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Dual Source Ceiling Speaker Pair

789 views 7 replies 6 participants last post by  jautor 
#1 ·
Newbie here. Need some installation advice. Doing a new home construction. Will be installing ceiling speakers in a theater room, used primarily as surround speakers when using the home theater. I was wondering, how would I wire the speakers, or what accessories would I have, in order to have the option to use those same surround speakers for whole house audio music, that is based in my home run location. At the home run location I am going to either have a sonos or casatunes system powering my mulitzone house audio. The speakers would be used for only 1 application at a time, either home theater use (in same room) or music selection, from sonos or casatunes.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.
Lenny12mne
 
#2 ·
I was wondering, how would I wire the speakers, or what accessories would I have, in order to have the option to use those same surround speakers for whole house audio music, that is based in my home run location. At the home run location I am going to either have a sonos or casatunes system powering my mulitzone house audio.
The home-run speaker wire for WHA just needs to come to the same location as the rest of the speaker wires for that AVR. Then an automatic speaker switch to select between the WHA or the AVR's surround outputs.

See here:

http://www.avsforum.com/forum/36-ho...te-surround-speakers-5-1-set-up-into-wha.html
 
#3 ·
Would you really have times when you would sit in the home theater and listen to the WHA system?

You could use the WHA system as an input to the home theater AVR.
 
#4 ·
Thanks for the reply's and great info. That is a good question, how often that application would come up, but with me doing a bunch of wire installation, I would try and cover that option too. Eventually, the room may transition from a media/movie room, to a sitting, hanging out room for the kids, as my main theater (when done) will be in the basement.
Lenny12mne
 
#6 ·
I always ask, because I think it is worth asking:

Why are you putting your home theater equipment in an area other than the head end?

You can throw a BD player in with a long HDMI cable or HDBT connection in the theater, perhaps a spare HDMI connection for gaming/other, then just leave the A/V receiver in the closet next to the WHA stuff. This way you can feed the A/V receiver locally for WHA, and leave your cable tuner there, etc. Get's it away from little fingers and hands, and keeps the blinking lights, heat, and space that the electronics take up out and away from the room. It cleans it all up.

I have done this many times where I just drop it all into equipment racks in the basement and use HDBT to feed a couple of sources from one room down to the equipment racks in the basement. Throw in a few pieces of cat-6 between the remote source and the equipment rack, and you are (more or less) covered.

If you want to feed the WHA to a secondary rack, then I typically run it over coaxial wire to feed the surround speakers directly from the WHA system as a dedicated zone. I have seen it done using a amplified automatic speaker selector, but it seems like extra money could be used to just automate the setup and use the good A/V receiver already powering those speakers.
 
#5 ·
If you are using Sonos you could simply add a Sonos Connect feeding into the receiver. Or you could go with the newer Denon HEOS system and do something very similar. In my house my full living room 5.2 setup is used as part of my distributed audio system, as opposed to just using the in-ceiling rears. I'm using an Elan g! system, but the same basic functionality could easily be accomplished with Sonos, HEOS, Niles Auriel, or even a small automation system that could be expanded to do much more down the road.
 
#8 ·
Hopefully not too stupid of a question, but you could do the reverse as well, correct?
Sure. I did both with mine, although I don't use that function much these days. Taking a fixed-level line output (pre-amp or record out) from the AVR you can pipe that to the WHA system as a source. I used the Qual Audio Balun from MuxLab that allows two stereo analog audio signals over a single cat5e (in a nice little package) to cross-connect my family room AVR and the WHA system. Whatever is playing on the family room system is available to the WHA, and vice-versa...

Jeff
 
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