Powered In Ceiling Speakers? (1 Viewer)

[MikeBoehm]

Howdy,

Our office is looking to put some speakers into the various break areas we have throughout our building. Since we don't want to run speaker wire all over the place (which is many hundred feet anyway) we are looking into sending the music over our network. This is not for high quality soundtracks, just elevator music and such....

Anyway, we were recommended some of the Barix Exstreamer products (http://www.barix.com/index.php?optio...=75&Itemid=182) to handle the streaming audio part of it and they have two main options we are looking at. One has a built in 20w amp for speakers and the other doesn't. The one with the amp is about $150-$200 more than the other one so we are trying to see if Powered ceiling speakers exist to see which way we can save money. Non powered speakers with amp'd unit or the other way around.

We don't have any recommendations on speakers yet (powered or not) and I am looking for any recommendations. Definitely not looking for anything of extremely high quality as the music being played will just be MP3s sent over the network and quality isn't a huge concern.

Thanks for any info.

 

[Dean_S]

Amp or no amp you are still gonna have to run wires to the speaker locations from the source equipment and if you get powered you will need electric plugs/wiring + input wiring where non-powered would only need speaker wire (less wiring then powered). I'm sure it's going to be a lot cheaper to buy non-powered speakers and spend the extra $200 on the source with the built-in amp. I've seen office speakers with a built-in volume control on the middle of the speaker grill but they were still not powered. You might also consider that you will probably want/need volume controls for each location/room where you have these speakers. I know from experience that one volume setting at the source will not be desirable for all locations.

 

[Kenneth Harden]

You are probably looking at 70 volt distribution audio.

Basically, you have a mean ass power amp that sends the signal over master wires to the speakers, and the speaker then has a transfomer on it, which you tap into (basically, pick how much power it sucks out of the line), and you have sound.

This is how a lot of big commercial sound applications are done.

No loss over long runs and each speaker can be adjusted (output) individually.

 

[MikeBoehm]

We are actually looking at doing something as non-fancy as possible. We have no budget for this and it's not something that will get used much... Mainly just to play elevator music in a few different areas.

But it sounds like Powered In-Ceiling speakers aren't very common so we'll probably go with the unit with the 20w amps built in and then just get whatever in-ceiling speakers we can find and just run the speaker wire and not worry about plugging them in.