Ceiling Speakers Need Volume Control

[Robert Cook]

Bought a house with a home made A/V system: 2 Receivers, 1 CD Player, 2 DVD Players, etc. The system connects to 7 rooms and the outside patio, each location with 2 speakers in the ceiling. Finally figured out how to get CD music to all of the speakers. Now the problem is that 2 of the rooms (each with 2 speakers) do not have a volume control. The rest of the locations have a volume control on the wall (knob that turns).

First question is: I can't believe the previous owner installed speakers in two rooms without a way to control the volume (other than the volume control on the master receiver). Does anyone know a potential solution to how the volume could have been controlled.

Second question is: For the two rooms without a volume control, I would like to control the volume. But I have no idea where the wires would be located within the walls. Does any company make a speaker that would allow you to control the volume at the speaker? Ideally, the "new" speaker would allow me to control the volume with a remote control so I don't have to climb up on a ladder to turn a volume knob on a ceiling speaker.

 

[Latent]

only obvious solutions are to either pull the wires out somehow and install a in room volume control or change the AV equipment that feeds the speakers.

Its hard to know how your current setups works right now but it is probably fairly basic. If it was my house I would look into something like getting multiple ChromeCast Audio's. If you had one per room all located at the central amplification point and a separate amplification channel per speaker connection then you would have a lot more control of the system. From any smartphone or tablet you can stream music to a selection of rooms and control the volume from here as well. This setup would make the in room volume controls you have possibly less useful but they can still be used to turn the sound down a bit if required. In your situation you could simply start out with just 1-2 ChromeCast Audio's and a new amplifier/receiver (second hand maybe) to power just the rooms you are having problems with. You could then expand it to the other rooms over time and throw out the CD/DVD players if you no longer need them. This simple ChromeCast Audio setup only has one big downside and that is that it only works with streaming internet/local music sources and won't work as easily for TV/Movie sources.

 

[BMXTRIX]

If you are feeding the speakers from a central location and each speaker is receiving it's own amplification from the receiver, then you can put a volume control at the receiver instead of in the room.

Odds are that if they were there before, then they used a speaker selector with volume control at the head end.

Using A/V receivers instead of a amplifier with speaker selector is not typical for this type of setup, but does often work as long as audio is at a reasonable level. A/V receivers don't typically do well with higher volume played back simultaneously through multiple speakers. Depends on the receiver of course.

A typical setup may involve a speaker selector and a couple of amplifiers, or a higher end setup would have a multi-channel amplifier driving each room with multiple sources available. The more advanced setups often offer phone control through Android or iOS. You can select the source, turn the room on/off, and adjust volume for each room independently.