[Gilley]

I am having the A-Bus system from Russound installed into a new house that is being built. The builder's contractor actually does the whole prewire and installation of all the components.


Each room with distributed audio is its own zone. Some rooms like the master bedroom, will have a local source input that will bypass the distributed audio source going throughout the rest of the house and will play a local source, like a TV or CD player, in that room only. The master bathroom is a separate zone and it will cost several hundred dollars to wire the master bath to play the same local source as the master bedroom.


Since the A-Bus system uses CAT5 connectors to connect the individual components, I thought there might be a simpler way to have the master bath play the same local source as the master bedroom via a CAT5 selector switch and tapping into the local source selector (using a home made "Y" splitter) to send the signal to the selector which will then be able to switch from the distributed audio source to the local source. All of the power and control signals will also be switched.


Any ideas on if such a switch exists or another way to solve this problem? I also thought about determining which of the wires in the CAT5 sheath carry the audio signal and just use DPDT switches (or something similar) to change the audio signal. The power wires would not be altered.

 

[Prokopiw]

I am trying to think of a solution for a similar problem. Two bedrooms with a shared ensuite with ABUS in each bedroom, and I wanted the enusite sound to be switchable between the two bedrooms, which would also have local inputs. I wondered whether a RJ45 telco switch (do a google search) would work to switch input to an ABUS volume control, or whether to use a speaker source switch. Using the latter, I would give up local volume control unless I included a speaker level volume control (non-ABUS).