Homeseer 2 Speaker Question

[upstatemike]

I see that the Homeseer folks have designed the speaker application to run both locally and remotely. They also say you can run multiple instances of speaker on the same box if you have more than one sound card. I was wondering if anyone has used this approach for zoned announcements? That is, has anyone put half a dozen sound cards in a PC so each zone runs on a separate instance of the speaker app?

Seems like a cool way to speak different things in different areas at the same time and way cheaper than using a remote PC in each zone to host a remote instance of speaker.

 

[bfisher]

I don't use Homeseer, but still caught this thread and have a recommendation for you.

Rather than use a half dozen sound cards... use the M-Audio Delta 410. It has 8 RCA outputs (normally uses 2 together to make 4 stereo outputs - but you can seperate them into 8 individual mono channels). This way - 1 card and you have 8 individually assignable "sound cards" using only 1 PC slot. Windows recognizes each of these channels as it's own sound driver.

I use this sound card with my JRiver Media and zone my outputs - it works very nice.

One caveat - use XP. I originally had 2000 with this card, and it had some HAL issues. I had to reinstall 2000 without HAL to make it work. In XP - no issues at all.

 

[Rupp]

...or you could use a few of these:

http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=HE-280B&cat=SND

 

[TonyNo]

Eight dollars?! That's worth a shot!

 

[upstatemike]

These are some cool options! How do I ensure that multiple instances of the speaker app will recognize this hardware correctly? Is there some specification or something I can check?

 

[bfisher]

can't answer for the USB devices, but for the Delta 410 - when you install it, Windows recognizes each channel. Looks like seperate sound cards to you. Very flexible.

 

[Mike]

Hmm happened to be looking. It seems the 410 is no longer made. It looks like this is the closest equivalent now:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00007MC0...5Fencoding=UTF8

There are a few 410's up on ebay though.

 

[bfisher]

wow - that stinks. I purchased mine on ebay for about $70 I think.