Whole House Audio Question....

[mspivy]

I'm looking at installing ceiling speakers in several rooms of my house. I have a great attic that allows me to easily get to the ceiling of every room I'm interested in putting speakers in. My question is what do I use to "drive" the system? I think what I need to do is run a dedicated receiver out of the "mechanical room" right inside the access door to my attic and from that receiver I would connect all the speakers around the house....I guess where my confusion comes from is I don't know how to hook up all the speakers. I'm going to have speakers in probably 8 or 9 different locations around the house so what do I connect all those speakers to on the receiver??? Am I just missing something obvious or is there some "special" component I need to purchase in order to run all the speakers for a whole house setup?

Sorry for being somewhat clueless!!

Mike

 

[jaxvon]

First off, please don't double post. Anyway, the setup depends on your goals. If you're just running the speakers for ambient music (IE party setting), then it would be best to run the whole system in mono. Otherwise, you're going to have some speakers running only left, others only right. As for what you need to drive them, a high-quality amp designed for that application will do the trick. Just connect the Zone 2 (or whatever zone you want) preamp outputs from your reciever to the amp and wire the speaker outputs from the amp to the speakers around the house. Done and done!

As for the amp recommendation, you reall can't do better than a Sonance. Here's a link to their amps. Find the one that fits your needs and go for it. The amps sound great and are built like tanks. You can stick it on the shelf and forget about it. The cool thing about the amps is that you can send a stereo input which the amp can then combine into a mono output for the speakes.

 

[BMXTRIX]

See my other post in the other area you asked the same question - it gets into details on this. I am a huge Sonance fan as well, though Speakercraft, Niles, and others are big on in-ceiling speakers and distributed audio as well.

You can't just run from an amp to speakers without doing some impedence matching at some point. Some volume controls do it, most speaker selection boxes do it.

Or use Crestron.

 

[mspivy]

Thanks for the info. Sorry about double posting....I figured that wasn't cool, but couldn't figure out how to get rid of my first post and thought this post might be more appropriate on the other board......oh well.

Anyway....I'm probably going to run this system audio system completely separate from the receiver I currently have in my "home theater" (small and modest HT)....and running in mono like you suggest. So what I'm reading in your post is that I will need a receiver AND an amp.....right? That's cool if that's the case....I'm just trying to figure out what pieces of equipment I need to start looking at (and thanks for the advice on which amps to look at).

Mike