More > Media Center 15 (Development Ended)
OMG! Zones!
fitbrit:
I finally got around to trying zones yesterday, and I am blown away! I know many of you have been doing this for years, but I thought I'd draw attention to this little-heralded gem of a feature.
I recently bought a 1923 house, but we've renovated and refurbished it into the 21st century. All rooms have at least a Cat 6 gigabit port. The media room and dining room have various cables riunning between them, including optical, coax, RCA and dedicated cat6 runs (for HDMI over ethernet, and USB over ethernet baluns). The idea was to get as much flexibility as possible, so that we could play the same or different tunes in the two adjacent rooms.
Since the dining room will have its own HTPC any day now, I knew I could just use the tremote functionality or even DLNA with MC15 running on both. However, a couple of days ago I tried sometihng I was very sceptical about. That was to use my HDMI connection in the media room for audio and video as usual, but then to use the optical connection from my motherboard to send music to the dining room. I've had enough audio troubles in the past to believe it would be next to impossible to let MC take over control of the non-default audio output (optical), while also sending the same or other signals through the HDMI. Well, it worked perfectly, first time around! I'm very happy indeed. The dining room has its own AVR, and 7.1 in wall system, and I think this is a much better solution than sacrificing channels on one's AVR for multi-zone capabilities.
My only gripe was that the whole zone configuration options were quite hard to find, being under playback options, rather than the main option settings accessed by ctrl-O; I think it makes much more sense there. It was only because I knew MC was supposed to be able to do this that I went rooting around looking for it.
I feel much more confident about recommending MC15 to others who want to do something like this in future. In the past, I've kind of known it should work with MC15, but never knew how well. Well done, team.
sunfire7:
nice, man! congrats! :)
newsposter:
Yup, zones and spdif optical cables. You can get nice USB sound adapters with 5.1/7.1 output and spdif for around $25 each. Run your cables to each room, add a low-cost amp with spdif input and you're all set.
JimH:
--- Quote from: newsposter on July 15, 2010, 05:45:24 pm ---Run your cables to each room, add a low-cost amp with spdif input and you're all set.
--- End quote ---
Listening to: 'At Last' from 'The Best Of Etta James 20th Century Masters' by 'Etta James' with Media Center 15
fitbrit:
--- Quote from: newsposter on July 15, 2010, 05:45:24 pm ---Yup, zones and spdif optical cables. You can get nice USB sound adapters with 5.1/7.1 output and spdif for around $25 each. Run your cables to each room, add a low-cost amp with spdif input and you're all set.
--- End quote ---
Yeah, if only I had thought about this before. All the plastering and painting is done. I lucked out and found a contractor who is really into this stuff so he was really keen to see my finished set-up. I got him to keep adding cables, and he was patient. The wife would not like it if we started to run more now though. Still, the Cat6 really helps - it's very versatile. I wish I knew the cool contractor before I got the house wired up with Cat6; he was much cheaper than the "pros" we used, and much better too. I would have got him to run at least 5-6 cat6 drops into each room. You can extend HDMI and USB to crazy lengths this way. With 23" touchscreens $300 or less a house can have a real wow factor and practicality with MC15 for not much money. For music alone I could just add a $200 Atom box running MC in TheaterView's Obsidian Touchscreen. Other rooms may get one of my several DLNA rendering devices such as the WDTVLive, Patriot Box Office or Xtreamer.
Dell also recently had the Aluratek Home Theater UPnP device on sale for $70. It has both wired and wireless connections, internet radio and USB too. It doesn't play Flac, though, but I hope I can get DLNA transcoding going on from MC. This is going in the kitchen with an Apple HiFi as the amplified speaker.
For a couple of the other rooms I may get the wireless JRiver device.
The basement gets my old HTPC and another 11.1 sound system (like the media room). The dining room is 7.1, and almost exclusive audio only; there is a 24" touchscreen connected to the mini HTPC there, but not practical to watch anything on. Plus we want just music while we eat, but some nice visualisations running during a party would be cool. The rest of the rooms get plain stereo for now, except my 5.1 office.
Thanks for the encouragement, sunfire7.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
Go to full version