New house - Flush mounted system help

[WyattB11]

Hi all, just bought a house and a majority of the rooms has 2 flush mounted speakers installed by the previous owner.. all the wiring looks fairly professional and all runs up and through the walls and ceilings.. but the problem is that all the wire ends come out in a central location in the bar area.. now I know little about what needs to be purchased as far as equipment is concerned to get maximum capability from the pre-installed speaks. There are 5 rooms with 2 speakers each all the wires coming out into a group.

If the forum members could give me some example of what they would buy to accomodate the speakers as they are now that would be very helpful.. I assume I will need some sort of switching equipment to select which rooms are playing and which arent.. Im not sure.. any ideas would be great.. to include any high end ideas with computer hookups for MP3 playback ect.. thanks in advance.

 

[ParadigmDawg]

5 rooms will be tuff for a normal AVR unless you have impedence matched volume controls installed. 3 zones would be simple but 5 will likely require a whole home audio distribution system.

There are plenty of guys on here who can walk you through the options, I am not one of them.

 

[bandphan]

Whats your budget? Are there keypads in place or VCs? Is there cat5 wiring in place?

 

[adwilk]

Yeah, the biggest thing you'll need to know is what kind of volume controls the rooms have... if they are impedance matching, a standard two-zone avr will do the trick... are the rooms wired for video? What will be your source/listening material? What do you want it to do?

IF this area wont be running a complete av setup independent of the rest of the house, a basic two channel stereo receiver would be fine.

IF not impedance matched, I would consider a pretty basic receiver and an amp for each room. Keep in mind that the receiver will have to have a pre-out. Selecting amps that will input the signal and the output the signal to the next amp will be ideal... Thats probably getting ahead of ourselves at this point not knowing what kind of volume controls were installed. Then of course, you could swap the volume controls out and probably spend less money...

You have tons of options....

 

[strube]

I have 5 pairs of architectural speakers that I run from a Denon DRA-395 stereo receiver for music from my HTPC, and I have a Niles 6 speaker selector box to do the impedance matching:

http://www.amazon.com/Niles-Audio-Six-Pair-Speaker-Selector/dp/B00022LD70/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1229548207&sr=1-5

Since I don't care about different volumes I just have the selector (and no individual volume controls at the speaker locations), but there is a volume/selector unit available too, if you don't have volume controls in the rooms with the speakers:

http://www.amazon.com/Niles-SSVC-6-speaker-selector-control/dp/B00024BLHU/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1229548207&sr=1-6

There are probably other brands that are cheaper, but that is just what I have experience with. My amp doesn't seem to have a problem with pushing all 5 pairs because of the impedance matching.

Hope this helps!