-zone amps have multiple inputs and outputs, with higher numbers being more expensive (naturally). They are generally advertised as "X in/Y zones" or "X in/Y out" where X is the number of inputs and Y is the number of outputs, or zones. They act as a switch and amplifier, sending the approriate input to the selected output zone or zones and amplifying the signal. You could easily hook two or more sound cards into the same number of of the inputs of a multi-zone amp and thereby map MC's zones to the inputs on the amp.

Here are some links:

http://www.audio-direct.com/cgi-bin/pgen_asp/pagegen.asp?itemnum=A6600
http://www.sonic.net/soundscape/russound/pr4z.html
http://www.futurehomesystems.com/xnmrc44.shtml

Google Search: http://www.google.com/search?q=multi-zone%20amplifier

The alternative would be to get some kind of line level switch/amplifier, but I don't know of any such thing. I know of "distribution amplifiers", which take a single input and amplify it and split it, sending it to multiple zones (where final amplification to speaker-level would occur at the amp in the room), but the problem is that you would need some kind of switch to determine which input goes out to which zone, and most pre-amps have only one or maybe two zones. If all you want is MC, then that's no problem, but as you add other audio components, it gets more complicated.

[Mastiff]

My approach is simpler: Just run phono cables from the sound cards of the computer with MC on and to the different amps in the living room, bedroom, bathroom and so on. Where possible I use SPDIF, then there's no degradation at all. The rest of the zones have lower quality amps/speakers (boom box on the bathrooms and so on) so a bit of loss doesn't really matter.

[Nolonemo]

If you do run cable, I'd go whole hog when you do it.

I ran a dual coax 60' run from the family room (computer location) through the crawl space and around the side of the house to the living room where the entertainment center is so I could play back my entire music collection on the pc.  Then a month later I had to go and crawl through the bloody crawlspace again to run another line of coax so I could use theater mode to control playback using the TV and the ATI wireless remote.  Now I regret that I didn't run Cat5 while I was at it, since I'm sure I'll want a cat 5 link at some point in the future....

[kiwi]

Have you looked at network audio devices?

http://www.slimp3.com/
http://www.rokulabs.com/
http://www.turtlebeach.com/site/products/audiotron/producthome.asp

[rjacobus]

Thanks for all the great feedback.

Mastiff, when you say 'phono cables' are you saying that you hook them up to the line out jack?  Are there limits to how far you can run.  Aren't there the same issues with SPDIF - ie. some limit on how far you can run it? Thanks.

[Zoner]

After (literally) years of research, I went with Russound's CAV6.6 system.  It's being installed right now in a 119-year-old apartment.  I'll let you know how it turns out.

[Mastiff]

I run the cables from 10 to 120 feet, approximately. There is no audible loss on low quality units, like the boom boxes and my son's system. On the three higher quality systems (living room, HT and bedroom) I use SPDIF, and only on one system I have a slight problem, that's the bedroom. That SPDIF is around 120 feet, it's in the far end of the house, and I sometimes get a short dropout (half a second or so) from electrical activity in the bedroom, like turning on and off lights and the thermostate turning the electric heater on and off. But that's probably very sound card dependant, I could probably get rid of that by using something else than the built in C-Media sound card in the HTPC. Since it doesn't really bother me that much, I haven't so far, but I probably will at some time.

[fex]

Mastiff,

Thanks you for your message. One (never told) problem solved on my side.

[Mastiff]

You're welcome, I think... Out of curiosity:What problem?