[mangoldm]

We're thinking of buying a newly-constructed house that has ceiling speakers in each room, plus a media room with wall plates for five speakers (front left/center/front right/rear left/rear right). All of the wires terminate in a utility room in the lower level of the house.


For the media room, how do I connect my projector, Cable box, Mac mini and Xbox 360? I'm having trouble envisioning this.


For the ceiling speakers in the rest of the house, I envisioned placing Apple Airtunes modules in the utility room where the speaker wires terminate, and controlling everything via iTunes. Is this a viable solution? What is typically done in pre-wired homes such as this?

 

[jwatte]

There's not really any "typical" solution. When everything is home-run to a single closet, then it's often the case that you use a single sound source and pipe it to all the "background" speakers. Running the media room surround to a closet that's not accessible from the media room itself is weird, though, as you'd want to be able to change media etc. Perhaps they expect you to put player and pre-amp in the media room, and run the signal from the pre-amp to a power amp in the utility closet, for further distribution to the speakers.

 

[mangoldm]

Are there receivers that will allow me to connect the ceiling speakers in 7+ rooms? Ideally, I'd like to control everything form within iTunes/Airtunes. I do that now with Airport Express modules to Klipsch GMX speakers in two rooms. I essentially want to replace the two sets of Klipsch speakers with seven sets of ceiling-mounted speakers while retaining iTunes control.

 

[jwatte]

You need a distribution amplifier and a multi-zone amplifier (with 7 zones), to power that many speakers well. You can use Ohm's Law to hook two speakers in series, and then two of those pairs in parallel, to end up back at your original impedance, but quarter the volume per speaker. If you have a multi-zone amplifier, perhaps you could set up all the ceiling speakers as zone 2, hooked in two parallel strands of series speakers per channel, and keep your main room as zone 1.