Lots of questions about multi-room audio, lots of good advice, but I'm coming at this with a non-standard set of parameters. Appreciate any suggestions!
End Points:
1) Play different audio in different rooms of the house. Have the following audio sources: TV (cable music stateions), itunes Computer music library and streaming services like Pandora on WIRED computers, iphones (via bluetooth?), physical media players (at this point we only would put CD's into a computer optical drive)
2) Play different video in different rooms of the house. Presently, we do this with cable boxes in each room where there is a TV. Only one DVR for the whole house. Would like to displace some of the satellite boxes to save $ on monthly "rental" of what I see as rendundant equipment.
Unusual resources:
- Recently did major renovation. Most rooms have both coax and Cat-5e ports. I have all the Cat5e going back to a CISCO router (I don't remotely begin to tax it bandwidth-wise). I'm less educated on what the Coax is doing. Really wanted to avoid Coax altogether, but didn't know enough to go purely with the CAT5e when I did the remodel.
I'm aware of Sonos and some imitators, but I think that I should be able to avoid the whole wireless environment by using the wiring I have in place -- I just don't know how to do it efficiently. My clunky solution would be to put a dumb, cheap PC in each room, connect to the home network and then run audio/video services off that, feeding speakers and/or montiors/TVs in that room.
Seems like overkill. Please advise how I can Use just a main centralized computer in conjuction with my home network (WIRED) to accomplish what Sonos could do for multiple hundreds of dollars per room.
Thanks!!
zinj
End Points:
1) Play different audio in different rooms of the house. Have the following audio sources: TV (cable music stateions), itunes Computer music library and streaming services like Pandora on WIRED computers, iphones (via bluetooth?), physical media players (at this point we only would put CD's into a computer optical drive)
2) Play different video in different rooms of the house. Presently, we do this with cable boxes in each room where there is a TV. Only one DVR for the whole house. Would like to displace some of the satellite boxes to save $ on monthly "rental" of what I see as rendundant equipment.
Unusual resources:
- Recently did major renovation. Most rooms have both coax and Cat-5e ports. I have all the Cat5e going back to a CISCO router (I don't remotely begin to tax it bandwidth-wise). I'm less educated on what the Coax is doing. Really wanted to avoid Coax altogether, but didn't know enough to go purely with the CAT5e when I did the remodel.
I'm aware of Sonos and some imitators, but I think that I should be able to avoid the whole wireless environment by using the wiring I have in place -- I just don't know how to do it efficiently. My clunky solution would be to put a dumb, cheap PC in each room, connect to the home network and then run audio/video services off that, feeding speakers and/or montiors/TVs in that room.
Seems like overkill. Please advise how I can Use just a main centralized computer in conjuction with my home network (WIRED) to accomplish what Sonos could do for multiple hundreds of dollars per room.
Thanks!!
zinj
