Hi, i am moving into a new house in a few weeks and would like to install a 'simple' home audio system. I dont know much about this sort of thing and so any help would be appreciated.
The house is not complete yet and so while the wiring is going on i want to take this oppertunity to install any necesary audio wiring while i have the chance.
In my living room i will be running speaker wire to my 5.1 surround sound system straight from the dvd player. I would like to add 5 or 6 other speakers in different rooms to this system which i can use to play music throughout the house when people come round and for parties etc...
Questions...
1. How would i go about adding speakers to my system, would i need an amplifier and how would i go about wiring them...?
2. Is there an easy way to control the volume of each speaker seperately For example could i have quiet background music across the house but louder in the living room?
3. If i wanted to control the music from anywhere in the house how would i go about doing this? Would an IR to RF to IR range extender be sufficient to work across two floors?
4. If i want to change the audio source is this easily done? For example if i wanted to change my input from a cd player to the TV audio can i just unplug the CD player from the amp and Plug in the TV audio output or is it not that simple?
Apologies if for any obvious questions but this is all new to me.
Any help would be much appreciated.
Thanks
FIRST: Please look up these two terms... Necrobump and Threadjacking
To answer your question, there are many ways to handle whole house audio. But, you want to leave enough space for the equipment that is needed. Make sure the cabinet the equipment is going into is nice and deep and is at least 23" wide so you can get to everything inside of it. Bonus points if you can slide the entire equipment cabinet out and work on the stuff inside of it. AV gear can take up a shocking amount of room and needs proper airflow to cool it. Anything with a sealed front door is an immediate non-starter as you will fry all the gear. Exceptions for spaces like a closet where you can add some air in and out flow of air.
For wiring, you want to decide early on if you want to invest a bit more and maybe have button controllers in each room of your home, or volume controls in each room of your home. A button controller is just that. It allows volume control and source select along with on/off control from a keypad located in each room that you have a speaker pair. The main unit lives back at the equipment location (called the head end). A typical button controller can be run off of standard network cabling (cat-6). So, you run cat-6 to each keypad location in each room. I typically would put the keypad location by the light switch to the room by the door. This is one of the 'best' overall options and also the most expensive. A complete amplifier, keypads, etc. are something like this...
https://www.htd.com/Lync-6v3-Set
Another option is to use volume only controllers in each room. This would require a single amplifier a speaker selector box, and impedance matching volume controls which are placed in each room. Speaker wire would run to the volume control location in each room, then up to the speakers in the room. This is far less money, and you can use a source selector at the head end to switch between sources more easily instead of having to rewire stuff.
The wiring to the speakers is pretty simple. I would use 14/4 wiring for everything. That's 14 gauge, 4 conductor wiring from the head end, to the volume control location, then another piece of 14 gauge cabling to each speaker with TWO speakers (stereo) in each room. Speakers shouldn't be that expensive, at about $75 each, so $150 a pair maximum. Four rooms, that's $600. It's nothing in the grand scheme of things. But, the wiring has to be there and ready to go. All wiring should be run from the head end location. A speaker only needs two conductors to work. A positive and a negative wire. So, running that 4 conductor wiring gives you enough for two speakers to work properly. This is also what volume controls were designed to handle easily. It's also what whole house audio distribution units, like the one linked above and designed to work with.
THE RUB
Surround sound is not stereo and stereo is not surround sound. This is, IMO, a massive issue. But, many modern AV receivers do allow for a zone 2 output which matches the main zone and will convert the surround sound in the main zone to stereo for the second zone. This means that if you're watching TV in a main area with surround sound wiring all in place (14 gauge) and you choose to listen to the same thing out on the deck, or in the garage, or whatever, you can turn on zone 2 on the AV receiver, set it to the same source, and listen to it throughout your home easily.
Stereo audio distribution can also be handled by streaming devices, like Sonos, which offer amplification and source streaming, which is pretty cool, but gets kind of expensive, kind of quickly and you don't necessarily get the flexibility of a single whole house audio system.
I've run 20+ zones of audio in my home for the last decade without any real problems. Watching TV in multiple areas and listening to music wherever. I use a single Sonos unit that's tied into my audio distribution, but can listen to anything I want to from cable television boxes to my Roku streaming boxes to my Blu-ray Disc player if I want to. Just a touch of a button to get things going.
So here we go... 24+ A/V Zones w/10 Sources | Audioholics Home Theater Forums
I have found one gripe is that the stereo audio is sometimes just out of sync with the surround sound audio, and this delay can be a bit irritating at times. We also really love having headphones hooked up to the whole house audio system. That way we can listen wirelessly to anything we want without blasting music through speakers. That's become a primary way for us to enjoy general television viewing in any room at a listening level that we enjoy. Especially nice when doing tasks like dishes where the TV would need to be cranked to hear clearly over the running water.