Basic setup for zoned listening

What are you talking about in the way of equipment? If you're feeding stand-alone amps, you'd probably want an IR control system. If they are standalone, are they they same make and model? Hard to say what would be best, though, without knowing the details of your system.

-- Bobby G.

I have a PC and speakers in the rooms. This is just a simple plan - what else do I need?

There are several things to consider. If all you want is just the same audio material to be heard in the other rooms then you need only worry about amplification.

If you want different material heard simultaneously in different rooms you need software that supports zones. Best bet on windows is J.River's Media Center. Well worth the $39. This gives you the ability to *easily* setup multiple output zones, each with their own playlist. JRMC supports adding multiple soundcards. I've added 4 via USB soundcard devices. Works great. I've got it setup feeding 4 output zones into a Russound CAV66. That handles the amplification and control quite nicely. If you want to setup a DIY rig it gets pretty tedious. The biggest hassles are having multiple amplifiers and controlling them. Doing in-room control means having to feed some sort of control signals back to whatever's controlling the amps. Some folks have had success using RF remotes or even PDAs with WiFi cards. Or you could use an IR repeater network; xantech, niles, etc. But even then you're faced with something having to recieve those signals and act upon them appropriately. I've got a PC running girder (from promixsys) listening to a usb-uirt. This, in turn, controls various source devices in addition to the JRMC application.

Alternatively you could use something like A-Bus. Each zone is fed via CAT5 cabling and has it's own amp in the keypad. The keypads handle routing IR back to the central hub device. They're usually suitable for up to 4 sources fed to 4 zones.

There are other solutions but most are, quite frankly, a real pain in the ass to setup and often even worse to use in daily life. They're getting "less worse" but most still don't rise up to the level of 'spousal acceptance'.

-Bill Kearney

One other solution comes to mind, if you've got a small enough are to cover you could get an FM transmitter. Tune it to an unused part of the band and then just listen to it on anything that's got an FM tuner. One such device is from Linex and it sets up as a soundcard via a USB connection to the PC. Distance is limited, as one would expect for unlicensed use of FM.

-Bill Kearney

Thanks for the replies Bill. Yes, all I am wanting to do is be able to listen to the same audio in a choice of 2 rooms (or the room housing the PC). So you say I will just need amplification then?

If it's truly just one source in two rooms you could get by using passive volume controls in each room and a single amp. Just make sure the volume controls are suitable for the type of amp and speakers involved. I don't use passive setups so I'm not the person to ask for the details. But the basic idea is you have to make sure the load on the amp is controlled properly so you don't ruin it and the speakers.

One thing you can do is feed the line level audio signal from your PC's soundcard through a splitter to all three room. Then, just use self-power speakers in all three room with the transformer for the speakers plugged into appliance modules.

-- Bobby G.

not sure if I should start a new thread?

We are starting to have a house built and I have been trying to figure out what kind of whole audio system to install. I think I want to go with something that is flexible for future expansion. Since I am thinking about running cat6 to lots of places around the house I was thinking of a-bus as a possible solution. How well does this work? How is the sound quality? pros/cons/competing ideas???

I don't think I will ever need more than 2 possible sound inputs (mostly 1). But I want the ability for the sound input to be heard throughout the house. I also want to start off pretty cheap with the possibility of putting more money in later. In fact I may initially just run lots of cat6 cable all over the place and figure it all out later. Thoughts???

Why cat6 some ask? Well it looks like cat6 will handle 10Gbit fine when that comes around and is a whole lot cheaper than fiber (when you consider fiber connections and all). If anyone has opinions on this I also have been thinking a lot on this and am open for ideas.

Thanks, Luke

A-bus keypads generally have about 35 watts max. That's enough to get pretty loud in small room. For a larger room it's more like loud background. If you want to crank it up, or if you've got a lot of people over for entertaining the a-bus amps are a little underpowered. But this is VERY subjective and dependent on all sorts of in-room conditions.

Why do you say that? My wife and I routinely listen to two different MP3 stream sources. In the morning I listen to the radio in the bathroom while she's got the Tivo going in the bedroom. We have 6 sources on our Russound CAV66 but generally find we use no more than 4 of them. While we /can/ drive it from the multi-disc CD player or the DVD, we really haven't bothered. All the music's on MP3s already and we usually don't watch the DVDs outside of the home theatre.

Fortunately if you start with a-bus you can upgrade to a CAV66 and re-use the a-bus keypads in secondary rooms. We drive 6 zones to Uno keypads and then have 4 a-bus zones piggybacked on a nearby zone. The deck/sunroom, living/dining room, exercise/bath, family room/bath. If you're just starting you could setup 4 zones somewhere and move those four to new locations if/when you upgrade.

Yep, CAT5/6 to each keypad along with 4-conductor 14 gauge in-wall stranded wire. Then run 2-conductor from each keypad to the 'most likely' speaker locations. This way you can either use a-bus keypads with their amp (and leave the centrally run 4-conductor unused). Or you can drive the speakers from a central amp and simply splice the connection behind the keypad. This pretty much future-proofs it. You'd then do well to install a pair of them to the most likely place for a 'high tech' wall plate, along with *at least* a pair of coax lines. There's worthwhile consideration to move coax since things like satellite tuners tend to need two feeds and you might also have centralized video being piped around.

But step back and ask how "wired" you really need to be in all rooms. It's one thing to have a keypad and speakers in each, but most probably need an AV wall plate.

Then consider where you'd most likely want a telephone and run suitable wire for it. You can, of course, use CAT5/6 to handle it since it's easier to avoid having too many different kinds of wire. Sticking with CAT5, coax and

4-conductor 14ga is usually fine.

Eh, it's a house and you're using a star topology. It's not like you're pushing any great distances. I wouldn't go out of my way to install GigE.

100mb with most applications in the home is usually fine. Bear in mind, it doesn't matter how faster your wire is if your devices can't overload it. A usb network dongle won't push faster than (around) 400mbps but that's in best-case situations. If the wire's not a lot more then, yeah, go for CAT6.

The trouble with fiber is nothing's using it in enough quantity to drive down the prices. That and it's pretty fragile when compared to plain old copper.

-Bill Kearney

on 1/4/2006 4:10 PM vluke carved the following into a picnic table:

Well, I will since this is almost completely off the original topic

I have done this every time I have walls or ceilings opened up for any reason throughout the years. A long time ago, I used to run a telephone cable and coax into a box in each wall of a room. Later, I started adding a few speaker wires to each project...then an RCA for subwoofer. Then networking came along and I had all these unused wires fixed in the walls with no way to add network cable. You probably see where this is headed since this is years before wireless networking was viable at home...

Anyway, my piece of advice is to run conduit everywhere you can possibly imagine. The bigger the better. If you have a multi level house, try to get something about 4-5" in diameter from the basement to the attic. The minimum I use anywhere is that blue flexible plastic stuff that is about .75" on the inside. It will really only hold about 5 ethernet and

2 RG-6 cables.

Now that I have pretty good Cat 5e coverage in my home, it looks like fiber might be fun. You just never know what you are going to want to slip into the walls in the future.

-- Scott Knight

on 1/2/2006 8:30 AM snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com carved the following into a picnic table:

I am getting involved in this at the moment and am going down the Squeezebox/Slimserver route. You should probably do some reading at

They have forums and you can find quite a lot of info around the web as well.

The parts that sold me are: free server that runs on Linux (I am currently running the beta version), free PC client that emulates the hardware, native FLAC support, wireless capability (for those rooms that I just can't get a wire into) and the ability to synchronize as many clients as I want for true whole house audio.

The single thing I wish were available was a complete Sonos-like system that included speakers and all. This would make it MUCH easier to drag out to the patio or the garage for temporary use.

Oh, yeah, the Sonos route is another nice option if you can justify the cost.

-- Scott Knight