Advice on adding an additional zone

[iordonezjr]

Hi,

I recently started getting into home automation and home theater setups. I am an IT guy and over the last year I have had some of my clients start showing interest in home theater and automation. Currently I have a customer who is in the middle of a large outdoor renovation, he's adding an in ground pool, sauna, cooking area and cabana house. The contractor doing the installation is installing speakers at each of the locations. He will have a total of 10 zones outside.

All the speaker wires will terminate in the cabana house. Currently my customer has a media closet with a Denon AVR 890 connected to an older Russound six zone amplifier. The Russound provides 5 zones in the house and has the 6th zone free.

His contractor has no clue on how to tie in the outside zones into the Denon and has asked for my input. I was thinking of using cat6 cable with audio balums to send the output of the Denon to an amplier in the cabana house. I'm also pretty new to this so I would love to hear any suggestions.

The speakers that will be installed outside are listed here

Yamaha NS-AW150W 2-Way Outdoor Speakers (Pair, White) x 1
OSD Audio RX550 5.25-inch 2-Way Outdoor 100-Watt Rock Speaker Pair, Slate Grey x 1
Dual LU43PW Indoor/Outdoor Speakers (White) x 3
Pyle Home PDIC60 250-Watt 6.5-Inch Two-Way In-Ceiling Speaker System (Pair) x 1

The will be attached to this
10 ZONE / PAIR Speaker Selector Switch Switcher with Volume / Level Control SPECIALTY-AV

Based on the items above do you think the speaker selector is adequate for the speakers listed above? Also how do i power all the speakers? Can I tie into the 6th zone of the Russound or is it preferred to have another amplifier in the cabana house to power the outdoor zones? If so, what size amplifier would be best?

Thanks in advance for your input

 

[adk highlander]

Hmm. I'm not sure where to start with answering your questions so I will begin with asking you some questions.

What are the clients expectations? All you have mentioned here is how to power those speakers.

Do they expect to have different sources playing in the zones outside?

Do they want different sources than what is being playing in the 5 zones inside?

How do they expect to control the system? Do you really thing they will want to get out of a pool to turn down the system?

What is the budget?

To answer one question. No the one zone left on the Russound will not be enough to power all these speakers.

Have you looked at Sonos?

As an IT guy also, I don't want to sound condescending but picking up home automation/HT clients if you have been doing wireless and home network without doing a ton of research is going to be tough to make them happy and have a good running system the first time. With that being said look at Sonos because it will make you look like a rock star without a huge amount of work.

 

[M Code]

A couple of things...
The last (2) mentioned loudspeaker brands Dual and Pyle are low end, poor sonic performance and basically low quality. I would strongly suggest that you consider some other better brands such as SpeakerCraft or Niles...
Regarding the Russound amplifier and Zone 6, this should work fine if you are only playing 1 pair of loudspeakers @ a time. Otherwise I would suggest that you get a multi-channel amplifier just for the outdoor loudspeakers. Also what about level controls, be sure to use the step transformer attentuators not the cheapo L pad rheostadt type. Using cheaper products will only invite sooner failures, I know everyone is trying to save $ but from an installer viewpoint I would never use those brands. In my AV install biz if I have to send a tech back out due to a product failure it is simply too expensive, thats why many of our AV installs are still running reliably even though done many years ago.

Just my $0.05...