I am getting ready to build a new house and have started to think through all of the low-voltage stuff as I will probably be doing all of that myself. I haven’t nailed down what I want to use for my multi-room setup yet but it will be some combination of ceiling speakers, Amazon echos, multichannel amp, Wiim streamers, musiccast, sonos…who knows where I land. Regardless of where I land, it seems like the need for a wall volume control has really been diminished by phones and tablets. Curious if anyone thinks I am off the mark on this? Should I still be considering a wall volume control as for each room/zone? Did anyone eliminate them and now wishes they hadn’t?
thanks
It's not that phones and tables have made them useful or not, it's the audio devices that can be controlled by these via an app. What do you want to use as sources- hard copies of discs, streaming, etc?
I Use a Yamaha WXC-50 streaming device that can be set for use as a source device or as a preamp and the latter is how I use mine. It works very well and if I had a larger house where I wanted to use that one source around the whole place, I would pick a l=multi-channel amplifier, then select the appropriate input for the rooms that would play this music- This is the way I usually set up systems for my customers and it works very well. OTOH, if more than one room has a TV with an AVR, I would send the audio to each and it can be selected as a separate source, to be played whenever desired.
FWIW- I prefer MusicCast to Sonos and while I haven't used HEOS much, it has benefits, too.
WRT streaming brand speakers, I think they should all use the 'brick' style power supply, in order to avoid the need to call an electrician for installing an outlet when old speakers are being replaced. The speakers don't need 120VAC to operate, it's just the manufacturers taking the easy way to provide power. If the brick supply were used, the power could be supplied over the old speaker wire with the addition of a couple of wire ends- one male, one female. The power used isn't enough to make the speaker wire inadequate- the small Yamaha speakers use about .8 Amperes.
