[frankieboy180]

Hi guys. Great board!


I'm a total newbie when it comes to distributed audio so forgive the ignorance. I want to get sound into each of 5 rooms in my home. I would like to be able to listen to one cd in my office while my wife listens to the radio (or another cd) in the bath while soaking in the tub. Can this be done with quality but without breaking the bank? I have a receiver, a pair of bookshelf speakers, a center channel and a subwoofer. The subwoofer and center channel are Phase Tech while the bookshelf speakers are unknown. Also, the receiver is an old Technics model (Dolby but no DTX).


BTW, I also want to wire the living area for home theatre.


House specs: 1 story, slab, cathedral ceiling in master bedroom, 12 foot ceilings everywhere else. I already have CAT 5 cabling in 3 of the rooms. The CAT5 wiring is simple: a wire from a wall plate in one room to a 4 port wall plate in my home office/den (all running up through the attic). Once at the office wall plate, I connect Ethernet cable from the wall plate to my router. I have a cable connection from the attic into the office wall plate that serves my Cable modem.


Do I need to buy a new receiver? Speakers? Please advise.


Thanks in advance...


Frank

 

[robertmee]

The traditional answer would be to run speaker wire to all your rooms from a single home-run location, connect to a multi-zone amplifier from Kustom, Russound, Niles or Xantech, Use RF repeaters or Run Cat-5 for IR distributed control, and relocate all your sources (CD, radio, VCR, etc.) to the amplifier location.


BUT, if you have cat-5 strung to your rooms already, and you are faced with the daunting challenge of running more cable with no crawlspace (you are sitting on a slab), you might consider something like this:

http://www.whiteoaks.com/distaudio/


I've never done it myself and don't know the costs involved in the balanced receivers/transmitters, but it's worth a look.

 

[DDODD]

Frank


Here's a little different angle on solving your problem. You may want to combine distributed audio and video using one solution. Normally, this would be done using RG-6 coax but can be converted to use the unused pairs of your Cat5 cabling with baluns.


The advantage is that you will be able to centralize and deliver all source material, some of which are capable of both audio and video (e.g. DSS satellite, DVD/CD players). The same system and wiring will also carry the IR from the remote locations back to your equipment. The disadvantage is that you will be relying on either the speakers built in to the televisions or speakers that you add to your televisions.


Personally, I have a hybrid system. Some rooms are serviced in the manner described above and some rooms have dedicated speaker wire supplying audio. My back yard is serviced by it's own PA amp (using the same sources as the indoor systems).


Basically, the way you would accomplish this is to connect all of your sources to a modulator system like the ChannelPlus 3445. The 3445 will handle 4 inputs plus cable TV or antenna and output to 8 TVs. If you need more sources, you can add a 5445 four channel modulator and add four more sources. Each source will be progammed and mapped to a different unused channel on your TV system and you select a source by simply selecting the appropriate channel on your TV.


The above described system accepts stereo inputs but actually distributes in mono. The same configuration can be used to distribute true stereo (MTS in the TV world) by choosing different modulators.


You can see what I've done at my web site www.ddodd.com, select Dennis' personal pages and Home Theater and Electronics. You may email me at [email protected] if you have any questions.