JoshWarren
New Member
Hi, all, and thanks for any help any of you can give me. A bit of background - we're closing on our new home in the next couple of weeks and I've had extensive prewiring done for home automation, security, whole house video distribution, etc., but the one thing I think I may have missed was multi room audio.
The good news is, we have prewire for speakers in several rooms with that prewiring running back to our media/wiring closet.
The bad news is, I just realized that what I want to do may not be possible with the way the prewiring is setup, and due to the layout of the 2 floors, I can't easily add additional wiring to the living room at this point.
What I have is:
1) 5.1 prewire in media room
2) 5.1 prewire in living room
3) 2 speaker prewire on patio
I plan to add either 2 or 5.1 to the master bedroom myself, and a 2 speaker setup in the gameroom myself. I have 2 spare Cat 5 running into most every room at switch-height so that I can add keypads, etc., as needed.
What I'd like to do is:
1) Be able to distribute music from a source in the media closet to all locations in the house (EXCEPT the media room - the 5.1 setup in the media room will just play the audio corresponding to whatever video source is being played there)
2) Be able to distribute the corresponding audio for the selected video source to the room that is watching that source - i.e., if the TiVo signal is being routed to the living room, I'd like to be able to distribute the audio from the TiVo to the 5.1 setup in the media room.
The problem I'm running into is that all of the whole-house/multi-room audio systems I've seen basically switch 4 or 6 sources to 4 or 6 rooms, and each room is limited to 2 speakers. How do you manage/switch when you have some sources and some rooms that are 5.1 and some that are simple stereo?
I'm hoping there's a solution out there; the ideal solution would be as automatic as possible - I'm going out of my way to make the system fully automated and simple to use so that it's easy for my wife, guests, etc., to use. Right now, on the home automation side of things I'll be running an Elk + ISY for alarm and Homeseer for most of the user-facing controls. Video is brought into each room via a 4X4 HDMI matrix and HDMI-over-Cat 6 baluns that also pipe all of the IR signals from remotes back into the wiring closet.
Any ideas? Help!
The good news is, we have prewire for speakers in several rooms with that prewiring running back to our media/wiring closet.
The bad news is, I just realized that what I want to do may not be possible with the way the prewiring is setup, and due to the layout of the 2 floors, I can't easily add additional wiring to the living room at this point.
What I have is:
1) 5.1 prewire in media room
2) 5.1 prewire in living room
3) 2 speaker prewire on patio
I plan to add either 2 or 5.1 to the master bedroom myself, and a 2 speaker setup in the gameroom myself. I have 2 spare Cat 5 running into most every room at switch-height so that I can add keypads, etc., as needed.
What I'd like to do is:
1) Be able to distribute music from a source in the media closet to all locations in the house (EXCEPT the media room - the 5.1 setup in the media room will just play the audio corresponding to whatever video source is being played there)
2) Be able to distribute the corresponding audio for the selected video source to the room that is watching that source - i.e., if the TiVo signal is being routed to the living room, I'd like to be able to distribute the audio from the TiVo to the 5.1 setup in the media room.
The problem I'm running into is that all of the whole-house/multi-room audio systems I've seen basically switch 4 or 6 sources to 4 or 6 rooms, and each room is limited to 2 speakers. How do you manage/switch when you have some sources and some rooms that are 5.1 and some that are simple stereo?
I'm hoping there's a solution out there; the ideal solution would be as automatic as possible - I'm going out of my way to make the system fully automated and simple to use so that it's easy for my wife, guests, etc., to use. Right now, on the home automation side of things I'll be running an Elk + ISY for alarm and Homeseer for most of the user-facing controls. Video is brought into each room via a 4X4 HDMI matrix and HDMI-over-Cat 6 baluns that also pipe all of the IR signals from remotes back into the wiring closet.
Any ideas? Help!