What to do with a wholehouse intercom system

[m1abrams]

Ok I recently bought a house and the house had in it a wholehouse intercom system that looks to be circa 1970. It is rather old and very ugly (think 70s decor). The system consists of a main control unit in the Kitchen which is about 1'x2' and it has the AM/FM radio and AUX input. The units in each room are 1'x1' and just have a single speaker and mic. The holes in the walls are basically as large as each unit.

The system works, and the radio reception is quite good since the ant. is in the attic. However the wife says they are too ugly and got to go. I actually agree with her even though I like listening to NPR on saturday mornings with it. The usefulness of a intercom system is not really that great, and the sound quality for a wholehouse audio is pretty crappy.

So what should I do with it? Just drywall it up and forget about it? Any creative ideas I could do? I am thinking of trying to use some of the wire that is in place to try and pull CAT6 through and put in some network drops. Not sure how tight they put the stuff in though, my thought is pull a string attached to the old speaker wire first then use the string to pull the CAT6. Does that sound feasible?

Man that is going to be a crap load of drywall work, total of 8 units in all (not counting the outside units that will have to stay until we re-side the house.)

 

[BMXTRIX]

You could pull CAT-5/6 if you have a reason to. If you are looking to put in-ceiling speakers in and do some higher-quality distributed audio system, then that would be a great way to do it with a bunch of single gang control keypads (or double gang).

It really depends on what you want to do, what your budget is, what the possiblity is of adding ceiling/wall/shelf speakers to the rooms w/wiring etc. I (personally) like distributed audio systems if done correctly, but would probably drywall everything up, pull out all the wires that weren't being used, and start anew. But, as I said, it really depends on what wires are there already and what the ability to add new wires & speakers is.

Can you believe that the MODERN day intercom systems look and sound almost identical to what you have from the 70's? Think 70's is exactly what I thought when I walked into the model home in the neighborhood I bought in. Thankfully, they can run my system instead of theirs.