Help me (1 Viewer)

[jonathanMo]

So I want to have a my house set up for future expansion, but for now i am going to do 5.1 surround in the living room and two speakers on the back porch. In the future i ould like to add speakers in the bathrooms and bedrooms. My question is should i just run cat5 and speaker wire to the rooms for future expantion, and how many runs of each.
I am looking to have nice sound but it doesn't have to be over the top I would like to do in wall speakers for a clean look. Could you suggest speakers, reciever capable of doing the different zones, which would be controlled by touchpad or remote, and anything else for ease of expansion.

Thanks for your help

 

[mylan]

Is there anyone here who wants to take a stab at this, lord knows i've tried!

 

[Wayne A. Pflughaupt]

You aren’t going to find a receiver capable of doing all your rooms and bathrooms. That will take additional amplifiers. I suggest doing some research at Niles audio website, they specialize in multi-room systems and equipment.

Regards,
Wayne A. Pflughaupt

 

[chris_everett]

Well.... Whole house audio is a populer topic as of late....

As I see it, you have three options.

1. Have someone do it for you with a system like crestron. Advantage: Easy, powerful. Disadvantage: Really, really expensive

2. Complete DIY with inexpensive components. Use common universal remotes and repeaters, off the shelf switches, etc. Advantage: cheap(est) Disadvatage: _lots_ of time and independant research.

3. Use some off the shelf hardware and some integration devices and do the work yourself. Advantage: fairly straigtforward, cheaper than crestron. Disadvantage: Still pretty expensive.

The problem that you encouter is that until you've selected a system, you really don't know what to run for control wire (you can however run speaker wire to all of your speaker locations)

Check out sites like smarthome.com and hometech.com.

IMHO, Home automation/whole house audio is about where HT was 10 years ago, limited to serious hobbyists and the super-rich. Products are just starting to come on the market to make it easier to build a system. Standards need to be established, contractors educated, etc,etc....

 

[Don.l]

Wow Chris. That was very well put. You seem to have a pretty good grasp of the topic.

Don

 

[mylan]

I'll disagree that it is expensive. You could get a Russound Cav6.6 with keypads for around $2,000 that would power six zones, not including the speakers. Yes, there are some super expensive systems out there but what i've just described would be awesome, I tried to save some money and went with the receiver option and it is no way is as good. The one thing I do not like is that whatever zone you are listening to you must also have it turned on in the room that the receiver is physically located in. This will limit the times you can, for example, play music on the porch when the wife wants quiet inside.

 

[chris_everett]

Thanks Don... I don't consider myself to have a very good understanding. I've just done enough research to get confused, mostly....

mylan, I guess it comes down to what you consider 'expensive' Lot's of people seem to want to do it with some old speakers, and an old reciever. I hadn't seen that Russound system. Looks pretty cool. I've added it to my bookmarks.

 

[Adam Gregorich]

For future expansion always make sure you run cat5 from your equipment center to your volume control locations.

 

[mylan]

The cost of adding something like the Russound system into your mortgage makes it even more affordable. I liken it to having a seperate two channel music system in six different rooms,one Russound unit, one CD changer, the add on XM/FM tuner or: six receivers, six CD changers, etc. When you start to think in those terms, it starts to look a whole lot different. Add that to the fact that the speakers and all gear are hidden.
Chris, check out the Uno 2 keypads, these things are nice. I may keep what I have for now and in a year or so I may upgrade to something like this because I did go ahead and run cat5 while we were running speaker wire.

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

If I were "future-proofing" a new house I'd run cat-6, rather than cat-5, or even fiber-optic if the added expense weren't outrageous in the given application. The field is coming along, and some companies make narrow cable bundles that carry data, phone, audio and control singals inside a single sheath that can be run once, hung inside the wall and tapped for each type of wire as needed. I pre-wired a house I had built years ago for cat-5 in the two bedrooms and the kitchen, and for two rear surround speakers in the master the bedroom and the living room. (The 2nd bedroom was being used as a home office and didn't even have a TV, so didn't plan on audio system for there. Today I would wire it up, too.)

I only actually used the living room set-up, but that was great. I had a "floating" shelf (no visible brackets or supports) above the couch and two wall jacks for the surround speakers to plug into. On the opposite wall, behind the TV and entertainment center, was another pair of wall jacks. I had great 5.1 movie sound and a teriffic music system with no visible wires and only two visible speakers. And plenty of room to grow. Killed me when I had to sell the place.

Regards,

Joe

 

[Adam Gregorich]

Overkill for a volume control. It's not a bad ideal to run bundled wire w/fiber to A/V and PC loactions, but just speakerwire and cat5 to volume control locations. Cat 5e is better than cat6 IMHO as it is a lot more forgiving, especially if you are in a do it yourself situation.

 

[chris_everett]

I've not seen any serious use of fiber in any home installation. Given the termination costs, I don't see the point. Most systems are happy with CAT-5e.